Ed Foster... Oh.

A notice has appeared on Ed Foster's blog (July 28, 2008) that Ed has died. Ed operated The Gripe Line for Infoworld. You can sample many of his stories there to see who we've lost. Ed was a tireless campaigner for consumer rights. He did a great deal to marshall sentiment against the unreasonable proposed UCITA legislation, which attempts to place consumers totally at the mercy of companies selling products. And he publicized terrible EULAs and warranty policies, shaming many companies into mending their ways.

Ed's death leaves a few open issues on his column, including Yahoo closing their DRM store, leaving those who purchased DRM'd music from Yahoo up the creek without a sound. (If Ed were still here, he would complete that story, as Yahoo has decided to compensate those who purchased their DRM'd music.) Ed also has open stories on Best Buy's warranty support of a Dell computer, the apparent death of customer support for Windows XP, possible copyright abuse in the Embroidery business, and legal issues in the siezure of laptops at US borders; and more.

We're going to miss Ed, and we're going to miss what he's done for us.

Update:Ed Foster was only 59. His family requests that donations be made in his name to the EFF.

I'm often unprepared:

I don't plan ahead as much as I ought to. I often walk into situations unprepared. But sometimes I think back, in greatest pleasure, to a moment when I took care to prepare, and it really paid off. You'd think that would give me incentive to do better ...

I had volunteered to bring my cappuccino machine to an evening meeting of an organization my wife belongs to. There would be about twenty people, and some of them would want a cup or two of cappuccino or espresso coffee, leaded or unleaded. I was concerned about failing to please them, because I could only make one cup at a time. What if I fell way behind?

For some reason, this was incentive to prepare carefully. I made lists of everything I needed to bring, lists of steps to setup and to make coffee, to clean up. I went over my lists. I imagined everything as carefully as I could. And then the big evening came.

They led me to the room where dinner would be served and coffee made. To my horror, there was no running water, no sink in this room. But hey, I was prepared. I had everything I needed. I went over my procedures, deciding how to deal with the long trek to keep my equipment clean, and to get water.

The evening was a great success. I turned out cup after cup, and everyone enjoyed their Java. Why don't I prepare like that more often?

“Acting” at a gas station:

There's an Exxon station that's closed, near home. It's at an intersection with US route 1. If you drive through the gas station and turn right, you can avoid the traffic light. And you can do even better than that. If you're going to turn into the gas station, you can drive in the right gutter to reach it. Of course, driving through a gas station, even a closed one, to avoid a traffic light, is illegal. I think it would count as reckless driving.
I saw a big, black SUV do this maneuver yesterday, and I think the driver put on a fine show. First, he passed a bevy of cars waiting for the light to turn green. Then he drove up to a pump. (The station is notably closed. It has no posted prices, no lights on, no parked cars, nothing.) He stuck his head out of the window, looked very puzzled, and then drove on, beating all those other drivers onto Route 1.

Oh, Oh, Beijing:

I don't want to say “I told you so” afterward, so I'm getting on the record now. The Beijing Olympics stinks to me. A totalitarian regime, despite its promises, is cracking down on every attempt at free speech and open media, in order to control the appearance of their Olympics. China is obviously in this arena to prove how wonderful their country and their way of life are, at any expense and effort. And that includes their relentless treatment of the fine, selfless athletes and driven slaves who will represent them.

Many fine athletes will compete at these Olympics. Their selflessness, competitiveness, team spirit and respect for their opponents will be wonderful and good. But from its relentless pursuit of money and manufactured reputation, to its relentless pressure on the athletes, this Olympics will stand for everything that the Olympics should not stand for.

The free press should not cooperate with China's desire for control. And I will have the greatest respect for any athlete willing to give up a chance of a lifetime to stay away from Beijing's polluted air. Those who stick it out and go to Beijing to watch and report on the spectacle will have their whole lifetimes to regret it.

Important Distinctions:

Here's what I think: There are trash sports, and then there are trash sports.

How come I never get to see Miniature Golf on TV? I think it could be fun.

A Certain Owl:

We have a lab at work where we test the hardware and software that our client uses in the field. Because of the nature of this project, it was appropriate to put a nice picture of an eagle by the door. Recently we expanded our use of this lab, and it became appropriate to add a picture of an owl next to the eagle. I found nice owl picture and posted it, but I was worried how people would react. (I've had a few bad experiences in the past, where an attempt to add a light touch to some grueling development work was perceived as an insult by some of the programmers.)

In this case I needn't have worried. The day after I posted my owl, someone added another picture: Tweety Bird.

