Specially Reserved:

While on vacation, we ate breakfast at our hotel, in an immense room with a fine smörgåsbord of tasty foods. The hotel has over 400 rooms, and while we were there it hosted many large touring groups. Breakfast tables were often reserved for specific groups. I liked the wording on the placards that reserved tables, for example:

Specially Reserved for Noseworthy Group.

It would be enough to say “reserved.” But “specially reserved” sounds particularly friendly and respectful.

The people who managed the breakfast room often wanted to keep us all one side of the room, to simplify cleaning and table-setting. They kept us away from other tables by using the same “Specially Reserved” signs, naming groups that had already left the hotel. This is a good recycling strategy, as there's really nothing else useful to do with a sign naming the Noseworthy tour, after those people have departed.

Colllld...:

We're back from a lovely vacation, and I shall resume daily blogging.

As we prepared to leave home for two weeks, I agonized over whether to turn the heat on. It had been so summery all October, but now the forecast was for fall. As I saw it, I had to decide between two alternatives, each with its own risk:

• Turn the heat on. But we have not used the furnace for months; something goes wrong, house burns down.
• Leave the heat off. Pipes freeze.

After much thought, I decided that since our pipes have never frozen, the safe choice was to leave the heat off. We returned to a forty-four degree house! We turned the heat on at once, and after a while the temperature began to creep up about one degree per hour.

When I was deciding whether to leave the heat off, why didn't I think about returning to a cold house? Brrrrr.

Where did I put that spectroscope...

An article in the NY times today, by George Johnson, quotes Martin Rees about what scientists can do as thy grow old: Become an administrator; content yourself with doing science that will probably be mediocre; or strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory, and quickly get in over your head. Rees says that “in contrast to composers, there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.”

Um ... why? Could there be something wrong with the way science is conducted, that prevents old and wise scientists from making wise contributions to their beloved fields? Science moves fast enough, perhaps, that the techniques of a particular field, even its terminology and paradigms, will be unfamiliar to the elderly, making it hard for them to apply their wisdom to anything that is current. In contrast, the classical composer, throughout his life, develops his own technique and builds upon it, at his own pace.

But I'm not persuaded by this argument. In the last twenty years there have been breakthroughs in fields that had stagnated for many years. Often, these breakthroughs required someone to examine what had been taken for granted, to apply thoughtful ideas from other disciplines, or to find a new way to do experiments. It ought to be possible for some of these breakthroughs to come from older scientists who have had a long time to think about their field. So I ask again:

Has the world managed to structure scientific investigation in such a way as to prevent elderly, deep scientific thinkers from making thoughtful contributions?

I will blog just a few times in the next few weeks. See you all, regularly, in mid-november!

So ... What's with the Yankees?

I followed the Joe Torre story with great relish. He's gone now, but the Yankee baseball team promises to be a melodramatic tear-jerker for years to come. I'm an ex-Yankee-hater. I got used to the Yankees during the few years that the Mets baseball team was actually repellent, and I sometimes even root for the Yanks. Now I just want to see what will happen.

All my career in software development, I've been fascinated by how hard it is to MANAGE anything. The Yanks will give me a treat in studying management problems. Every bit of the saga will be played out in my favorite daily papers. Oh, the humanity!

The bottom line is that the Yankees have to have a year or two of "rebuilding." I'm amazed that the sports columnists haven't focused on the rebuilding issue. The Yanks are losing free agents and aging stars. They have some great young talent, but not enough, and their young players are YOUNG. Any sane management would realize this and give the new talent time to develop. It's SO unlikely that the Yanks will do that!

The Yanks are controlled in an unusual way. It's quite normal to have an ownership that is not skilled in baseball. The owners give the GM, the general manager, a budget to work with. The GM, an experienced baseball person with some ability to control an organization, makes the personnel decisions, and leaves player development to the field manager. The Yanks used to be controlled by one highly competitive, rich martinet owner. Right now, that aging martinet wants decisions to be made with both his sons -- who know little of baseball -- in agreement. They could leave the GM, Brian Cashman, in charge, but they won't. And they obviously feel that their feeble Yanks are almost as good as the powerhouse Red Sox.

