Poor Jay Leno:

I'll bet I'm not the only person saying this, but maybe you're reading it here for the first time: Jay Leno is probably washed up. He's a remarkably resourceful comedian. He was amazing during the Writers' Strike. But his show is very set in its ways, and a lot of his viewers are just kind of “used to it.”

Leno was THE choice when he inherited the Late Show mantle and ran with it. Now, he's the guy whose same show failed at 10 p.m.; he's the guy who is chasing Conan O'Brien away, even though he doesn't seem to intend it; he's the guy who wants his late time slot back, even though he's forgotten that he gracefully released it. When he returns to 11:37, a lot of his taken-for-granted viewers will not be pulled to him by the old trigger. He'll have to be very imaginative to rebuild a big audience. Jay, and NBC are turning back the clock in a world where the clock is running faster and faster in the opposite direction.

Too bad.

The Abdulmutallab Dots that 'Should Have Been' Connected:

I'm linking to a Bruce Schneier column, because it deserves all the exposure it can get. We've all heard about how it should have been easy to “connect the dots” about the crotch bomber. I've been skeptical of this, because I wondered whether each of the dots that jumps out so nicely in hindsight was obscured by a million other dots. Schneier does a good job of debunking the so-called 'ease' of dot-drawing. His full column is here. Some of his points:

• Walk-in warnings by family relations are highly unreliable.
• The bomber had been banned from Britain for claiming coursework he didn't do, not for being a terrorist.
• British Intelligence had NOT notified the US about him.
• He paid cash for his ticket, but so does everybody else, where he came from.
• He checked no luggage. Neither does Bruce Schneier. Neither do most people who fly from third world countries.
• He bought a round trip ticket, not a one-way.

Jane Austen and the Yeth Hound:

You've probably heard about the great success of the book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And now we also have Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. You're probably wondering about the rest that are still to come. Well, here they are:

• Mansfield Park Poltergeists
  
• Emma and the Erlking
  
• Persuasion and PiKachu
  
• Love, Leviathan and Friendship
  
• Lady Susan's Succubus
  
• Northanger Abbey and the Avantars
  

Call Phone assistance:

A few months ago I visited a doctor, a specialist. After a long wait, his nurse put me in an examining room. Another twenty minutes passed. What's the point of leaving a patient alone in an examing room for twenty minutes? I wasn't exactly pissed, but I was annoyed, and I did not want to be forgotten. So I took out my cell phone and called the doctor's office. I asked them at the front desk how long I had to wait.

The doctor showed up a few minutes later, and was he angry! He took my phone call as a terrible insult. I was so amazed, I didn't even try to justify myself. I just accepted his whine (I think he's a good doctor) and moved on to the business at hand. And the next time I get left in an examining room for a long time, I'll call again.

But I think this is even better: I was in aisle 13 of the supermarket, and -- remember, I'm a guy -- I just couldn't find a product that had to be there. The natural thing to do is to walk to customer service (over at aisle 3), wait on line and ask for help. Instead, I called the store, got customer service, and said "I'm in aisle 13 and I can't find Mop'n'Glow. Can you help me?" They sent a guy over, and we found the product. (Hint: If you call, they will help you first, ignoring the people on waiting line for customer service. Everybody helps the phone caller first.)

Discontinued...

I couldn't find a product in the "pharmacy" aisle at my supermarket so I asked the manager of this aisle to help me find it. He soon gave up and said, "They've discontinued it."

The first time a supermarket employee said that to me, it really hit home. If you care about something enough to ask for help in finding it -- and let's face it, us guys do need that kind of help -- then you really need it. You don't want another "oh damn, no more Coca Cola" moment.

But I'm on to them now. I responded, "That's what you guys always say. You always claim the product is discontinued."
"I'm only reading the tags," he said. There's no shelf space for it."

And then he said, "Oh no, here's the tag. I guess we're out." I did my best not to smirk.

They can't have it both ways!

Immediately after the crotch bomber did his thing, the TSA instituted a draconic set of new restrictions for air travel. Leo Laporte summed them up this way: We might as well travel with our hands in the air.
Thank goodness we won't face these new restrictions on every flight.

Days later we are being told that the crotch bomber's success was a systematic failure of the 'system.' There were any number of ways he should never have been allowed to fly into US air space. And by gosh, such a failure will never be allowed again. Why, the president is displeased, and heads are even rolling, I think, although I haven't actually seen one roll.

They can't have it both ways. If this man's success was due to system failures, then we do not need new travel restrictions. And if his success was due to incredibly inadequate passenger oversight, then there's no need to blame systemic failure.

I have a suggestion: let's try to overreact in a thoughtful, more measured fashion.

Malted Coffee; Instant Molasses Coffee:

I have two remarkable coffee discoveries for you today.