The great secret about cooking with eggplant:

When I decided I wanted to include eggplant in some of my breakfast vegetable dishes, I was overwhelmed by the instructions for preparing this vegetable. Some recipes tell you to roast it until it collapses. OR you slice it and soak it in salt water. Or you puree the seeds and put them back in place. (Okay, I made that one up.) These instructions for dealing PERFECTLY with an entire eggplant prevented me, for a long time, from realizing the obvious:

You can cook an eggplant a little at a time.

Keep your eggplant in the fridge. Cut a few slices and work your will on them. You can nuke a slice and drop it into a sandwich. Cover the cut end of the remaining plant in plastic and put it back in the fridge. Treat your slices like any "almost ready to eat" food. You can enjoy eggplants even if you don't like eggs. They couldn't be easier. Tasty, too.

How to Fix the Allstar Game (baseball):

Most people in the stadium and at home gave up before the low-scoring allstar game ended. It's not interesting enough any more, it needs to be jazzed up. Here's how to fix it:

The National League pitchers should pitch to the National League batters. Ditto the American League. The pitchers will try to grove every pitch, but there will still be plenty of outs. There will be lots of scoring, too. I think seven innings should just about do it.

Raven's Gift:

I'm delighted to tell you that my first novel, Raven's Gift, is now appearing at Podiobooks. This is a fantasy novel, and it's a series of author-read audiocasts. The first five chapters are out now, and all twenty-nine (approximately) will appear, I sincerely hope, in 2008. If you think the book might interest you, please read the description at Podiobooks. And you can check for other news about the book at RavensGift.com.

Podiobooks is a pretty nifty website. Their books are free, although they ask for donations. And they have a good audience. In the first 45 hours, there have been almost 300 downloads of my chapters.

UPDATE #2:I published (and have removed) an incorrect rss feed. Please use this RSS feed.

I used to hate computers:

A few years after we owned a PC, and I was actually working with IBM PCs, my wife noticed something remarkable: I didn't hate them. I had been expressing my hatred of computers -- for their unreliability -- for years, all the way through the minicomputer era, from PDP-8's to every flavor of Mini I came across.

After she pointed this remarkable fact out to me, I realized what it meant. PCs in the 1980's were not great machines, but they worked ever so much more reliably than all the mini computers I'd ever dealt with. And by the way, if you're old enough to have used mini computers in the 1970's you may not understand why I found them so unreliable, but I'll explain.

In the 1970's I worked for three companies that developed software on many configurations of mini computers. We set up the desired configurations by swapping boards. There were times that I moved these foot-square boards between computers daily. Every printed circuit board was full of genuine, old-fashioned wires. (I remember the first time, years later, that I saw a printed circuit board with no wires at all, just pristine printed circuits and chips. I thought it was a miracle.) These boards slid in and out of narrow slots. The manufacturers did not expect you to move their boards around all the time, they just didn't engineer for it.

When you moved boards, they snagged wires. Or their wires snagged other boards.

There's a great irony here. Those old computers had such simple operating systems that it was child's play to configure a machine after you changed its boards. Often you did nothing at all, you just ran software that knew which boards where on the computer. But snagging those wires made the computers behave undependably. I never wanted to entrust my source code to any of them.

Modcomp: Quarterly Accounting:

Gosh it's fun reminiscing about Modcomp. Now a bit about their accounting. Modcomp calculated their financial position each quarter. As a result, they were hyper about shipping as many mini-computers as they could, before the end of each quarter. Before a machine could be shipped, it had to pass their own quality tests.

We learned that we should ONLY allow Modcomp to ship a machine to us during the second month of a quarter. In the third month, they would ship ANYTHING if you let them. If you took delivery during the first month of a quarter, you got a machine so sick that they had been unable to ship it in the third month of the previous quarter.

Days of reboots ...

Last Wednesday, I wrote about how we got knocked off the web because a Windows Security patch was incompatible with ZoneAlarm anti-virus software. Three anxious days later, ZoneAlarm, working with Microsoft, sent us the fix. I don't blame either company for this mess, these things just happen. But I do blame Microdaft for something.

ZoneAlarm recommended a temporary fix: remove the Microsoft security patch. Now when Microsoft installed that patch, they rebooted my computer. And when I uninstalled it, I had to reboot. For three days I had to remove the security patch, because each day I removed it, MSC put it back. And we're talking about three computers, all doing the same thing.

When Microsoft installs something on my PC, if I uninstall it, I expect Microsoft to guess that I might know what I'm doing; they could ask before putting it back again. Normally I run Windows XP for weeks without rebooting. The last three days have been ridiculous.

