CNN Weather advisory:

Yesterday, I watched CNN on an overhead monitor (no sound). The following weather warning caught my eye:

TORNADO WATCH IN NORTHEAST


Actually, that was not the entire advisory. I eventually noticed the second line:

TORNADO WATCH IN NORTHEAST
ARKANSAS AND WEST MISSIPPI

I'm in New Jersey; I can relax now.

Plan your vacation around your work schedule! Not!

I remember a rather hysterical period in my work career: The whole group tizzied, trying to meet a long string of nearly impossible deadlines. Our manager wanted very badly to take a week off to ski. But there was a particularly critical moment in our project, and she just HAD to be at work then, so she scheduled her ski trip after that critical moment. The project slipped, so she rescheduled. And so on, for three slipping, rescheduling months.

I made up my mind then that I would never plan my vacation around my work schedule. Just plan the trip, buy the tickets, and hope for the best. I've scheduled vacations to conflict with critical work moments many times, yet I think there has never been a vacation/work schedule conflict for me.

By the way, when I said that this project had nearly impossible deadlines, I meant it. Here's how we referred to three of those deadlines in our formal schedule:

• Fool our manager into thinking the completed software compiles.
• Fool our director into thinking that the main functionality works.
• Fool the customer into thinking that the software's ready to ship.

And imagine how proud we were, when the software actually was ready to ship.

A recipe today, Winter Squash Fu-fu:

I cooked a squash that looked like a giant acorn, but probably any winter squash will do. Cut the squash in half and remove the seeds and their binding strands. Then take your titanium spork (I doubt an ordinary fork will work as well) and scrape, scrape, scrape away at the squash's interior. You will eventually scrape free hundreds of short strands. Gently transfer these to a hot, oily pan and fry gently. Delicious! (You might add black pepper to taste. You might also fry the squash, as I did, with sweet plantain.)

Human Nature again:

We went to our exercise place today, and it was unbelievably crowded. In six months, we've never seen so many people there. Almost all of the dozens of treadmills and cycling and stepping machines were busy. One of the trainers said it's always like this on January first. Seems like people make resolutions ...

Talking Head Sense:

David Byrne, THE Talking Head, has a thoughtful piece in Wired about where the recording industry is going. He agrees with me a lot, which I like. His essay reviews how the recording companies used to add value, and how they fail to do it now. His most striking point is an assertion that in recent years, the RIAA companies have tried to sell CDs instead of selling music. To him, that's like supermarkets trying to sell shopping cart loads instead of selling food.

For the world in general, 2007 was a truly awful year. I hope we do better in 2008!

Creature of Routine:

In my youth, I lived an extremely flexible life. Nothing was a regular responsibility, not even flossing or dishwashing. (Well, maybe practicing.) I liked the feeling of living impromptu, making decisions about what to do on the spur of the moment. Day-to-day life had a lot of enjoyable variety.

In his late 80's, my father-in-law gave me a hint that such variety and old age do not mix. I admired his inflexible insistence on washing the dishes before playing Scrabble, even if we barely had time for a decent Scrabble game. There was iron routine in his life, and that routine ensured a certain order in his household, made it less likely that he would founder beneath duties undone.

I'm only in my sixties, but I have become much more a creature of routine. There are maybe a dozen things I try to do everyday, despite the incredibly varied ebb and flow of the rest of my life.

As I watched myself falling into this semblance of routine, I hated it. I regarded my new habits as a necessary evil to be understood and despised, but not abandoned. Which brings me to our recent vacation.

We were away from home for two weeks, during which I abandoned all pretense of routine, even taking daily vitamins. I never did my flexing exercises. I got around to almost all the usual routine items every few days. I was living the flexible life again. Why not, I was on vacation! And then we came home.

I found myself determined to pick up every bit of my routine life again, the flossing, the flexing, the walking, the dishwashing, the vitamins, the medicaments, etc., etc. As all of my routine life fell back into place, I felt good. I was home.

Ummm, security:

I bought something at Walmart. (I apologize.) The lines were long, except at the self-checkout counters. I'm sure you're familiar with self-checkout. Typically, a single human being can monitor four self-checkout aisles, continuously solving checkout computer problems. That's a lot better than hiring four cashiers.