First, Malted Coffee. This is one delicious drink! Mix a heaping teaspoon (or maybe two) of your favorite malted milk powder into a cup of hot coffee. The coffee and malt flavors really favor each other. Excellent. (Of course, you have to like the taste of malt.)

Second, I suggest that you try sweetening instant coffee with molasses. Of course, you have to like the taste of molasses. I suspect that this trick works best with Starbucks Via Coffee. Via has been hailed as a breakthrough among instants. It really is a breathrough, no doubt about it! Imagine paying as much as a dollar per cup that you brew in your own home! Good as Via is, you can still taste that undertaste characteristic of intant cofee. But not if you sweeten it with a little molasses! Somehow, the molasses and the instant tastes cancel each other out.

I tried adding molasses to a more pedestrian brand of instant. The results were not as good, but again, the molasses neutralized some of the "instant" taste. Not too bad.

Really Simple Acceptance/Rejection:

When we invite people to parties and events, we generally consider the invitee's acceptance (or rejection) to be a private matter. But what if we didn't? Suppose we wanted the people we invite to tell the world whether they judge it worthwhile to attend our event? If we did, we would probably end our invitations like this:

RSSSVP.

(I'm rather conflicted about this blog entry. I'm not sure that this wordplay deserves to live. Sorry about that.)

Night at the M'seum:

"Free" televsion is biting the dust. When there were less than a hundred channels, no iPhone and no WoW, people tuned to some ordinary channel and watched and bought the sponsor's products. The audence for these ads is shrinking fast. Perhaps that's why there are so many ads now.

We watched Ben Stiller's Night at the Museum on TV. (No nasty comments please; we're not fans of Ben Stiller.) The movie filled a two hour and thirty minute time slot. Wow, I thought, that's a long movie. So I looked it up: the movie is 108 minutes long. And it's PG, which means the whole thing can be shown on family TV without upsetting the FCC. The movie's length leaves time for 42 minutes of ads. So the movie occupies 72% of the time slot, right? (42 minutes of 30-second ads would be 84 F-ing ads.)

Actually, it's worse than that. At the beginning, you can see a text screen advising us that the movie has been edited to fit the time slot. I think the message should have said this: The movie has been edited to fit what's left of the time slot.

Sigh.

Charge It:

As the world's technology changes, it's fun to make jokes about what people used to take for granted, that we no longer remember. I loved that scene in a Superman movie where Clark Kent needs a phone booth to change in, but all he can find is an open public phone on its stand in the sidewalk; no booth. Jules Feiffer drew a great cartoon almost fifty years ago about his schlub character, Bernard Mergendeiler, wanting to rent a phone booth to live in so that his friends would know he was available. Booths? Public phones? Every old hotel has a wall full of peculiar-looking bays near the bathrooms, where the pay phones used to be.

There's something else you may not remember – or know of – from the old telephone days. Let me tell you a story:


In the early 1960's my wife and I lived in what had been intended as temporary housing for returning WW II veterans: ridiculously flimsy little Graduate Student homes at Princeton University. In late 1965, I think, we got new neighbors, Bob and Vicky. They were not just 1960's people. They were offbeat 1960's people. She was slim and very pretty. He was tall with a big shock of hair and a rough-and-ready, capable-guy persona.

The first thing they did was to paint the gypsum-board walls of their apartment, a flat light color. The last bit of painting, which I'm sure fascinated all their visitors who saw the result, was different. Vicky stood naked against the living room wall, arms and legs spread, and Bob painted an explicit silhouette of her entire body. The silhouette wasn't very close to the front door, leaving room for the full-size blacksmith's anvil that moved in with their spare, artsy possessions.

We shared a single building with them, separated by a thin wall. We heard everything that went on in each other's apartments, and I mean everything, which means that one night, when Bob yelled at a peeping Tom, he woke us up.

That winter, Bob and Vicky went on vacation around December 14. Thank God they left a window open so that their cat could get in and out.

About a week later, their phone began to ring. They rarely got phone calls, so these calls were noteworthy. They came about every three hours, and the caller tried about twenty rings before giving up, every time. The calls came morning, afternoon and middlenight. And they were LOUD. In those days, we all had clunky, massive AT&T phones that typically kept working for eighty years. They had real bells in them, not electronic imitations of bells. Those night calls woke us up.

After a few nights, I'd had it. The phone rang, yet again. I threw on coat and slippers, ran outside, crawled through their window in the dark, and answered their phone.

I found myself talking to an AT&T operator. She informed me that I -- Bob, that is -- had made an “Other Number Call" on a certain date. The call would cost $1.75. Would I accept the charge? I said that I did. There were no more annoying calls. AT&T operators had been calling for DAYS to get this charge cleared up. Now let me explain.