Just Give the News Please:

Today I want to bring your attention to a particularly descriptive sentence in the New York Times sports section. This might also be a good time to mention that the Times seems not proofread its paper as carefully as it used to.

The writer, Alan Schwartz, discussed issues related to the MLB's treatment of concussions. The Mets' player Ryan Church has had two (I think) concussions this year. He has been cleared to play several times and then has obviously suffered more post-concussion symptoms. Currently he is not playing. For me, concussion is a very dangerous injury with quality-of-life implications, and I always hope it will be treated carefully. The writer (with the help perhaps, of some befuddled Times employee), described Church's current predicament like this: "It is questionable whether he will return to play this season is questionable." I think that just about says it.

Sniffing Out Computer Trouble:

I've worked with computers for forty-seven years. I'm a software person, a programmer. I've learned an awful lot about hardware, operating systems, the Internet, and major software applications, but I'm not an expert on any of these. Whenever there's something seriously wrong with my computer, I'm likely to throw myself on the mercy of gurus, or make desperate calls to my vendor's technical support people. But – you know – working a lot with computers, you develop a sensitivity to problems and their causes. Take this morning, for example:

I woke up to find that my laptop could not access any web sites. When that happens, I open a DOS box and try to “ping” Yahoo. If the ping fails, I restart my DSL modem and my Router. But today, “ping” worked fine. That meant I could access both a DNS computer and Yahoo itself. (The job of DNS computers is to remember the “hard address” of named computers. When I try to ping Yahoo, a DNS computer tells the ping program to talk to [69.147.76.15].) And yet, Firefox could not find Yahoo. What was going on?

We've had a bunch of forced upgrades from Microsoft lately. I became convinced that one of these upgrades had knocked me off the net. This was the “sensitivity” step. I had no solid evidence, but I was sure I was right. Now I asked myself: what if I'm right? The whole nternet is abuzz with this disastrous security update, and they're talking about how to fix it. But I have to get on the net to see that.

We have three Windows computers. (Pause here for sympathy.) I rushed to the second one, and it had just rebooted from a MSC upgrade. It had the same problem. I tried the third. Miraculously, it was able to access the Internet. Now at this point I remembered another part of the puzzle: Right now, the Intenet is experiencing an amazing upgrade that coordinates changes by 81 companies, to fix a security problem in the way that DNS name servers work. I felt I was in a hurry. Microsoft could push its fix on this third computer and knock it off the net at any moment. So I went to Google News and searched for “DNS patch.”

And I found my problem, but with all my “experience” I was still lucky. A little item in Google news stated that Microsoft's DNS patch had knocked users of ZoneAlarm Anti-virus (that's me) off the Internet. ZoneAlarm recommended uninstalling a particular Microsoft patch for now, and that's how I've gotten my laptop back on the Internet. I was lucky to find this out. I think that ZoneAlarm ought to post this problem on their front page, but instead they are discussing it in a forum that I might never have noticed.

How do 'ordinary' users survive problems like this? Maybe ordinary users don't use ZoneAlarm ...

Ginger Coffee:

Today I boiled a few slices of ginger for ten minutes, then used that ginger water to make coffee. Ginger is not the most natural flavor to combine with coffee, but the results were pretty good. Next time I try this, I'll add a little hot pepper as well, and let you know.

Little Foibles:

It's amazing how distinctive, original and different people are. There are thousands of ways we each set ourselves apart from everyone else. When you see strangers who look alike and are had to tell apart, you cannot begin to guess how amazingly different they will seem, when you have better knowledge of them.

I mention this because of one of my original little foibles. It's more amusing than embarrassing, so I can tell you about it.

When I swim at the health club, I try to follow their request to use only two towels. One towel gets soaked underneath me in the steam room, leaving just one ordinary-size towel to dry me off. I want a towel with a thick nap, because a thin-napped towel will not absorb as much water. The towels are folded and stacked on shelves in many tall piles. I choose a towel that has a loose fold. A tightly folded towel is more likely to have a thin nap. The club has hundreds of towels. It stands to reason that some of them are older than the others. Those will be the worn-out towels with the thin nap, that I wish to avoid.

Now sensible as that all sounds, here are some facts: I have never actually observed a towel with a thin nap. And it's perfectly possible, when folding a towel, to fold it very flat or loose, regardless of its nap. So my care, in choosing a loose-fold towel, is utterly pointless. But just to be on the safe side ...

Those Muddy Clods:

You remember I told you about this patch of grass that the university covered with packed gravel, and then dug up? Well the dirt clods are still there, only after some rain, they look pretty ugly.

