Garry Moore (2):

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

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

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

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

Garry Moore:

Garry Moore was one of the first TV show hosts I truly enjoyed. He was much more low-key than modern talk-show hosts. The talk-show had not yet been invented, so his show was Variety, complete with a small orchestra and a regular singer, Peggy King. When it was time for her number, he might say, “Sing, Peggy King.” Occasionally he said, “Sinj, Pejjy Kinj.”
Although I remember many hours of gentle amusement, I remember very few specific gags, but here’s one to share with you. He held up what I hesitate to call a pair of glasses. There was only a single lens, centered in the frame. The live audience tittered.
“These seem to be lost,” he said. “But there’s a name: ’A Cyclops.’ Mr. Cyclops, you can pick your glasses up after the show. Please be sure to bring some identification.”

One Towel Only, Today:

The fitness center where I swim provides a towel service. The towels aren't large but they are good enough to save me, and many appreciative members, the trouble of managing our own towels. My fitness center is almost the only one in our area that provides towel service. They ask us to limit ourselves to two towels per visit, because the service is so expensive. They have to buy towels and pay people to wash them, dry them, fold them and move them from place to place.

Last Monday a sign said: Temporarily, please use only one towel. There will soon be more towels.

That was a challenge for me. I need a towel to keep me from freezing in the A/C when I return to the locker room; that same towel to sit on in the steam room; a towel to dry with, after I shower; and a towel to step on so that when I change into my socks, I need not stand barefoot on the locker room floor. (Fungus, anyone?)

I can make two towels suffice for all this. That one-towel limit was onerous, but I managed.

A short, Spanish-speaking attendant came into the locker room to remove the bin of used towels. I wondered if he knew what the problem was. My brain told me not to bother. He wouldn't understand my question; I wouldn't understand his answer; he wouldn't know the problem. But I have gotten so used to chatting with strangers lately (at my 50^th Reunion) that I plunged right in:

“What's the problem with the towels?”

He stared at me and said, “Dryer is broken.”

The General Trauma of Backwards Shirts:

When I was a kid, I utterly failed to master the art of putting shirts on frontwards. Undershirts, Tees, anything without buttons was hit-or-miss for me. I can't recall how my parents felt about it, but if they corrected me, they were kind and gentle.

If they hadn't been kind and gentle, I would remember, the way I remember being at summer camp when I was ten, mercilessly teased for wearing shirts backwards. A counselor took me aside and told me the sure-fire trick: Lay the shirt on my bed, front-side down. Then lift it up and put it on, and presto! It would go on the right way.

I carefully followed these instructions for three days; three horrible days of being told my shirt was backwards, and going back to the bunk until in desperation I got it right. On the fourth day, I tried to be analytical. That counselor had given me the solution! I must be doing something wrong.

Once again I laid the shirt on the bed, front side down. Then I watched myself like a hawk, as I reached out with my arms crossed and lifted the shirt. As I uncrossed my arms, the shirt twisted around backward. WHY HAD I DECIDED TO CROSS MY ARMS???

I got through the rest of camp with my shirts properly on.

Men's Undershirts:

I'm growing old, and I have not mastered the art of putting undershirts correctly on. Almost always, I make sure to turn them right side out. Then there is the issue of distinguishing between front and back. The collar at the back is usually higher and thicker. Why? If I put the shirt on backwards, I have to take it off and try again. Why can't the front and the back be the same? In fact, why can't the inside and the outside be the same? We're talking about a garment that is normally invisible.

My occasional ineptness isn't the only reason that undershirts bother me. I'll tell you about the traumatic side tomorrow.

"Preaching" to the Choir about double quote marks. Again:

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but, hey, Choir: maybe some of you can preach to the perpetrators. Double quotation marks have several uses: to show that someone is speaking; to show that a few words have been quoted verbatim; and to show that the words so-called are implied.

I shall give an example of the latter: I believe that these two sentences have almost the same meaning:

We sell so-called fresh shrimp.