In the old days, if you were away from home, you could make a call and charge it to your home phone number. (That's the “Land Line number” for you young persons.) You gave your name and number – some people used to lie about this – and then AT&T enabled you to make the call. But AT&T did not trust you 100 percent. They would subsequently call you at home and get you to agree to be billed for the “Other number” call. When you were home.

Bob and Vicky returned in early January. I had bought us quite a bit of peaceful silence by then.

My GPS Hits a Home Run:

A GPS is a wonderful device if you know what you're doing. And if you have plenty of time. My Garman 1300T Nuvi did a brilliant bit of navigating for me today. However, every plus for my GPS seemed to come with a minus. Here's the score:

1. MINUS! My story begins a week ago, when the GPS began to hang every time I tried to use its database of places. Otherwise, it worked fine.
   
2. MINUS! I deleted all my “favorite places” to see if that would fix the problem. It didn't, and I will have to re-enter them.
   
3. MINUS! I was on hold yesterday for two hours and twenty minutes, trying to reach Garmin. The automated message had warned me the hold would be over 30 minutes. I eventually gave up.
   
4. PLUS?? I called Garmin again this morning, the moment they opened for customer service. The automated message warned me that the hold would be over 30 minutes. Yet I was immediately connected to an operator. Garmin may know where we are in space, but it seemed clueless about the fourth dimension.
   
5. MINUS? The operator said she could transfer me to technical support, where the wait time was only two minutes. She transferred me, and I was on hold for twenty-six minutes.
   
6. PLUS!! The guy at technical service quickly fixed my GPS by reinstalling the system software.
   
7. I went to the post office south of Princeton. From there, I wished to go to the new Trader Joe's in our area. I was convinced there was a brilliant, short route from the P.O. to TJs, but I did not know how to find it. I asked the GPS to find Trader Joes. That store is not in its data base. I understand, the store is pretty new. There is a Lowe's at the same shopping center, so I asked the GPS to go there instead.
   
8. PLUS! (with two minuses): There was a brilliant route, and the GPS found it; it took me right to the entrance of the shopping center, even though (MINUS) the entrance road to the center was not on its map, and (MINUS) it really wanted me to cross US Route 1 to get to Lowe's (incorrectly placed on the other side of the big highway).
   

There's no point adding up those pluses and minuses. I'm so glad to know about that clever route.

Sweat it out!

I'm a steam-room kind of guy. The only use I have for a Sauna is this: it's a nice warm place to dry off after a shower. So I entered the Sauna at the fitness club and found three highschool seniors (I think) huddled up on the benches. They were wearing sweatpants and hoodies, very irregular for our Sauna. (The rules say you're supposed to wear a towel or a swimsuit. But I wasn't going to complain, because I wear neither while drying off.)

I stared at them politely, trying to figure out why they were there. After awhile, Guy A said, “Losing weight sucks.”
I asked, “Are you trying to make a weight limit?”
“Wrestling,” he said.
Guy B said “We all got out of condition over the holiday.” (I guess 'out of condition' is a euphemism for too much food.)
Guy C said, “My plan is: I leave here and go to Bagel Barn.”
Guy A looked mournful and said: “Ain't gonna happen.”

Book Report: The Montreal Olympics by Paul C. Howell

This is not a sports book. It explains how the 1976 Montreal Olympics were planned, financed and prepared. Its author is a long-time friend of mine, the planning director, who was there from start to finish. I intend to review this book properly after I finish it; but I'm already excited enough to talk about it, and I'm in chapter five. If you have no experience of managing a development project, then this book is your opportunity to gaze deep into the challenges, risks and responsibilities that managers face when they try to do something that has not been done before. If you have ever managed a development project involving a dozen people or more, then this book will read like a thriller for you, as you empathize with the key committees and the great dangers they face on an unforgiving, fixed schedule.

Imagine the Olympic planners sitting in their offices in 1972. They have come to realize that they must find and hire hundreds of skilled executives, each of whom will be responsible for making one aspect of the Olympics come together. They must find the money to hire all these people. And as they realize this, they sit in their offices in their coats, for they lack even the funds to turn on the heat in their building. How fast can they make it all happen? How many good guesses will they have to make?

This is not a rah-rah-we-did-it book. Howell analyzes decisions made and not made, difficult guesses about future needs, counter-currents among personnel, political infighting and string-pulling. It's all there for you to follow, with that dread fixed deadline hanging over the chase to succeed.

You can buy it here, if you like.

The names aren't always strange:

You know, the players on the football team, they have some pretty strage names. And I'm not leading into the Abbot and Costello routine. Because not all pro football players have strange names. Take, for example, this conversation I heard during a TV game last week:
Announcer A: You know, that receiver's really good. He reminds of Steve Smith.
Announcer B: Yeah!
Announcer B, a moment later: Uhh, which Steve Smith?