So we have a recipe for disaster here. Will they luck out? Will they come to appreciate how lucky they were to have Joe Torre run the club in past seasons?

Oh I almost forgot to mention, they have to hire a new manager, and they may in fact hire a Newbie Manager. Suppose the team does badly next year and the owners decide it's the manager's fault. They probably won't fire him, but neither will they realize -- still -- that the team isn't that good, and has to rebuild.

While writing this item, I corrected a misspelling, but in the future I may continue to use it. The team we're talking about here is: The Ynaks.

The Library of all Possible Books:

Jose Luis Borges wrote a story about the Library of all Possible Books, and this concept has fascinated many authors. When young, I read an essay about this library that intended to help me better understand large numbers and infinities. Imagine a library that contains every possible book. (Don't think about the niceties of placing a limit on the size of these books, to make this an exercise in finite numbers; it'll make your head spin.) You can imagine that somewhere in this library there is an index to all the books in it. But if you think you've found that book - maybe you've actually found a book that is an index to all the books in the library except for one tiny mistake, or ten big mistakes; or maybe it just LOOKS like an index to this library, but every book it names doesn't exist. (Is that possible?)

When I was young, the "library of all possible books" was an interesting, if impractical meme. But today: we have the internet! As the internet's collection of web pages grows, it resembles, more and more, and with all its warts, the Library of all Possible Books.

When to hog a handicapped parking space:

Our car has a handicapped parking sticker right now. Some friends say that a handicapped parking sticker is merely the entrance fee to a parking game: whether my wife's in the car or not, how good a parking space can I get?

Frankly, I'm slightly more ethical than that. Really! When I enter a parking lot without my wife, I think hard about whether to preempt a handicapped space. Here's the truly moral and ethical issue: Suppose there are hardly any regular spaces left, but plenty of handicapped ones? Then the kindly thing to do is to grab one of those handicapped spaces, to make it a bit easier for "normal" people - some of whom have trouble walking, by the way - to get better regular spaces. Okay? I hope you understand now.

Where are the hot guys?

I visit my new health club at many different times of the day and week. I can't help noticing that there are always women there -- of all ages -- who have excellent physiques. Some of these women might be sculpting their bodies to attract men, others are probably just working to get better at the sports or outdoor activities that they like.

But where are the corresponding guys?
I often see a few handsome men, especially after work hours. But it's not the same thing. Without question, young and early middle-aged women have a much greater desire to improve themselves at this club than the corresponding guys.

I've thought of two reasons for this dichotomy, and I suspect they are both true:

• There are no sports at our club. The guys who play racquetball, tennis, basketball, etc., go elsewhere.
• It's a culture thing. In our sick society, it's much more important for women to work on their figures.

Which law would you rather break?

Late one night, I was waiting for the light to turn green so that I could turn onto US Route One. A sports car came down the highway and hot-pinked the light. He was doing at least 85 on a 55 mph road. Had he driven any slower, he would have run the red light as well.

Now that set me thinking: maybe he SHOULD have dropped his speed to 55 and just gone right through the red light. Late at night there's little traffic, and he would have hit the light at the beginning of the cycle. My car would hardly be in motion, I could see him and brake for him. Now please think about this:

Q.: Would you rather blow though an intersection, 30 mph over the speed limit, or just run a red light without speeding?

When you look at it that way, the answer to this question is obvious:

A.: I won't get a ticket, will I?


Well you could get a ticket. And surely you'd be in A LOT MORE TROUBLE for speeding 30 mph over the limit! But we all know human nature, don't we? Nobody's going to slow down so that they can run a red light without speeding, for gosh sakes.

Picky, picky, picky:

I've listened to many different podcasts, and I've learned from them that podcasters are different from most humans. They worry about the tiniest audio problems. They apologize for sounds we cannot hear. They fret about inaudible refrigerator noise. They rejoice in equipment changes that – so they tell us – have improved their audio quality. Exposure to all these worriers helped to convince me not to try to podcast, for the simple reason that I was, obviously, not one of them.