We sell “fresh shrimp.”

Sadly my favorite supermarket thinks that the second sentence means:

We sell remarkably fresh shrimp.

Languages evolve. Even punctuation evolves. The trouble with this new use of quote marks is that it directly conflicts with an existing use, and for those of us aware of the contradiction, it fails to accomplish its intention. For example, I find it hard to believe that my supermarket's shrimp is really fresh; too bad I will never find out. I also think the realtor who brags like this on his billboard fails to convince me:

I “sell” homes.

I find it hard to stay off land when I'm asked to do so in double quotes:

“Stay off the grass.”

And I am not attracted to a restaurant whose billboard says:

“We serve vegan food!” (Who said that?)

This new use of double quotations could be welcome in English as soon as we expunge all of the directly conflicting usage. Which of course will never happen.

Bucolic Campus?

I left home at 5:30 a.m. today to walk across town and through the university campus to the radio station. (My classical music  show ran from 6 to 8:30. WPRB broadcasts at 103.3 FM and streams from WPRB.COM.)

Outside my door, the birdsong symphony was beautiful and intense. There was no traffic, and wow, there were a lot of birds. I bet it will sound even better on campus, I thought. There's only one road on campus, and the students would be asleep. I walked on, eager to find out what the birds would sound like among the tree-landscaped dorms and school buildings.

Campus was a surprising disappointment. A noisy bus plied up and down that one road. Students were asleep, but workmen drove their utility vehicles into place for their day's work. Giant A/C systems rumbled in the larger buildings. Against all this noise, birds sang their hearts out, but there weren't many of them.  For the first time, it occurred to me that our town has more tree cover than much of the open campus.

I'll listen to the birds at home.

I've invented an intelligent toilet.

Somehow I lack the energy to bring any of my inventions to fruition. This one has to be worth a lot, but I'm just giving it away, right here.

Consider a toilet equipped with a camera and some excellent video analysis software. When a person approaches the toilet and prepares to use it, the toilet controls the seat according to what is visible on the camera. If buttocks can be seen, the seat is lowered. If the user is facing the toilet, the seat is raised or lowered appropriately..

The hardware for the camera and its controlling software must be extremely simple and positioned so that anyone can easily verify that the device is not connected to the Internet.

Nimble NASDAQ:

NASDAQ's computer fumbles in handling the Facebook offering reminded me that fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was developing finance software, NASDAQ was the uptodate, nimble, highly computerized system, while NYSE seemed to be an old fogey. I will give you one example that sticks in my craw.

At that time, both exchanges issued new specifications for the formats of messages that reported trades. The changes made it possible to specify stock prices in much smaller increments, and to specify total trades in much, much higher totals. Since the company I worked at was doing business with NASDAQ and NYSE, we were entitled to get the new format specifications.

I had to modify some software to handle the new formats. For NASDAQ, I went to their website and downloaded the full new transaction message spec. It was a document that was easy to search, and I often cut-and-pasted from the document right into my comments.

For NYSE, I had to call a general phone number and ask around. I soon found a person who was willing to send me their spec. It arrived a week later, a bulky paper document. It was much less convenient than NASDAQ's online spec. It was obvious that this bulky paper document had been printed from a word-processing program. I inquired, and was assured that I was not permitted to have the computer-readable form.

And NYSE billed me $25 for the paper document. (Which I never paid.)

*Uck Zuck* :

Do you trust Facebook? Do you expect this humungous webworld to play straight with you, and with our data? Well, let’s look at Exhibit Number One. According to news reports, it appears that shortly before FB went public, Facebook learned they had a problem that might be material and signifigant to the price of the offering. Information about that problem was shared with some of the banks’ biggest customers, but not with the rest of us who may have wished to take a flyer on some FB stock. If some of those bankers acted illegally, or even immorally, I hope they get what they deserve. But please remember: FB is nearly a one-person company, because an awful lot of it is owned by one person: Zuck. If anyone was in a position to make sure that we, the public, were properly informed about the prospects of FB, it was Zuck. If anyone was in a position to instruct the bankers to handle this late-breaking problem in the most honest way, it was Zuck. If anyone is ever going to keep FB honest about how the company treats you, me, and our data, it is Zuck.  Well, when FB went public, in my opinion, he blew it. I’m through trusting him for anything. Here’s what I just can't help thinking: *Uck Zuck*.