Ten Commandments Plus:

Cecil B. DeMille directed >The Ten Commandments in 1923, and he directed the remake in 1956. Yet another Ten Commandments movie showed up in 2007, this one about Moses. I'm really glad that none of these movies seems to require a sequel, because, these days, you know what they would call it? Yup: The Eleven Commandments.

Even Better TV:

A recent legal decision – in a case so revolting that I won't even link to it – highlighted an important principle of our legal system: Imagine a jury hearing a criminal case that takes days to complete. Suppose that the defendant happens to be in jail without bail, and he appears in court each day in his prison garb. He looks like a prisoner to the jury. As days go by, they think of him as a criminal, and they convict him. But No! That defendant is entitled to be tried on the merits of his case, not on his looks. He's entitled to wear normal clothes and look innocent in the courtroom. Which brings us to my new idea for a Reality TV show: The Perp Walks!

Each week, the show interviews a defendant whose trial is about to start. You get a pretty good look at him, and you hear the case against him. On camera, he (or she) says whether he's guilty, but you don't get to see that part before the trial. (You think he might lie? That's not important. Read on...)

The makeover crew of 'Perp Walks' gives the defendant a real going over. They spruce him (or her) up and buy a really nice wardrobe. Then we get to find out whether the perp was convicted. Maybe we even get to see a bit of the trial, to see how he (or she) looks in court. On the TV show, the post-trial analysts decide whether the makeover was the crucial step to winning the case, if the perp wins.

Are you wondering how alleged perpetrators get picked for a makeover on the 'Perp Walks' show? They have to compete for it. Of course!

Inflation!

On a nearby store with “Dollar” in its name, a sign said: All Items: $1.00 and up.
It wasn't even telling the truth. Most items in the store were $1.19 or $1.38, but you could buy candy for 69 cents.

Another Leak, the worst so far:

You're probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it's a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means!

The size of this database is astounding; it's not just for Christians. Abu Dhabi and India have registered official protests over the inclusion of their children in the comprehensive worldwide listings; And there have been howls of outrage everywhere about the inclusion of sixteen and seventeen year-olds. Santa's list is an inexcusable invasion of privacy for teenagers everywhere.

The myriad of inaccuracies (see Cory Doctorow's critique at Boing Boing) makes matters much worse. The majority of the children are accurately identified by their age, addresses, birthdates and (where possible) national identification numbers. All United States kids with Social Security numbers are now sharing their identities with the whole world. But in some cases, and for a few countries, the kids are identified by name alone. Aristotle Makektikutis, a thirteen year old Athenian, insists he is not the Aristotle Makektikutis in Santa's Greek records whose naughty deed is listed as “pollution.” His parents have issued a statement that their son does not even know how to pollute.

But it gets worse. In fact, this reporter thinks that any sober assessment of Santa's database can come to only one conclusion: it never should have been, and it should never be again. The mistakes! Jane Doe (actual name withheld), who is fully identified in the database and stands accused of “weak morals” is actually twenty-six, not eleven as shown in Santa's data record. Jane Doe has had to disappear into the FBI witness protection program to hide from the crowd of men seeking her company. Frequent age errors in the database mean that grown men and women who used their social security numbers as banking passwords are now losing their life savings. This outrage cannot go on.

Pity the poor Predators and their handlers:

Today's scandal concerns the revelation that our terrorist enemies have been intercepting the video that unmanned Predator airplanes transmit to our forces on the ground. It sounds like a terrible black eye for our military that this “hacking” has been going on. (By the way, this is not actually “hacking,” any more than watching TV in your home is “hacking”.) Our enemies need little more than a laptop and a very cheap program to record the video. And many, many hours of Predator surveillance have been discovered on enemy laptops.

I think there's a lot of nonsense in the way the media is reporting this story. I've had a lot of time to think about this encryption issue, because I have been working on another program that transmits video to the ground. (I do not have any government clearance; I have no special knowledge of the Predator program, and I am not about to give away any secrets. Let's just talk sense here.) There are costs to using encryption, even if encryption had been instituted on Predators from Day One. There are costs to having the Predator's video intercepted, and I suspect that these costs are being overhyped. I hope that our military analysts choose a sensible reaction to this monitoring problem, rather than a 'move-plot” reaction (by assuming the fantastically worst possible outcome).

First, let's consider the costs of operating an encrypted system. Today's powerful computers can probably encrypt and decrypt a video stream on the fly, so that there will be no delay in using the video on the ground. That may not have been the case when the current Predator design was approved. It's possible that encryption was not included from day one because adding this feature would have made the program much more difficult, delayed it, and made it less useful.