But there's been a change. I'm trying to learn how to make an audio recording of my novel, which I plan to post on the web for free downloads. I got the (FREE!) program Audacity, which makes editing audio fun. I recorded a few simple tracks, loaded them into the editor, and listened to them. At once I was apologizing to myself for nearly inaudible noise sounds, worrying about how to remove every possible sound blemish, and in fact, I think that in less than a minute, I became one of THEM.

You know that old saying that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Well if you can edit audio, every sound looks like a work in progress.

Toy Store Nostalgia:

I love to go to toy stores, and, with young grandchildren, I have an excellent excuse these days. But why the nostalgia? Hardly anything that I associate with toy stores can still be found in them. Sixty years of imagination, and the evolution of plastics and computers, have utterly changed the landscape.

One of my last landmarks is rapidly disappearing. I used to find the Monopoly game in every toy and game store. Today we find Monopoly variants: New York City Monopoly, Louisiana State LSUopoly, Bible-opoly, Dino-opoly, Texas Hold-em monopoly, Popeye Monopoly, Al Qaeda Terrorist Monopoly, NSA Surveillance Monopoly, Chinese Poisonous Imports Monopoly, Cable TV Monopoly, Bermuda Triangle Monopoly, Hollywood Oscars Monopoly, Drug Rehab Monopoly, Hedge Fund Monopoly, Subprime Lending Monopoly . . .

I'm not upset to find all these variants. I congratulate the various game companies that have owned Monopoly rights over the years, for resisting this temptation for so long.

The Windbelt:

Last year I blogged about how wind turbine farms -- an excellent sourvce of electricity in some places -- are incredibly ugly, even though wind turbines seem to be photogenic. If you've seen photos of them, but haven't seen them in the wild, you may wonder why anybody wants NOT to have them in his backyard.

Well here is a remarkable invention. Go here and play the short video. Then click on the inventor's name: Shawn Frayne to learn more. His invention is a belt that is suspended to allow wind, or even a gentle breeze, to make it vibrate. Magnets at one end of the belt turn this vibration into electricty. The belt is the only moving part, making the windbelt cheap and probably reliable. It can be scaled up to a large size, although the windbelt vibrations may pose interesting maintenance challenges for a really large belt. But in small scale, it seems like a very easy source of low-power electricity. In the video, Shawn explains the windbelt's advantages over wind turbines.I think we are going to see a lot more of this invention.

The bottomless bowl of cookie names:

Brian Wansink recently received an Ignobel prize for his Bottomless Bowl of Soup experiment. A good-natured scientist, he picked up his ignobel in person, even though I'm sure he feels, as I do, that he was getting the reward for brilliant experiment that demonstrated something truly useful. Wansink's research often illuminates how people decide when to stop eating, and this Ignobel story reminded me of when I was 18 years old and a camp counselor for the first time.

Before bedtime, a counselor from each bunk (my campers were 8 years old) picked up the milk and cookie snack that ended each day. We wanted our kids to eat this snack before bedtime (what did we know? It was 1959). An ongoing concern was the cookies: flat, blah sugar cookies without the slightest interesting variation. I made up names for the cookies each night: sasquatch cookies, umga blamga cookies, sugar-tower-armadillo cookies, whatever. The kids were always eager to hear what I would call them, and my co-counselor and I thought the names made the snacks go down better. (Wansink has done other research into how naming food can make it more or less desirable.)

In mid-summer, my parents visited me on my weekly day off. They brought me a Gugelhupf from our favorite Manhattan babka bakery. I ate some of it, and, at day's end, brought the rest back to share with the kids. As I held out the cake to them, they asked, "What's it called?" I think you can tell yourselves the end of this story.

If I Did it:

Have you read Justice Clarence Thomas's new book, If I were biased?

Freeze Frames from Video:

I am pretty sure that people rarely step through video to select individual frames to post on the internet. There are exceptions, especially with regard to evidence of crimes and women without underwear. But here's what I know: When you record a human being in motion, at thirty frames per second, you capture hilarious in-between expressions and postures that you'd never notice while watching them in motion. Some people are "worse" at this than others. When I worked on video capture, I watched many talking heads. Some of their faces remained quiet and placid while they talked; others flitted through hilarious momentary expressions that you could only see by looking at individual frames. Based on my experience, I have to wonder why such expressions are not showing up all over the internet. But I think I know why:

Good hi-res still shots always set the standard, at any time, for quality images on the internet. Still-frames are generally much clearer than motion frames. In fact, most people record their video in compressed formats. If you step through compressed formats of people in motion, you'll often see little detail, blurred images that trick your eye into seeing smooth motion. But these frames are no where as clear as posed still shots. Some day the quality of motion frames will dramatically improve, and then you'll all get to see these hilarious expressions. I doubt we'll have to wait more than ten years, so let's hope for the best!