Now I know that those of you who read my blog regularly suspect the worst of me: that I would prefer not to know what's going on there, so that I can muse about it instead. Frankly, I suspect that of myself. So when I saw a university workman get out of his worktruck near the dirt clods, I was delighted to ask him about the 2,500 square feet of dirt.
“Do you know why they put gravel down here and then plowed it under?” I asked.
“No, I'm puzzled. It looks like someone screwed up here.”
“Is there someone I can call, to find out what's happening here?”
He got a faraway look in his eyes, and he said, “Oh. There are so many departments ...”

So for now, we'll have to muse.

Modcomp again: Shipping in Place

One of the things that might have caused accounting trouble for Modcomp was its practice of "shipping in place." Occasionally they would ask us if we needed to receive a computer on schedule. If we didn't need it yet, because all our projects were behind schedule, they might offer to "ship it in place." This mysterious phrase means that they assured us the computer was all ready, and they billed us for it, but they did not ship it. This practice might have allowed them to accrue revenue for that computer. I do not remember what we did with these bills. We might have ignored them until we really wanted the computer, or (I hope we never did this) we might have passed the bill on to our actual customer for payment.

The thing is ... you always wondered whether there really was a computer, all fixed up and ready to ship, in some bay at Modcomp, with our company name on it.

Swimming is good for me:

Swimming in a swimming pool is good for me. Really. Swimming strengthens so many muscles, with so little strain, and burns so many calories. I have to keep reminding myself about this, especially after today.

I was swimming in my favorite lane, at one edge of the pool. About halfway down the lane, peering underwater, I could see what looked like a small rusty bolt screwed into the bottom of the pool. I don't know when I first noticed it, maybe a long time ago, but I certainly saw it there last week. Today in midlap, I realized that this thing could not be a bolt. There was no imaginable need to make a hole at that place in the pool, nor to screw a bolt into a hole there. So it must be some object lying on the bottom of the pool.

I like to retrieve junk from the pool bottom. I float very well, so to go down to the bottom, I have to do something unintuitive: I expel all the air in my lungs and dive down. I did that and came up with a buffalo head nickel. I have quite a few of these, but the one I pulled off the pool bottom is different: it is almost flat. Somehow, all the embossed detail has been eaten away. Looks like the weird chemicals in the pool have done a number on this nickel, disfiguring it while it lay on the bottom. And how rapidly? I don't want to think about it, because: Swimming in the pool is good for me.

More about Modcomp:

In my previous post about Modcomp, I mentioned that -- as far as I know -- they were the only mid-70's computer company that routinely revised its computers by replacing chips and rewiring wires. All of Modcomp's competitors made upgrades and hardware fixes by replacing entire boards. (We're talking foot-square boards, there was less miniaturiation in those days.) Modcomp's approach was much more flexible and dynamic, but -- let's be frank -- it was wrong.

First, as I mentioned, Modcomp issued corrections every week. At that torrid pace, you have to suspect that they were introducing problems as fast as they fixed them. There could not be time to run careful tests on each week's combination of fixes before publishing them. Even if the fixes were good, they still had to be performed correctly on your computer. You had to hope that every wire was rewired correctly, and it's easy to attach a wire to the wrong pin.

Second, Modcomp had to perform most of the wiring changes for its customers. They paid a lot to get the rare people who knew how to do this fieldwork and were willing to travel, and to try to be deadly accurate. Paying maintenance guys to swap boards was cheaper, simpler and safer, and required far less qualified people.

Now here's an interesting note. Our company agreed on a set of critical changes with Modcomp that required an entire forty hours of rewiring. They sent a young woman to us, to make these changes. They told us they had learned that men were too impatient to do a lot of rewiring accurately. All their top repair people were women.

A software company catches fire:

My mid-1970's computer company caught fire and burned, for possibly as much as twenty seconds. If you're wondering, I can assure you: you never want to experience any kind of malicious fire.

In those days we used electrostatic printers. They spilled a fixer on special paper and the printer burned dots into the papers. The print stayed visible for a year or two before fading into uselessness. The fixer was nonflammable. But apparently, if a tiny leak allowed it to form a cloud over the printer's power supply, eventually it would start a flash fire. The fire consumed all the oxygen in the building very quickly, and after those first twenty seconds it probably just simmered a bit.

It was our practice to run 500 page printouts overnight, so the fire happened about 2 a.m. with no one there. The guy who left at 1 a.m. said "Gee, I wish I had been there, maybe I could have done something." Had he been there, he probably would have died.