In this case, the customer ahead of me had checked out his ten items and was attempting to pay with three Walmart cash-gift cards. Only one of them would scan, $10 out of the needed $28. The fixit guy came over and tried; and he tried and he tried, to make the cards scan. I stood right next to them, trying not to look impatient. After all, the customer had scanned all his items. It wouldn't be fair to make him go to a cashier and start all over again.

I was wrong, it IS fair. The fixit guy entered his ID# on the self-check computer, and his password. I have them right here, they printed out on my receipt:
STORE #: 2171
ID #: 9643934
PASSWORD: 5996
I mean it, his password printed out on my receipt!!!!!! Anyway, the point is, the transaction was SUSPENDED so that it could be continued by a real cashier who could handle the gift cards. And meanwhile I got to do my checkout, without needing help from the fixit guy. I'm really impressed by Walmart's security.

Chinese Restaurant Chaos, and a compliment:

How often do you compliment other people? In your work, in your life? People really appeciate compliments, but we all have a tendency to offer only constructive criticism. Most people really love compliments, and you can take a great deal of pleasure in how they receive them.

Last night we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant in chaos. Chaos! People complained that dinner took three hours. The front of the restaurant was clogged with angry customers demanding their overdue takeout orders. Sometimes no staff member could be seen. The staff gave very vague answers, explaining that "It's not my problem."

Indeed, food straggled out of the kitchen, a dish here, a dish there. There must have been too few cooks and too many takeouts. While we were there, they ran out of tea, mustard, cloth napkins and chopsticks.

We had made a reservation, so, in the absence of staff, I grabbed the first empty table for our little group. I cleared the table and wrote up our order myself. I handed my order paper to the one harried woman on the staff. She snatched it and ran into the kitchen. After that, for a long time, I wondered whether our very atypical order would be processed. I could not imagine how to find out how the order was doing, after hearing conversations like this:
"I've been waiting an hour, where's my takeout order?"
"It's being cooked now."
"You said that thirty minutes ago! I'm leaving!!"
"Stay, and you can pay half-price." (The woman got her takeout order ten minutes later.)

Eventually we got all the food we ordered, mostly brought by this woman, one dish at a time. The first time she brought part of our order, I guessed that all would be well; the order was being cooked, and she knew it was our food.
When I paid, I thanked her for looking after our food. She practically melted with pleasure. After maybe seven hours on her feet, and three hours of angry complaints, a nice word!
Try more nice words yourself, you'll enjoy it.

Another Business model is about to tank?

If you've read my blog regularly, or handreds of others, you know that the big music media companies are desperately trying to prop up their obsolete business model. These companies no longer provide much added value, and they are doomed to collapse, despite their success in getting laws passed to make it difficult or illegal to compete with them.

A recent podcast by Sam and Jim, of Sam and Jim go to Hollywood, suggests that the TV business may be the next to go. I find their argument refreshing, especially because I had little inkling of it before. They note that TV is doing everything it can to get onto the Internet. Once it's truly easy to watch TV on the web on a large screen (2008 or 2009 will be the year), the TV business will lose their current business model, and there will be a market for writers and actors on the internet. Here's one of their examples:

It costs two to four million dollars to make a hour of TV. A significant part of this cost involves paying for access, because there are so few successful TV channels. But when there are a million TV channels on the web, access costs will fall.

I would say that more generally, the added value that the networks provide will gradually disappear. Computer software will lower costs of production and delivery, just as they have for music. People with talent will be able to produce, distribute and sell. We can expect the TV channels to do everything they can to jury-rig the laws in their favor, just as the song-biz has done (with DMCA legislation, for instance). But in the long run, you cannot legislate a business model, not in an international economy. The days of giant, powerful, conglomerate TV channel owners are nearly over.

The world is going to hell ...

There's a Pirates of the Caribbean version of Scrabble.

Staples is selling Starbucks coffee mugs.

I don't care any more, but if I did: I would be in pain.

How to eat Raw Egg White:

During our vacation, I ate far too much delicious food of every sort, so it is perhaps kind of sweet that I tried to avoid extra cholesterol at breakfast. I shelled hard-cooked eggs and ate the whites only.