Nec-tar-ine: (1,111)

Hey, this is my 1,111th post to Precision Blogging. How about that?

I was thinking: an awful lot of fruits have one or two syllable names in English. Apparently we like fruit names to be as simple as their operating instructions. 'Nectarine' is a notable exception. I suspected that this word was a 20th Century invention, but a quick web search will show you that the word is at least 400 years old.

Driving with a Red Inspection Sticker:

New Jersey used to send us a reminder, whenever we had to get our car inspected. Now there's an honor system, backed by a nasty ticket if a policeman catches you. We're supposed to READ our sticker to figure out when we need the next inspection.

One day my wife pointed out to me that I should have gotten the car inspected seven months ago. Life was very busy, so a few weeks passed. Each time I had to drive my car, I consciously chose roads that were unlikely to have police cars along the way. I felt like a nervy miscreant. Eventually I got my car inspected. It had a hideous problem that actually occurred the moment I handed the car over for inspection - the brakes failed. My car was now undrivable. They slapped a red sticker on the car and gave me 48 hours to repair it and return for reinspection. I had to get the car towed to the repair shop of my choice.

Two days later I drove my repaired car back to the inspection station. I drove proudly, head held high, not the least bit afraid of being stopped by a police car. After all, I no longer had an expired inspection sticker. I had a legal, RED, FAILED, sticker.

Down with Kibbitzing!

As a young teenager I played innumerable chess games with my friends. Then I discovered the Lynbrook, Long island VFW Tuesday Night Chess Club, my first exposure to somewhat organized chess pleasure. My strongest chess-playing friend joined the club with me, and I believe the middle-aged and older club members found us refreshing. There we had an experience that has repeated itself several times in my life. The strongest player (before we arrived, anyway) was an inveterate kibbitzer, offering his opinions loudly on other games in the middle of play. It's usually a very strong player who feels he has the right to kibbitz. But his advice does not nearly represent his full abilities; I think that's because these are not his games, so he's not thinking about them seriously enough. Anyway, as I'm sure you know, kibbitzing is annoying, so we decided to get even with him.

My friend and I memorized a great brilliancy, Lasker-Napier (1904). We were quite familiar with this game and had played it over while reading some decent analysis. The next time the kibbitzer sat down at our table, we reset the pieces and began to play this game right in front of him.

We REVELED in his stupid comments! He had no idea how brilliantly Lasker was playing, and he often congratulated me (I was playing Lasker's opponent) on my wise moves. At the end of the game he shook his head and announced that I should never have lost. after that, we felt we had ground this kibitzer right into the dust, even though he had no idea what had happened.

Really bad self-inflicted typos:

Your email program probably warns you about spelling errors. But it won't warn you about typing the wrong word, and you can type really awful wrong words in email. I've prevented myself from sending all but one of these:

Sincerely Yours, Toy [instead of: Toby]

Dead Ralph, It was nice to hear from you ...

Jane, I'm glad to see you're woring on this problem.

Alice, just a grief reminder ...

Jim, I haven't heard from you in a whine.

I reviewed your plan. It sounds goof to me.

He's on vacation, leave him alone!

Have you ever had this work exprience: a really awful emergency arises at work, and everyone knows exactly who can deal with it: a person who's on vacation. By the time that person returns to work, it may be toooo late. What have you done when faced wth this dilemma?

Most experienced people know that in a real emergency, a work call could interrupt their vacation. I know one guy who charged his entire vacation -- family expenses and all -- to his company after they made him spend hours every day on the phone. I also know a guy who was careful not to be interrupted:

When I was working at Exxon Office Systems, in September 1984, Exxon gave clear and unambiguous notice that they were planning to fold the Office Systems division. We all knew that there was only one last hope, that the officers of the company could quickly present an appealing plan to improve our division. To do this, they needed the director of Engineering, who was on vacation. All anyone knew was that he was on some sort of boat, somewhere in the Pacific. Nobody bothered him with this crisis. They just couldn't figure out how to find him.