Human Nature and Business:

I apologized to my Physical Therapist today, saying that I probably would never see him again if I could only keep doing the exercises he had given me.

“If my patients kept doing their exercises,” he said, “I guess I would be out of business.”

Raven's Daily Fortune Cookie:

I haven't been blogging enough lately, so I've started another blog. I'm trying to be succinct and useless, almost every day. You won't find advice like this elsewhere, and that's probably a good thing: Raven's Daily Fortune Cookie.

Tufted Titmouse:

We put up a bird feeder last winter. It had a cage designed to keep squirrels out and let only the smallest birds in. Weeks passed without a bird at our feeder. I complained to a neighbor. She said, “Don't worry, they'll find it.”

Gradually they did. I have an iPad app to identify the birds with, and learning this new skill has been difficult. We are feeding “finch food”, but I think we have yet to see a single finch. Black-Capped Chickadees came, sparrows and Downy Woodpeckers.

We are still feeding, and I added a “suet cage” that is another difficult challenge for squirrels. It appears that the presence of suet is a like a mighty billboard. A bluejay once poised above the feeder, looked around and flew away. Starlings have come by and chased the small birds off while they tried in vain to reach the finch food. And I think we are now getting visits from at least four kinds of sparrows.

The strangest visitor has a white cheek and looks positively ghostly. I may have misidentified it because of my life-long fascination with its name, but it seems to be ... yes … the Tufted Titmouse.

Buttermilk:

On rare occasions, my father drank a single glass of buttermilk. Watching him approach it as a special treat fascinated me, and I often asked for a taste. I couldn't stand the stuff.

But because my father liked it, I tried to do as he had done and drink it. I'm sure I tried it at least once every decade. Around age sixty I started to like it, and now I often buy a quart. I can't explain how my disgust at buttermilk's sour, fermented taste has turned into pleasure. I suspect that commercial buttermilk itself has changed, and I know that my taste buds aren't as sensitive as they used to be. But no matter; buttermilk is now a special treat for me, and a special remembrance of my father.

There's a weird aspect to this story. How did it happen that my father occasionally drank a single glass of buttermilk? We never bought it by the quart, and I really mean that he had the occasional glass. Here's how it happened: he would see buttermilk on the restaurant menu and decide to order it. Have you ever, ever seen buttermilk on a restaurant menu?

Times have changed.

Spam with passwords:

Sorry I've been away for so long. I'm back today with a paradox. I received an email from a website called Zeekler that gave me an account, an account name, a password, and some free resources. Zeekler seems to operate some sort of buying/selling web site. I have never contacted them or requested an account, as far as I know.

I was tempted to log in to Zeekler and close my account, but my instinct is that it would be better to have nothing at all to do with them. I deleted their email (permanently, because it contains a password). I had thought about reporting them as spam when I realized a rather special problem.

First, I hope you know that you should not save emails that contain passwords. In fact, no website should ever send you your password. If one does, you should delete the email with the password permanently at once. Your email account might be hacked some day, and if it is, the hacker will use any passwords in your saved emails to hack your other accounts.

If you successfully report some site as spam, how will you know whether they have sent you another email with a password in it? That's my problem. If Zeekler ever tries to contact me again, I want to know it.

I use Gmail. The way you avoid spam is to mark specific emails as spam. If I had marked Zeekler's email as spam, Google would have saved it in my spam folder, password and all.