One morning, when I cracked the egg, raw yolk and white ran out. I quickly realized what had happened. The tray of raw eggs was to the left of the chef making omelettes, and the hard boiled eggs were to his right. (This particular mistake is harder to make when the omelete chef works from a bottle of egg, instead of using fresh eggs.)

I really should have noticed. The cooked eggs were warm, the raw eggs cold.

By the way, to eat only the whites of hardcooked eggs: Gently slice around the long axis with a knife. Do not cut though the yolk. The white will come off easily, and the yolk won't be stuck to your knife.

What shall I use ...

I'm a fan of the Daily GizWiz podcast. Each show recommends a gadget, along with humorous talk and wonderful reminiscences. One show, Leo Laporte made history by recommending the Titanium Spork. He has been teased about it ever since. The problem is: how desperate do you have to be to call a spork a "gadget?" It has no LEDs, it needs no battery, it doesn't play music ...

But that spork has become a watchword on the show, so I was very glad to receive -- at last! My own pair of titanium sporks as a gift. If you're wondering, a spork is equally useful as a spoon or a fork. That's all it is.

Two days after I got it, I took a bowl of left-over food out of the fridge. Staring at it, I found myself wondering, should I eat this with a spoon or a fork? Aha! I pulled out my spork and savored the dish to the last drop.

Avis ... Strange:

I rented a car from Avis today. You remember all those optional insurance items? When you rent a car, you have to decide which to accept, which to decline. My Avis agent said that now he is not allowed to call them insurance. They are "services."

I went in person to rent my car because the AVIS number was busy for the previous hour. When I got there, the agent hung up. I told him his commercial line was busy.
"It's not busy now," he said. I called the number and it was still busy.
The agent shrugged his shoulders. "Oh well," he said, "We have plenty of reservations."

I'm just bitching today, I hope you'll listen:

I received an email inviting me to take a survey at SurveyMonkey. . (No, I'm not making it easy for you to link to them.) I happen to care about the survey topic, so I took the survey. The survey was designed, I believe, by the website that emailed me, a PR site called www dot welfeldpr dot com. (No, I'm not making it easy for you to link to them either.) The client who paid for the survey is blameless I think, and shall not be mentioned.

Now about ten minutes into the survey, I was admonished that I had to fill in all the lines on the previous page. I was set back to that page. On that page was a table, four columns of seventeen rows. I had to indicate preferences by checking one column for each row. But now I noticed that as I added checks, other checks disappeared. I won’t bore you with the detail, but it was in fact impossible to check more than four of the seventeen rows. Since I could not possibly follow the directions, I had wasted my time and had to give up.

I emailed surveymonkey, telling them to redesign their software to prevent a survey designer from making such a bonehead mistake. I hope to hear from them some day.

I emailed welfeldpr, explaining the problem to them. I soon got a response that tells me they actually got a few more complaints about this survey. Here it is:
Thank you for taking time to take the survey. We are sorry that you had difficulty with it.

If you would take a moment to try again, we have corrected the problem and will gladly enter you for a chance to win the gift certificate.

Thank you to those who wrote to explain the challenge which occurred for some recipients.

The gall! I've been asked to fill the questionnaire in all over again, and in return they will not make me ineligible for their prize. This might be the last surveymonkey survey I take. I appreciate Welfeldpr's apology, but I'm not very favorably disposed to them, either.

Griddlecakes Radio:

I very much enjoy a podcast called Griddlecakes Radio, which serves up regular “Griddlesodes” every two weeks or so. The author, Ron, tells stories about his life, or regales us with spellbinding bits of history, like his series on fishing boat competitions between New England and Canada. I was listening to a recent podcast he called “Transitions”, in which he went through some of the big changes in his own life. I wasn't really “touched” by this tale, I just nodded wisely as he limned transitions of his own: learning to live with strangers, having the first baby, kids leaving for college, and so on ...

And then he announced another transition: no more time to prepare podcasts! He will complete the current season, and then pretty much stop. And then the meaning of this Griddlesode hit home: I'm having a transition too, as another favorite podcaster gives it up. I'm glad he's leaving his shows online, I plan to go back and listen to all sixty-plus again from the beginning, they're good entertainment.