Can you hear me?

In August I had a great wireless experience, and Verizon could make an advertisement out of it. I was working at this little airport the middle of Virginia, in a hectic crisis alongside many hardware and software developers. People called me to speak to other people; people borrowed my phone to call other people. When I wanted to make a call, I had to beg for my phone back. Because I HAD VERIZON'S GREAT COVERAGE! You could hear me!

A quick update on tomatoes (2007):

This year we planted fullsize tomato plants and cherry toomatoes. The cherry tomatoes were a spectacular success. We picked 900. (Last year we got 489.) And they were delicious. The fullsize ones were a disappointment: 23 (we had 40 last year). At season-end I finally started looking online for advice on how to prune tomatoes. I discovered that there IS excellent advice, and I have not nearly been following it. It's also obvious, now, that I should not plant cherry tomato plants right next to fullsize plants, for the sprawling cherry tomato growths overwhelmed the biggies.

While reading advice about pruning, I became certain that cherry tomatoes should not be pruned the same as big ones. If I did that, I would lose about 80 percent of my cherry crop! So I was happy to find the following advice about pruning cherry tomatoes, which suggests I was doing just about the right thing for them:
Pruning and staking increases earliness to fruiting, at the expense of yield.
Earliness to fruiting, Hm? Next year, I might try pruning ONE cherry tomato plant.

The Generations of Computer Programming:

In the first generation of computer programming, there were manufacturer's manuals. You read them, you studied them, you figured out how to program the computer. (One of my consulting friends had a great story about not even having these machine manuals. I must tell you about it some day...)

In the second generation, everyone also had a few good books about programming. Otherwise: we relied on those manufacturer's manuals.

In the third generation: everyone had about ten books on programming, but if you needed to figure out how to do soomething useful, you consulted your guru. Every programming staff had a few gurus (to cover many different topics), and you couldn't live without them.

In the fourth generation -- the present, that is -- everyone has at least twenty books on programming. But routinely, to figure out how to do something useful, we search the web.

A weeks ago, I needed to write a program -- right now, right this minute! -- to convert video in YUV 420 format, to YVU 422 format. In my opinion, after running all the usual web searches, YVU 422 is rather ambiguous, it has too many permissible forms. In any case, the video was not displaying correctly, I obviously had not figured out the format. At about 9 PM (EDT) I found myself hitting the telephone. Whom could I call right now who would know more about video than I? It was Guru Time, a great nostalgic throwback to the third generation of computer programming. My Gurus came through for me, too.

Laryngitis:

I have laryngitis. It hurts to talk. At all. A lot. But I've been through this before. There were times when I went to work with laryngitis. To avoid talking to people, I brought a few index cards on which I pre-printed the few responses I would need to get through the day. I brought a few standards, like Yes, No, and "This too shall pass". I also pre-printed one or two specials, like the card that said: "You MUST implement the remote control package as a dll!"

Now here are the cards I took to the supermarket last night:
Laryngitis, I can't speak.
Yes
No
This too shall pass.
It's a plantain. The PLU code is: 4235

But as soon as I reached checkout, I knew I was going to have to speak. I had forgotten to bring a card that would answer this question:
"Credit or Debit?"

Now you might think I should have brought a card saying "Credit", but I always prefer a card that has more general application. This card would have been fine:
"Um, what was that second choice again?"

Doors with Windows:

While I was working at Intel, the company implemented a policy that all doors must have eye-level windows. I watched carpenters modify doors in accordance with this policy, and I think it's a good idea. If you can always see into a room, there's less chance it will be used for robbery, espionage, chicanery, sexual quickies or sexual harassment. But I must admit, I remember seeing few truly beautiful doors with big, eye-level windows in them.