Today, as the media have discussed, the problem is that adding encryption to all the relevant government computers is a considerable cost, and a likely delay. During such an upgrade, some computers that need to run flawlessly may be temporarily incompatible with the encrypted feed; or they may assume that the feed is encrypted when in fact it is not. Such confusion hurts us, possibly more than the current open feed helps our enemies.

Let's assume that we do upgrade all Predators to use encryption. There will still be an ongoing cost, possibly a painful one. The Predator and its ground crew will have to share the password to be able to view the video. Obviously, all Predators cannot use the same wired-in password all the time, because when that password is leaked or guessed, everything would be in the open again. Sometimes the ground crews and the Predator will fail to share the same password. (This is a corollary of Murphy's law, trust me on this.) So using encryption means that some entire flights will be useless.

Finally, I would like to speculate about what our enemies are getting by viewing our Predator video. I am not impressed by the argument that it tells then where our troops are. There are other ways to know where a Predator is, and one good way would be to intercept its video stream even without being able to read the stream. I am sure that anyone with access to hundreds of hours of Predator video can figure out something useful about our military habits, by analyzing what we choose to make our Predators examine, and by analyzing what we choose to look at most closely. But it's possible that we could post all this Predator video on the web and be no worse off. (We would actually be better off, because hundreds of Americans would spend their own time examining the video, and reporting important phenomena that are hard to see, under stress in the field.)

Now let's remember the bottom line: there are costs to encrypting, and costs to not encrypting. Someone has to balance these costs and decide how to spend our military time and money most wisely. Let's not let embarrassment stampede us into action.

Under a dollar for coffee...

When I buy really excellent coffee beans, I'm horrified by the cost. Shipping (which is highway robbery of course) pushes the rates up to about $28 per pound. To assuage my conscience, I follow an expensive order with a cheap one, more like $7/pound. In my opinion, the $7/pound coffee I buy still makes a better drink than you can buy in Starbucks, for dollars per cup.

I had never tried to figure out how many cups of coffee I can get for that money, but I'm tracking my consumption this time. At first I was hoping that the cost for my expensive beans would be less than $1.50 per cup, but it appears that the cost per cup will be much better, about $0.85. That's pretty fantastic, considering that I believe I'm making better coffee than I can buy in nearby coffee houses, and much cheaper too.

But here's the thing: As I noticed that the likely cost per cup was coming down, I did not get very excited. Because no matter how many cups I get per pound of beans, it's obvious that the $7/pound coffee costs one fourth of that. In relative terms: compared to Starbucks, my expensive coffee is a bargain; compared to supermarket prices, it's a grand luxury.

AT&T, can you stand the heat?

AT&T has determined that its iPhone users are using too much bandwidth. In fact, just a few percent of iPhone users account for nearly half of the bandwidth that its iPhone customers require. AT&T proposes to 'educate' these users, or else to charge them more, to make them cut back. This sort of misguided thinking by our Internet providers threatens to push United States Networking back into the dark ages of computing.

In fact, iPhone's 'leading edge' users are requiring the sort of bandwidth that fifty percent of iPhone users will require in about three years. AT&T's job is to plan for those needs, not to scuttle them. The bottom line? AT&T, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the iPhone.

A Devastating Putdown:

I met a fellow today whom I haven't thought about for years. We were reintroduced, and I really put him down. He was not devastated, but I clearly got to him. At the time, I was fascinated that I had invented a nasty remark, and sorry that I had used it. He's a nice guy, and he didn't begin to deserve it.

I had walked into the lab to find a manager bringing a developer up to speed, a person I did not recognize. I started to introduce myself, but he said, “Toby, I remember you. We worked together ten years ago on the motion video project.” And he told me his name.

I remembered him at once. In fact, we had been acquaintances at best. We worked with the same people, but not quite on the same project, and our paths had indeed crossed quite often in 1999 and 2000. My response to him was, “I remember! You never answered my last email to you, in 2003.”

That was the putdown. And as best as I can recall, it's true. In 2003, I was looking for consulting work, and I had systematically emailed developers I knew of including, this Mr. X.

I wish I had saved my remark for someone who really deserved it. I can think of a lot of situations in which my remark would be even more devastating if I, and the other person, both knew it was false.

Too many ads:

There are too many ads in pro football. The ads slow an unnecessarily slow game into a painfully slow game. I record games on Tivo so that I can “speedwatch”, and I still find it annoying to skip over so many ads.

One situation in particular annoys me. I don't understand why fans accept it. A lot of people watch pro football on TV, and they should all be complaining. It works like this: When a team scores, there's an ad break. That's fine. Excellent time for a few ads. Then comes the kickoff, and right after it, there's another ad break. That means we get to watch ONE PLAY sandwiched between pods of ads.

The people who televise the games know that what they are doing is wrong. Late in the game, if the score is close, they'll skip that ad after the kickoff and leave the excitement in. Ads after the kickoff: what a dumb idea.

Unsubscribe!