CAre to check him out? Try this one first, it's a hoot: Radio vs. Podcasting.

UPDATE: The news isn't as bad as I thought. Ron plans to post fewer shows per year, but there will be some.

Who was that Lady?

Today, I'm protesting a photo caption that appeared in the New York Times. It accompanied Vivien Schweitzer's review, "Listening to the Fragile, Ethereal Beat of Butterflies' Wings". The caption simply says "from left," and names four of the five people in the picture, as you can see. The fifth person, completely ignored, sits at the pianist's left: she is the page turner. Page turning is an honorable avocation that frees the pianist from the drudgery of memorization. Page turning requires concentration in the throes of a great performance, the ability to judge how early to turn each page so the pianist can read ahead, exact knowledge of which repeats will be taken, and precise fingertips that never turn the wrong number of dog-eared or crisply new pages. Who was that lady? She deserved to be identified.

"Pig sitter charged with cruelty"

This newspaper headline says it all, but it's not easy to guess how. The story is all over the internet. Imagine a pig ballooning from its normal 50 pounds to 150, so that surgery was needed to remove a collar that had become embedded in her overly fat neck.

Written by a College Student, no less!

There's an orange and blck couch in the hall near the radio station entrance. It has been there for a long time, and I'm not sure it ever gets used. Someone pinned a hand-written note on it, as follows: "Does this couch belong to you? If not, please write here."
I wrote there. I imagine this note will get a lot of responses. But I doubt they will help.

A test for vegetables:

When our daughter was young enough to eat from a highchair, she went through a food-throwing/food-dropping stage. You know what I mean. But I was clever. I figured out what vegetables our dog liked. When she threw food on the floor, the dog cleaned up.

A few years later our son reached the same stage. I could not remember which vegetables our dog had been willing to eat, so I experimented, with absolutely no success. I eventually came to the conclusion that our dog no longer liked vegetables.

Toilet Flush Handles can be Interesting:

During our vacation in Israel, I had occasion to use many toilet flush handles. It seems to me that Israel (and perhaps all of Europe as well) has hit upon the precise sweet spot in its bureaucratic regulations of these handles. First, you must understand that almost every toilet has two handles. One of these produces a much more prodigious flush than the other. Second, it appears that anyone who knows about the two-handle system can figure out which handle will produce the larger flush.

Now you may find my second point puzzling, unless you already know the truth: there is an unbelievable variety in the design of these handles. Artists and designers have been given free-reign by the bureaucrats to make the handles look any way they want, as long as they are there, and their separate functions can be inferred. Let art reign! At least, when it comes to clever functional design.

The drama of the keys:

When I take a business trip, I rent a car from an Avis place that is three-tenths of a mile from the parking lot where I work. I leave my own car in the company lot, and walk to the Avis to get the car. I take the rental car key-ring and attach it to my regular keyring, so that I have one ring, ensuring that no key will be lost. Please bear these things in mind.

When I returned the car to Avis, I took my keys off its ring and handed the car keys to the Avis rental agent. "What's the car mileage?" she asked. I had not thought to check, because usually the rental company uses an electronic thingy to get the mileage.

"I'll go check," I said.

"You'll need these." She handed back the key ring, and I saw, with horror, that the key for my own car was still attached. I might not have been able to drive my own car anywhere. I extracted my own key, gave her the mileage, and walked to work.

I did about two hours of work and then walked to my car. I tried to open the locked door with:

Oh hell! With the Avis car keys, which were still in my pocket. I drove at once to Avis, wondering why they had not called, and whether they would charge me an extra day for keeping the keys.

I walked into the Avis place. The same agent was on the phone. I quietly handed the keys to her. Her eyes widened, we nodded to each other, and I left. Phhewwwww.

A cascade of alarms:

I worked in Virginia this week, waking up at 6 a.m. each day. Hotel rooms usually have one abstruse alarm clock-radio, and it's usually risky to assume that you how to make it work. So I often ask the desk clerk for a wakeup call. Most hotels now automate "personal" wakeup calls. I trust their computer to call me on time, more than a hotel clerk. Unless the computer is down, of course.