I was reminded of that last night, when I approached one of the nicer buildings on our local university campus. I faced a pair of giant, windowless doors. Their beautifully finished wood glowed in the light of a nearby red LED sign. I was about to step up to these doors and open them, but an undergrad was quickly catching up to me, so I stepped aside to let him have the honor. As he did so, the doors opened smartly from within, clobbering the undergrad and knocking him down.

Doors with Windows ... a word to the wise.

Hark, Hark, the Lark:

If you like Schubert songs, you might still not enjoy his setting of this Shakespeare poem: "Hark, Hark, the Lark at Heaven's Gate sings", etc. The problem is the way the German sounds: "Horch, Horch, die Lerch ..." Not as elegant as the English original.

But you can sing it in English, can't you? Well ... you can, but you can't quite use Shakepeare's own words. Schubert composed a setting of the German translation, and parts of the original English don't fit the music. My father tried to sing Shakepeare's words to Schubert's melody and was quite disappointed. You can sing an English translation of Schubert's German, but it's not quite Shakespeare.

I should have known ...

Now here's what ought to be one of the great advantages of reading while growing up. After reading about all the tragic mistakes people make in works of fiction, you'll know better, you'll never repeat them in your own life, right?


I wish. Despite reading much wonderful fiction in which the conflict turns on a father's expectations that his children will share his interests, I still expected my children to gravitate quickly to my own interests. The good news is that my disappointments were not the stuff of great, tragic fiction. And at least, I've relearned that lesson, right? I know better than to let my own expectations override my own experience.


I wish. Which brings us to: beta testing.


I know a lot about beta testing. I've been closely involved in many product tests. I have a pretty good idea of what you have to do to get adequate comments about a nearly complete product. One important matter is the size of your beta test: many of the people who agree to test a product will never be heard from again. Many of them will give you such vague comments that you'll have no idea how much they used it, whether they liked it, and whether it works. Some of your beta testers will have chillingly horrible experiences, but give you too little information, so that you will wonder whether your product contains a horrible bomb that's going to blow up right and left, or whether that tester was very unlucky. I could go on. But the point is, I KNOW this stuff, right?


I wish. Which brings me to the fantasy novel I'm writing. I've found more than a dozen people to read it. And that means that it's in beta testing right now. And I fancied that getting it into the hands of so few people would give me plenty of good feedback. Why didn't I realize that this beta test would be like all the others?


Hey, thanks for listening. I feel better already.

Home Computing:

In 1969, we had a teletype in our kitchen, that communicated (at 10 characters per second) with a midsize computer system, giving us access to word processing and many snazzy compilers.

In 1978, I had a home computer based on the Zilog Z80 chip, assembled by the company I worked for (Exxon), with an 8.5 inch floppy disk that had the astounding capacity of 110,000 characters per floppy.

In 1981, we bought our first of many PCs, a gift from my mother. I recently found the itemization list for this little beast, and here it is. My eyes mist over, just thinking about it:
$1,760 IBM PC Chassis
$193 Keytronics keyboard. (We liked its touch.)
$269 "Sixpak" expansion board by AST. This little jobby gave us our parallel and seial ports, plus some memory.
$64 An A/C line filter
$32 Printer cable
$150 192K additional memory (this was a 640K machine!!!)
$409 Princeton Graphics display controller, supporting both color (at this time, IBM itself did not support color) and excellent mono.
$291 Shugart 5.5" floppy drive. (360K capacity per floppy.)
The total was just under $3200. We used a "loaner" color CRT for a long time with this PC, and we also bought a word processor for us parents, and a word processor for our children, about another $300, I think.

Ah, those were the days...

Goal!

Like many men, I have the gene for tossing things into garbage cans. I work on my follow-through, it makes a difference. When I score from, say, five feet away, I've saved myself a few steps. When I miss, I have to walk, pick up and try again, but I fancy that I come out ahead. In entertainment value, anyway.

Today I had an experience that I think I've never had before. I tossed a plastic cup at a garbage can against a wall. I overthrew, and the thing bounced right back to me, so that I could pick it up and effortlessly try again, with no extra steps. I threw short, twice, walking over and picking the cup up, before finally dropping it into the can.

Better luck next time.