A “Grabber” for Mail:

A “Grabber” is a tool that extends your reach to pick up things. Old-fashioned grocery (and other) stores had stock shelves far above eye-level, and we used Grabbers to pull items off those high shelves. Today, Grabbers are mostly for the disabled, and for people who cannot bend down to pick things off the floor. There are several types of Grabbers. They use stickum, magnets, wide-spaced pincers or tight pincers. None of them, in my opinion, is suitable for picking up mail.

Not only that, it's hard to try to search the web for a grabber that might be suitable for mail. Try it and you'll see.

At the moment my back is recovering from an incident that has left me rather stiff. Struggling with my Grabbers to get the mail off the ground is doubly frustrating because I am sure I know what a genuine Mail Grabber would look like. It would have a slender flat hand with a small depression in it, to slip under the mail. Its other side would press a blunt point into that depression, holding envelopes in place without dropping or piercing them. Inventors, please take note!

The New “Photogenic”

You may not have thought about the issue I'm about to raise. Possibly no one has. I've worked a lot with Video. I've been mulling the issue about in my subconscious for twenty-five years and I know I'm right, so please pay attention.

The question is, whar sort of person do you want, to represent your company in ads, or to be a new anchor on TV, or any sort of movie or TV star? You want them to look good, appealing, attractive, intelligent. In fact, every time someone pauses the video and looks at a stop-frame, you want your star to look good THEN.

And there's a problem there. When you watch people in a video or on TV, you see their expressions. But you do not see the micro-expressions between their expressions, the moves their faces make to get from one look to the next, unless you pause the video at an inopportune moment.

Some people look truly ridiculous in those in-between stop-frames. Dumb. Goofy. Confused. Even: Guilty. Try a few stop-frames on your favorite TV and movie people, and see what you get.

Chances are you've been seeing these revealing stop-frames and you never stopped to think about them; but your brain did. And you've judged those people for their stop-frame looks.

I want my TV star or ad representative to look smart or attractive at every stop-frame. And now that I've mentioned it, so will you.

How we have inflicted Terrorism on ourselves:

Bruce Schneier has just published (in his blog) the conclusion of his dialog with Kip Hawley about the "value" of the TSA. This little essay is marvelous, and  I encourage you to read it.

Here's one of Schneier's chilling paragraphs. I'm quoting without permission, and I hope he doesn't mind:

The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us—to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them—is the greatest harm of all.

Words with Friends HD: A crashing sucker on my Pad:

I would like to write a review of Zynga's Words with Friends on the iPad2. I can't review it in the iunes store because the store says I have to buy it or download it in order to review it. The program IS on my iPad and in fact, it just crashed again for the tenth time, even though I restarted it and even reinstalled it. At first it worked, but now it crashes faster than I can try to think.

What's wrong with these guys? Anyway, WwF-hd started out just fine for me and I happily switched to it from the older WwF app. I liked the way you could see the whole board while playing your tiles. The arrangement of the command buttons is a little peculiar but I got used to it. And then it started to crash. I hope they figure out what the problem is and update the app. Meanwhile I've gone back to the older WwF.

First, Printers could be identified. Now, Bits! Remember when we discovered that the major printer manufacturers were making every printer’s output unique? Printers now place a unique, discreet dot pattern on every page that can be used to identify the printer that printed it. In case you thought you could be anonymous, you know.
Well, it’s getting worse.

This web page explains how to identify anonymous authors from their writing, in a tradition that goes back to telegraphers: Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choice of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. ...

But wait! It gets even worse. We think of the “bits” that computers produce as nice clean ones and zeroes, but if you take a close look at the way they are stored in the substrate, you can see that they are all different. When we copy bits from one medium to another, their original shapes are partly retained, and imaginative researchers have announced success in tracing bits back to their source.

Be careful what you write!

[]

Seriously, no one lives in our garage:

In a way, I sympathize with the phone companies. They have begged congress to let them stop publishing those thick, fat telephone directories. They know that most people don’t use them any more. Smart phones and the Internet have created better ways to find telephone numbers.