But in this case, I was able to set a cascade of alarms. My cell phone has three alarms. I had brought an alarm clock. I also used two alarms on my watch, and that hotel clock-radio. I set them up as I do at home when I need to wake at 4:20 a.m. (to turn on the radio station at 6): starting with the quietest alarm, working, in intervals of two minutes, to the loudest. Then I thought: I'm being silly!

At home, my goal is to wake up early without waking my wife. Alone in a hotel room, my goal should just be to wake up. So I set all the alarms for 6, 6:01 and 6:02, and their avalanche of sound woke me very nicely, thank you.

Duplicitous Salesmen, Double Salaries:

In the early '80s, I wrote software for Exxon Office Systems (EOS), one of the more disastrous ventures in the history of computing. Exxon tried to make EOS into a worldwide presence with sales in dozens of countries. They paid well – otherwise who would work for them? – but their sales force presented a special problem, one that's probably well-known in many industries.

Many of the sales people worked on their own, covering some large geographic region. They set their own hours and planned their own campaigns to make sales. Occasionally they reported to regional meetings or came to the home office for new information and training, but their real challenge was to sell enough to support themselves well, and they could use their time as they wished to accomplish that. (To raise their gross, some salesmen, when visiting the home office, would steal copies of new software applications not even ready for alpha testing and sell them, but that's important now.)

The problem was that sales were dismal. EOS sold some expensive, poor products. They also sold some very expensive good products. Prospective customers were wary of a gasoline company in the office business; so every sale was hard to make. In fact, most sales people could not live on their commissions. To keep sales people, EOS paid them decent salaries. Therefore most of their sales staff had little incentive to bust their chops to make a few more sales.

Remember how I described the life of the sales force above? Well with all that independence, it was understood that some sales people had two fulltime jobs. They sold just enough EOS products to keep getting their salary, and they also worked on commission, maybe even for for one of our competitors.

In September 1984, it became obvious that Exxon planned to shut down its Office Systems division. But they did not wield the axe until the following January, giving us all four more months of salary. In the interim, the documentation people set up a little shop to polish resumes for everybody. Marketing played trivial pursuit; the software people played computer games; the hardware designers worked on inventions that they could use to start up their own companies; and we suspected that many, many sales people took that second fulltime job.

"Port delays damaging fruit imports."

The title of his entry is a news headline that I read while on vacation. I like it for its ambiguity. For a wonderful few moments, I wondered why the port hadn't started damaging the fruit imports already.

Not at all!

Pity the poor fruits, just waiting there in the port, getting damaged.

A tool is broken:

You know how easily it is to break a fingernail? I grabbed something wrong and cracked a piece off my right thumbnail. (I used to think that nails got brittle when you didn't eat enough calcium or protein, but we had been on vacation, eating an avalanche of Ca and Me, so forget that.) I filed the nail smooth, and it's not bothersome now. But the white part of the nail's profile dips low in the middle. And that's very important now.

My music player has a peculiar set of controls. When I first bought it, I thought I would hate it, but with use I discovered that the controls were brilliantly designed. There's a tiny touchpad on the device, and the plastic ring around the pad is actually four pushbuttons. You press the right edge, for example, to fast-forward. With your thumbnail. If you happen to have an ordinary sort of thumbnail, that is.

What group are you in?

During our vacation, most of the guests in our large Israeli hotel were on religious (Christian) tours. We talked to a few of them and they seemed quite sincere. One morning I was talking to two Sapanish-extraction fellows from L.A., and I asked them which tour they were on. They both said the exact same thing:

Um . . .

Suddenly it occurred to me that a religious trip to the holyland might be an inexpensive way to vacation in Israel, even for Christians.

Microsoft, IBM, and the seven dwarfs:

Well, I'm writing abut Microsoft's Zune again. Microsoft has released new Zune models. Unlike the original ones, these music players are not a joke. Microsoft is trying to crack the music player market, starting at a great disadvantage, and it is fascinating to watch them and see what they can do.