Verizon, DNS, "OpenDNS"

We connect to the Internet via Verizon DSL. Recently, say, in August, we've gone “offline” a lot. Sometimes I thought I had to restart our router and modem, sometimes the service just came back by itself. The problem: we seemed to be connected, but our browser “couldn't find” any websites. At last it occurred to me that the problem might lie in Verizon's DNS servers, or “name servers.” The job of these computer systems is to translate site names like www.yahoo.com or www.whatever.tv into numeric addresses like 1.101.222.76. If your computer has the numeric address, it can send an Internet message. Almost every time you enter, or click on, a named website, a “name server” is asked to translate that name into its number.

There's a free name server called OpenDNS that anyone can use. I modified our router to use it instead of the Verizon name servers, and we've had no “offline” troubles ever since. Coincidence? Hmmmm...

I just did a little web searching, and it seems that other people are complaining about Verizon's name servers. The issue is particularly poignant for Verizon FIOS users, who may not be able to tell their Verizon routers to switch name servers.

Where's the Cruise Control?

When I rent a car, I don't drive away until I know its basics. If I can't find the safety brake or the “brights” switch, I'll ask. But on a hot day, after dragging the car guy out to explain the user interface to me, and discovering that there seemed to be no cruise control, I quietly gave up and drove off.

But there HAD to be cruise control! There always is in a rented car, and this was a full-size fancy car, with its sixty icons. While driving, an idea occurred to me. One button had a really weird pictogram on it, a sort of half-compass with an arrow pointing into it. I had pressed that button when the car was parked at the rental place, and nothing happened. But you can't turn cruise control on when you're parked, you have to be driving over thirty or so. So I hit the button again, on a dark, rainy stretch of the PA Turnpike.

At once it was evident that I had turned cruise control on. This funny button was at the end of a separate stalk behind the steering wheel, on the left. (Excellent idea, most people have better control with their left hand than their right...). There was a three-position slider on this stalk, and it had three icons for its positions: a zero, a vertical bar, and a plus, like this: 0 | +
Now most cruise controls have about the same functionality, you just have to figure out how to turn them on and off, how to acellerate and slow down, and how to resume the previously selected speed. Thank goodness, because there was nothing obvious about this 3-way slider. I believe I figured out its three positions:
Totally Off; Don't care; accelerate/resume.

Now here's what's weird about all this: one of the truly natural things to do with a cruise control is to gradually adjust your speed, a little up, a little down. I would have liked to push that slider one way to accelerate, the other way to slow down. But NO! I pushed it to the right to accelerate, and I pushed the button at the end of the stalk, the one that turned on cruise control, to slow down.

Thanks for listening! I hated that cruise control; at least, I didn't have to keep all that misery to myself.

Icons, Icons, Icons ...

During the ten days I rented a full-size Pontiac, driving it nearly 1500 miles, I got to know it pretty well. The first few days were a voyage of discovery into the unknown, however. I had no manual for the car, and had to rely on the little symbols on the knobs, buttons and sliders to figure the car out. In the software business, most of us know that there's no such thing as an “obvious” symbol for anything. I think that the car manufacturers, as they manage the slow slide of the automobile interface from obvious and universal to original, incomprehensible and quirky, have a bit to learn about icons.

The best thing you can say about icons is that they do not have to be translated. You can use the same symbols in every country, which lowers Internationalization costs. It matters not that some of these icons will be cultural-specific. It matters not that some of them will make no sense to anybody. They just DON'T HAVE TO BE TRANSLATED.

Perhaps you'll understand why I'm working up such a snit when I tell you that my rented car had sixty icons visible from the driver's seat. Oh, maybe there were more somewhere; I counted sixty. The icons were not all different, mind you. In several cases, the same symbol was reused, FOR DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS. And most of them were pretty obvious, leaving maybe twenty as an exercise for the busy driver. I will reserve the cruise-control icons for a separate blog entry, they richly deserve it. Otherwise, my favorite icon was a button that looked a lot like the old symbol for the “enter” key, a sort of abstract indicator of a carriage return. This button turned out to be the “interact” button. If pressing any other button required you to make a choice, you pressed the “interact” button to go through your choices. If pressing a button required you to confirm you'd seen something, or if the car wanted to know you'd seen a warning message, you pressed the “interact” button. Quite a concept!