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. This book is full of well-planned experiments that show we do not reason as we believe we do. The book is full of entertaining surprises, and you can just read it for fun. But I think it is helpful to try to understand situations where we cannot help acting irrationally in predictable ways, and situations where we might become more rational if we knew how to try.

I noticed one of the latter situations during my vacation. I was often away from my email for days at a time, and when I finally logged in, I usually found dozens of emails waiting for me. The majority of these were ad-mails from companies I had once made a purchase from. I had no idea how many of these I got per week, but at last I realized that I value the time it takes me to scan and delete each of these dumb messages.

I realized that I was behaving in accordance with one of the principles discussed in Ariely's book: we tend to overvalue the risk of losing something. I had not unsubscribed to any of these company's ad-mails, because, one of these days, I might need to know – or to be reminded of – what they were selling.

With newly opened eyes, I have been vigilantly unsubscribing, and I'm enjoying my email more.

Organic Whatever:

I've just finished consuming a lovely gift: a Goji Berry bar. If you're not familiar with Goji berries, you need to know that they contain a certain amount of protein, which makes them very special.

Now I'm something of a party pooper with regard to protein content in foods. I consider a food to be a good source of protein if the food's cost is less than ten cents per protein gram. Goji berries do not come anywhere near this standard, but the Goji bar tasted delicious, and it did contain five grams of protein.

The bar also labeled itself "organic," and let me tell you what that means. The quite annoying contents are: Organic Peanuts, Organic Raisins, Organic Sunflower Seeds, Organic Almonds, Organic Agave Syrup, Organic Goji Berries, Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Organic Raspberries, and Organic Organics (I just threw that last one in to see if you're paying attention).

For me, the magic of this awful Organic nagging is spoiled by what it says on the packaging just after the ingredients list:
CONTAINS PEANUTS, ALMONDS, MAY CONTAIN SESAME, TREE NUTS AND SOY.

My goodness, you don't suppose they are warning us that the product may contain non-organic ingredients do you? (I don't; I assume that the laws governing these warnings do not permit them to scream ORGANIC. I hope I'm right. I consume a lot of non-organic products, but I'd never want to do that unintentionally.)

Exxon (Xonex), Boxing:

Exxon, in the 1960's (I think), developed a plan to remain a high profit company even after the world's oil supplies ran out. All they had to do was become a major player in the computer business, where profits seemed even higher than in oil. Exxon nurtured a series of computer startups between 1975 and 1985. In the early 1980's, they combined the most successful of these into Exxon Office Systems (EOS). Exxon pulled the plug on EOS early in 1985. They may have wagered as much as a billion dollars (over a decade) in computer companies. (In contrast, I've heard that AT&T lost a billion in one year of the computer business, in 1985.)

Today, computer profit margins are dwindling, although not everywhere, and the world's oil supply still has many years to run. I just want to share one brief observation with you, from my early years in Exxon's computer business.

In mid 1978, I joined Exxon's 19th computer startup. Its goal was to produce the paperless office. It was expected to rely heavily on the 20th startup, which tried and failed to develop the first practical office optical disk drive. Our startup was called “Xonex”. The name is an anagram of Exxon, and it is also a sort of spelling of 19 in roman numerals (X one X). For about a year and a half, Xonex worked in happy isolation, but then we got more and more involved with the other startups.

I believe that the majority of Exxon's startups were duds. (I could be wrong about this, but I never heard anything about most of them.) The non-duds were pretty exciting: the first cheap Fax; ink-jet technology; an intelligent typewriter; and the world's best (for a year or three) word processing system. After a while, Exxon forced them to try to work together, and then Exxon squeezed us all into one company.

In 1980, I often thanked my CEO for giving me more than to the opportunity to do cutting edge work. I told him that I also felt I was in the first row, watching a boxing match, as Exxon figured out how to deal with all its ventures. This “dealing” got more and more exciting to watch. It was a terrific education in business management for me.

But then, frankly, it got too exciting. That's when I realized: I wasn't in the front row watching a boxing match; I was in the ring!

Dink for Doink!

After seeing and hearing many of the wonderful applications that have been invented for the iPhone: I wish someone would invent a music box that can make phone calls.

Impressions of Jerusalem, Autumn, 2009:

We just spent a wonderful two weeks in Israel. Nonetheless, many impressions of this foreign culture are relatively bizarre. Here are some of my memories from the trip:

They told us the weather was unusual for the degree of rain: torrents fell in blocks of days. But there were sunny summer and fall days as well. Sometimes we let Jersusalem's presence enwrap our own presences, joyous in the clear air among the bountiful views. And sometimes we engaged in what seemed like a war to overcome this country, however briefly, to accomplish some tiny goal. Israel is too clever; Israelis are too smart for their own good.