Congress has not obliged. Consequently, once a year, we watch an immigrant walk down the street, depositing a plastic bag pregnant with pages in front of each and every home.

I’m sure some people really appreciate these heavy tomes, but I throw mine out at once.

Twice.

Because only the phone company, or its legitimate representatives, seem to think that both I and my garage require a full set of phone books.

Britannica Bows:

New technologies are uncompromisingly cruel to the old technologies they replace. It’s particularly painful to see computers doing things ten times better than print matter, and there’s no stopping them.

The Britannica company has bowed to the inevitable and given up on its printed edition. In the past, most printed encyclopedias gained important revenue from door-to-door hard-sell salesman who offered parents a dream of books that would raise them and their children to a new level. Most such families today expect their home computer or smart phone to do that, so I suspect this hard-sell market for books is gone.

But for Britannica, it gets worse. The Company inadvertently made its own excellent case for switching to an online format years ago. Do you remember the comparison between Britannica and Wikipedia, that claimed Wikipedia was as good or better an encyclopedia?

Britannica responded with a detailed rebuttal to show that the analysis was wrong. The most common theme in their rebuttal was that the analysis incorrectly asserted valuable information was missing from Britannica; in fact, the Britannica encyclopedia contained that information, but in a different place. In order to find such information, you needed to know where Britannica’s expert editors had decided to put it, or – and Britannica’s rebuttal did not mention this, but it screamed between the lines – you needed hyperlinks or a search engine to find what you needed to know.

Printed books do not handle hyperlinks and search engines very well. End of printed encylopedias.

Targeted Ads: Of course I care!

If you live on this planet, you may have noticed the recent uproars about companies mining data about you to figure out what you need to buy. Target’s ability to figure out that a girl was pregnant before her father did is way up there as a symbol of targeted ad overkill.

Frankly, I do not mind that companies distill everything they can discover about me in order to throw well-targeted ads at me.

I have been the victim of untargeted ads for over sixty years. Newspaper ads, junk mail, TV, radio, Internet, skywriting, you name it. Even though I have a wonderful Tivo box at home, those mis-aimed ads are still an extraordinary waste of my time. I wish that every ad I had ever been exposed to was about some product I might really want to buy.

I wrote system software for a company that places targeted ads, for more than a year, but that experience had no effect on my opinion: I have always wanted targeted ads! Well-targeted ads. Expertly sculptured ads. And I am willing to let Google save my search information and whatever it can profile about me, to improve the value of the ads I see online. Or offline, for that matter.

Tens of thousands of irrelevant, untargeted ads have occupied months of my life. What a waste.

iPad Game Reviews, Guides, FAQs:

I have been writing up the iPad games I've played. I decided that I could put the time I invested into these games to good use by putting brief ads for my two books into the reviews, and as far as I can tell, people have been reading my reviews and increasing my eBook sales.

Not all of them, though. When someone sends me an email that says, "I saw your review of game X. How do I persuade the dragon to fly me to the island?" I know that person will not read my book, because he didn't even read my guide, which explains how to persuade the dragon to fly him to the island.

My reviews, FAQs and guides point to for some excellent ways to waste your time. Here's my current list:

• Aralon Sword and Shield Tips and Walkthrough
• Battle Frontier: a Review and a FAQ
• Book of Heroes: a review and a FAQ
• Dungeon Crawlers, a review and a Guide
• Kard Combat: A FAQ for the tablet game.
• Let's Golf 3 by Gameloft: A FAQ for the iPad game.
• Order and Chaos: Guide for new players!
• Words with friends: A FAQ for the tablet game.

Email: prior art!