The music player market is itself quite peculiar. Apple owns the overwhelming share with its iTunes products, and then a whole bunch of manufacturers come in second and third with less than (or much less than) 10% of the market. Microsoft claimed to be the second strongest manufacturer based on their original Zune products, but their sales numbers are suspect, because they announce how many players they send to stores, not how many are actually purchased by actual users.

It occurred to me that this player market looks a lot like the computer mainframe market of the 60's and 70's. That market was overwhelmingly dominated by IBM. There were a few also-rans, which we called the "seven dwarfs." Over time, the dwarfs disappeared, one by one. (Actually I believe two of these companies still exist, but they are not in mainframe competition as their old selves; they have evolved into different markets.) The history of the dwarfs suggests that in the player market, Microsoft has simply positioned itself to gradually fail. It just might sell players longer than, say Creative Zen, Moby or Sansa.

But of course Microsoft has a few other sources of revenue. They can weather storms that would have destroyed the seven dwarfs as long as they care to. Can they stay the course and gradually catch up? One opinion I've heard is that Microsoft has established itself in the player market as a great catcher-upper, while Apple is the established innovator. That's not good enough for old MSFT. We'll see.

A slice of bread:

As I think I've mentioned, the hotel where we stayed on holiday offered a stupendous breakfast smörgåsbord. One feature was a great collection of breadloaves of every size and shape, with a wicked long knife to slice them. I used that knife to cut fine, thin slices, or to snip off just the top of a bagel encrusted with poppy seeds.

One morning I noticed a woman cut the largest slice I'd ever seen. She brought it back to her table with the usual plate full of foods. The slice was almost two inches thick, cut from a loaf about 5” by 5”. It was not quite as big as her head. Of course I wondered what she was going to do with it, so I kept a subtle eye peeled on her table.

From time to time, she tugged off a small bit of the “slice” and ate it straight, gradually reducing the noble slice to a jumble of crust.

My father never caught a fish.

My father never caught a fish. Oh, he might have caught the occasional trout or a tiny sunfish, but that's not why he fished.

When I was fourteen, someone gave me a Milton Bradley jigsaw puzzle called “Trout Fishing”. It was a 1000 piece puzzle, all of them dark mottled brown, blue and green. It took us six weeks to put it together, and the faint form of a fisherman emerged amidst a jumble of leaves, twigs and water. I imagine my father as that fisher, wading into a good trout stream, dangling a lure, lost in thought. No fish would keep him company, but his ideal companions were there: twittering birds, rushing streamlets, wind-tossed greenery – to help him relax and think.

We never knew what he thought about while fishing, but he had so many interests – science experiments, amateur math, his law cases, classical music, patterns to work into ceramic designs, and so on, and so on – it seemed he could easily keep occupied if the fish left him alone.

The best part for him came afterwards: arriving home, opening his empty creel, and proclaiming himself the unluckiest fisherman of all.

How to eat a Smorgasboard:

Our Israeli hotel laid out fine breakfasts, with more than a dozen different vegetables, many kinds of yoghurt, many cheeses, many salads, and rolls, croissants, breadloaves, several kinds of fish and halvah. And dry and hot cereals. And shakshuka, potatoes au gratin, omelettes made to order, hot cheesecake, lots to drink and many other items I'm too lazy to mention.

In my limited experience, Israelis attack a grand breakfast layout differently than Americans. Most Americans tend to make multiple trips, sampling, deciding what they like, and going back for seconds and thirds. Israelis like to load up several plates full of tempting foods and array these plates on their table. Then they sit down and work away at their own grand meal.

How to remove the yolk from a hard-cooked egg:

I'm now on a low cholesterol diet. A single egg yolk has almost three times as much cholesterol as I want to eat in a day, so I can only eat egg whites. This is a pity, because all the good taste is in the yolk. But whites have a terrific ratio of protein to calories, so I manage. (Egg whites are pretty good with maple syrup.)

I used to cut hard-cooked eggs in half lengthwise and scrape the yolks out, then eat the white. The yolks stick to the knife and make a bit of a mess. Fortunately, I found a better way. I make a shallow slit in the egg white and then strip it off the yolk. The yolk comes out as a perfect, uncut round ball, and it's easy to dispose of.