An elevator lifted us from the depths of a parking garage right up to the street. A one-way door allowed us to leave it, but there was no way for a disabled person to take the elevator back to our car.

A liberal sprinkling of traffic lights moves Jerusalem's traffic a little. Often you see many traffic lights at once (they are not masked for direct view, as in the US). Different lights, often in different colors, advise you when you can go straight or turn. Such ornament-driving demands great concentration.

Always, you must watch for 'turn-only' lanes. Near the King David Hotel, there's a tiny road that ends on a main street. You stay on the little road to turn left, but you must cross part of a gas station to find the right turn lane.

In the last twenty years, we have seen Jerusalem choke on its traffic. Despite some wonderful projects to speed traffic around the periphery, the narrow downtown streets fill with halting trucks and cars. And these winding streets have been intentionally narrowed even further: by reserving lanes for buses and taxis; and by destroying other lanes to build a light rail transport whose ongoing construction endures forever. When Israel decided they needed tunnels for some of their roads, tunnels sprang up in a year or two. But light rail construction appears to be similar to continental drift: centimeters per century.

Parking on streets is now civilized. You used to have to buy pasteboards at the post office and stick pins in holes to mark your parking allowance. As tourists, we used to park illegally, fearing that we could never deal with the P.O. Now you find machines at every parking site that sell parking rights for shekels.

Despite what you read in the news, the great day-to-day danger in Israel is car accidents. Everybody knows someone who died in one. Many of those dead are pedestrians. I kept a few of them alive myself, when – as usual – they stepped off the curb without looking.

There's a lot of negotiating in Israel, and it's fun to assume that no price is fixed. I parked in the Neviim Street Parking Lot, where the clearly posted price was a very expensive 12 shekels per hour. "For an hour and a quarter," the attendant told me, "the price is already 20. And it goes up from there. But you can pay me twenty in advance for the whole day."
I paid twenty, and the attendant carefully wrote 'all day' (in English) on my parking ticket. Maybe I could have bargained down to eighteen, who knows? But I parked there almost three hours, so I thought I had struck a great bargain, until I returned to my car. There was no attendant at the lot to collect fees! I could have parked for nothing, unless the only reason the two attendants left was that all the remaining drivers, like me, had paid in advance.

We drove half of our 960 kilometers in the West Bank territories, where friends, and children of friends, and even an express road have chosen to live. The K'far Adumim settlement, on a few hilltops in the middle of nowhere, offers stunning views. I stood on a porch where I could see both Jerusalem and Amman. "They are that close together," my host said. "Think about it."

Elaine gifted me with a special tourist treat: a 100-minute Segway ride, rolling through the parks and grounds near the Knesset. It will probably be my only Segway ride ever, and it was wonderful.

In the past, we traveled all the way to the depths of Tel Aviv to buy bitter almonds for Elaine's most special cake. They are difficult to buy, perhaps because a single bitter almond, uncooked, can kill a young child. A friend insisted that by now it must be possible to buy them in Jerusalem's great shouk, Machane Yehuda. We were doubtful, having failed in the past, but this time we succeeded. (You have to find a vendor who sells them, rather than a vendor who falsely claims to sell them and offers you ordinary almonds; the real ones taste horribly bitter.) We also discovered that Machane Yehuda has entered the 21st century, with HD TVs and a fine Italian restaurant, Topolino. (For dessert we ate chocolate-filled home-made ravioli in chocolate sauce.) In fact, fine Italian dairy dining seems to be a specialty of Jerusalem.

In Hebrew, the TV show 'Ugly Betty' is named 'Betti'.

We ate our last restaurant meal at Cafe Inbal in Ein Kerem. I made sure of the exact address before driving there: 25.

I don't know why I thought that this talismanic number would help me. Ein Kerem is a town spread out in patches along a twisting valley road. Building numbers are puzzling and rare, and signs are haphazard. Eventually I pulled up at a restaurant and inquired where I might find Cafe Inbal. They pointed to a sign behind a parked car. I was there.

At Ben Gurion Airport, I watched two workers sift a few kilos of dirt near some half-hidden ticket counters. At first it seemed that their desire was to keep (for themselves) what failed to fall through the screen, but then they took the finer dirt and mixed up some concrete. I'm sure they had a good reason; there's a reason for everything in fascinating Israel.

My Zenclass Review (Updated twice):

The ZenClass Nirvana Seat-Back Organizer and Travel Tote is a remarkable carry-on bag for airplane flights. (It's also handy in cars, on strollers and on changing tables!) I believe it's not perfect, but it's so wonderful that I look forward to discovering how to take advantage of all it offers. Here's a wonderful video to show its versatility.