This Washington Post story is about a man who has been honored by the Smithsonian for inventing Email in the late 1970's. The company I worked for in the 1960's had Email (and I believe we even called it that.) Applied Logic Corporation (a defunct company abased in Princeton, NJ, not to be confused with a current company by the same name) was a time-sharing company. If you had an account on their system, you could dial in remotely with a Teletype and use their computer services. Among these services was the ability to send electronic mail to any other account, addressing that user by name. It was Email, and it was available in 1967. We employees of ALC made extensive use of email to share our development work, APIs, etc. Years later, when I encountered Email on a Unix system, it felt like coming home.

Spring is here? (Feb 23)

I saw my first Robin today. Either Spring is here, or that was one hornswoggled robin.

The Spring of '62: New Old Mets:

The baseball season's acoming, and Robert Lipsyte has written a superb piece on the original Mets. I was there for those hapless Mets, and I expected Lipsyte's piece to be a rehash of old memories. Instead, it was fresh and alive with new insights into those old days. I can't recommend his article enough.

Quantum Walking to Fitness:

I have self-published a second book. This one is very short, so it is only an eBook. The book explains how to keep fit by taking many short walks during the day, walks that add up to a respectable total. I also explain how to work these walks into your daily activities, so that they do not take up too much of your time. You can preview the book or buy it here, for $0.99: Quantum Walking to Fitness.

And please allow me to remind you how to get my first fantasy novel for grownups, Raven's Gift:
eText versions for Kindle, Nook, etc.
The genuine book version at Amazon.

Super, Supersizing:

Macy’s is selling a cappuccino MUG. A mug! The first time I drank a cappuccino, it was served in an espresso cup. And just in case those have been supersized beyond recognition, let me explain that a traditional espresso cup holds just a few ounces of liquid.

Oh, and that  cappuccino mug? A mere twenty-four ounces.

Superbowl XLVI: Falling into the Endzone:

I’ve read many descriptions of that memorable play near the end of Superbowl XLVI, but none of them, I think, captures the full narrative. I shall tell it here.

There was scarcely more than a minute left, and the Giants were inside the Patriots’ ten yard line. The Giants appeared about to go ahead, as they were only two points behind. One of the NBC announcers, Chris Collingsworth, told us TV fans that the right play for the Giants, strange as it might seem, was not to score too quickly, to run out the clock.

The Giants’ coach, Tom Coughlin, did not tell his team not to score. In the huddle, Manning did not tell his team not to score.

The moment Manning handed the ball off to Ahmad Bradshaw, he saw the Patriots standing there, allowing Bradshaw to score. I suspect Manning made a sensible, quick decision: anything that the Patriot’s coach wanted to do must be wrong. It’s indisputable that Manning yelled, “Don’t score,” after the hurtling Bradshaw.

Bradshaw was running with a lot of momentum. Not just physical momentum, but also mental momentum. Here’s how he put it after the game: It’s terrible not to score the winning touchdown in the Superbowl.

Bradshaw teetered on the one foot line, trying to keep his balance, and he fell in.

There’s a miracle here. Can you imagine a Patriot running up to Bradshaw and shoving him into the endzone, to save a second on the clock? Can you imagine a Giant grabbing Bradshaw and hauling him away from those six points? I’m so glad we were saved from all that.

The American Lockdown:

Today, Bruce Schneier commented on a good, thoughtful article about the huge incarceration rate in the U.S.: The Caging of America, by Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker.

I would like to comment that there would be far fewer people in jail, if our country did not actively pursue people who buy marijuana and drugs, and jail the lowest level of dealers. I learned from my stretch in Grand Jury how actively the police try to catch the dealers who make less than fifty dollars a night dealing crack and marijuana. They arrest buyers as well.

The "war on drugs" is a mighty missile mis-aimed. The desire of the American People to consume drugs is what fuels the production, smuggling and dealing that we officially find so distasteful. As long as that desire remains, efforts to police the flow of drugs resemble holding a paper tissue up in a hurricane.

There's an awesome amount of hypocrisy at work here. Is there any way to sweep it away, other than to appeal most of our drug laws?