The ZenClass bag zips up to form a small, light carry-on bag, about 8 by 12 inches and thin. (You'll probably keep it in your fullsize carry-on. Or you can wear it on your belt or body, in several different ways.) When you get on the plane, you unzip it and hang it over the tray that comes with your seat. The ZenClass bag has an ingenious flap for this purpose. You lock the tray in its closed position, and now all the contents of the ZenClass bag are available to you. There are three goodsize zip pockets, several see-through mesh pockets, and various special purpose holders (e.g., for a passport, for a ticket, for a pen). Depending on how you load it, you now have everything you need -- even a paperback book -- within reach for your whole flight. (You can even pop your laptop into the open bag.)

Beverage service does not require you to put your tray down; the ZenClass bag has a cupholder. When your meal comes, make sure that most of the ZenClass bag's contents are in its (closed) zip pockets. Then open the tray to eat, and the ZenClass bag will hide under the tray until you're done with your food.

I tried the ZenClass bag out on two eleven-hour flghts, and I never needed anything that was out of reach: pills, reading material, snacks, you name it.

The ZenClass bag doesn't interfere with the seat pocket below your tray, so you can fill that up too. It costs $39.99 plus shipping. I've found a few negative aspects of the ZenClass bag; perhaps some of these comments reflect my lack of experience with it:

-1: The ZenClass bag doesn't fully close when not in use. It zips three-quarters closed; the top side is "auto-closed" by magnets. I believe it's possible for small things to fall out of the top, so when the ZenClass bag is closed, I make sure that almost all its contents are zipped up in its inner pockets; a slight nuisance.

-2: It's hard to get the zipper moving when you want to close the ZenClass bag. And it gets harder, the more you fill it.

-3: Although the ZenClass bag has neat see-though pockets, your stuff will spend a lot of time zipped up out of sigtht. I think it's necessary to review what I've stuffed in all those pockets from time to time, to make sure I know what I've got.

-4: If you use a laptop on a flight, you're going to keep the tray down a lot. You'll have to get the laptop out of the way, each time you need the ZenClass bag.

Update:
Brent Hollowell (of ZenClass) wrote the following:
All of our new product has YKK zippers - the highest quality brand name zippers available. UPDATE: {I talked to Brent about the magnetic top, and found that no one has complained that they lost anything out of the top of the ZenClass bag. Thus the magnetic top appears to work just fine, although there are people like me who worry that something might fall out, when the bag is not in its normal vertical position. The magnetic top allows easy access to items in the top of the bag: passports, tickets, etc.}

In the "tray table down" position, in order to use your laptop and the organizer at the same time, try this: In the long zippered pocket that spans the entire bag, lay something fairly rigid/structured (like a couple of magazines, newspaper, book, notebook or even a laptop when not in use) across the entire inside of the pocket, horizontally, so that it spans the mid-point or folding part of the bag. This will give the bag a solid structure in the open position. You can then rest the entire unit on the metal tray table "arms"that hold the table in place (these are parallel to the floor on most current aircraft equipment).The back lip of the tray should meet the bottom edge of the organizer and hold it fairly well in position so that you can use the tray table.

It's not the most elegant solution, but unless it's insanely turbulent (or you're flying on an aircraft with the older tray tables) then you should be OK to use it in this manner as well. We did not design it for this mode, but we are working on a (hopefully) simple solution that will make it easily usable in both modes... trying to do it simply without adding quite a bit of cost, so we want to be deliberate about how we solve this one!

Fashion in “Law & Order”:

Near the beginning of almost every Law & Order TV show, the camera thoughtfully observes the first corpse. It must be someone's job to decide how to dress these corpses. I wonder if any manufacturers try to offer kickbacks to get their clothing lines on death-display.

Segway Tours!

We have just returned from a wonderful vacation in Israel, during which I took a Segway Tour in Jerusalem. If you search for Segway Tours, you'll see there are a lot of them, everywhere. There are at least two companies in Jerusalem: The Green Ride (which I took and recommend), and Segway Jerusalem (which I only know from their ad). Since riding a Segway is unintuitive, I imagine that most tours work like mine: first, they train you to use the Segway; then you start the tour on simple ground; then gradually you get a chance to zip along over hills and dips.

Touring on a Segway is great. You cover a lot of ground (I rode for 100 minutes). You see well because you are up higher. And you feel safer, because you can 'outrun' anyone if you have to. (My tour covered a lot of interesting trails where we saw absolutely no one. On the Segway I felt fine, but I might have felt uncomfortable walking in such places.)

If you're curious, here's what's unintuitive: You need to move smoothly as you step on or off it, so it doesn't try to get away from you. You control your speed by leaning forward or back at the ankles, not at the waist. You turn by sliding your handle bar right or left, not by turning the handlebar. And it's hard to keep the Segway still; you are more likely to jitter slightly back and forth when trying not to move it. After a while, some of this becomes second nature, and you just enjoy the ride.