I arrived the next morning to find mini-computers smoking in the parking lot. Firetrucks were there, and the windows were black with smoke. A new employee started work that day. He stood there looking at the mess. I would have understood if he had quit on the spot, but he stayed and worked there for four years.

The company survived the fire because, one week before, they had shipped a brace of computers and software to a prime customer. If those computers had been caught in the fire, they could not have been shipped and there would have been no cashflow cushion, nothing to tide us over until insurance money came in.

Everything smelled of smoke. There were plastic knobs in the ceiling to adjust vents, and the knobs nearest the fire now looked like stalactites. The computers closest to the fire looked just awful. But their only problem was that their plastic exteriors had melted. New plastic was put in place, and we used those machines for years.

Several Modcomp machines were twenty feet from the fire, and they worked fine afterwards. But the Modcomp company was kind enough to warn us that these computers would all fail disastrously after about three months, because the acid smoke had caused uncorrectable damage to their printed circuit boards. Their machines all failed as predicted, but there was insurance money to replace them.

We did no programming for weeks. Removable disk packs -- lots of them -- had to be opened and cleaned. Card decks -- thousands of punch cards -- had to be cleaned. Everything had to be cleaned. After about six weeks the office stopped smelling of smoke, and we started to program again.

Modcomp: Chips and Wires ...

In the mid 1970's, my company used mini computers made by a company called Modcomp. This was no ordinary company. For one thing, I remember hearing that one or two of their executives was wanted for accounting fraud. For another, the names for the Modcomp computer instructions were designed by an alien from outer space, and were generally less mnemonic than for other computers. Typical instruction names in those days were: JUMPL (jump to another address if result is less than zero); LB (load byte); ADD (add). In Modcompese, I'll bet you wouldn't guess what the SUM instruction did; that's right, it SU-btracted, storing the result in M-emory.
But that's not important now. Modcomp, unlike all of its competitors, built their minicomputers with chips that could easily be removed and replaced. (Take just a moment and savor the fact that in this, Modcomp differed from ALL of its competitors. Perhaps they knew something that Modcomp didn't know.) Chip replacement made it easy for Modcomp to upgrade machines and fix computer bugs, and they issued correction sheets all the time. Typically a bug was fixed by replacing a few chips, removing and rewiring a few wires. (There were printed circuit boards in the 70s, but typically every mini had lots and of real wires as well.)

At that time my company was developing software for a large oil company to control waste in a refinery plant. We bought the Modcomp mini-computers, sold them to our customer, and held on to them for many months while we developed the software for them. One day our customer mentioned a contract clause we had totally ignored: "You're keeping the computers up to date, right? All the upgrades and bug fixes?"

There was an awesome mound of fix-sheets in our director's desk drawer that we had never applied. He sorted through these, suspecting that some of them must be obsolete already. Eventually we forced a meeting with our customer and the director of the Modcomp fixups division, to decide what fixes must be applied, both now and in the future.

The Modcomp guy was proud of the intense rate at which his company issued fixes. He saw this process as insurance that the computers were as good as possible, although I suspect you will come to a different conclusion. At the meeting, discussion focused on the amount of time needed to take a computer out of service to apply each weekly batch of fixes. Finally our director confronted the Modcomp guy: "You're telling me that we'll have to take our computers out of service more than forty hours a week to keep them current?"
After some hemming and hawing, the Modcomp guy agreed. It was an astounding moment. Our customer agreed that we could apply only the most important fixes, to be determined by Modcomp, so that we could finish writing our programs for them.

I wonder how many fixes were added after the computer went into production at the customer plant. They wanted to run 24/7.

Watch habits:

last Last Thursday's blog entry was about shifting my watch from my left wrist to my right. I can see already that this change in a life-long habit will be harder to manage than learning to thread my belt in the opposite direction. My new wrist position conflicts with three other life-long habits, two of which I'm happy to mention here.

What do you do when you're not sure that you remembered to put on your watch? When this thought hits me, I run my right hand up my left arm to feel for my watch. All that does now, is to give me a better view of my right wrist.

Do you take your watch off to wash dishes? I don't. But to be safe, I've developed a habit of keeping my right hand more in the water, and my left hand more out. My watch runs more risk of getting wet now.

But, some of you will ask, isn't your watch “water resistant”? It is, but what does that mean? I imagine myself writing a letter to Cadex saying, “My watch got wet and now it doesn't work.” And Cadex writes back to me, “Oh, our watches aren't that water resistant.”

2500 Square feet of Gravel:

We've lived near the university, and walked across its grounds, for many years. It's always a little depressing when more of the campus greenery is plowed under to make room for new buildings, but the university flourishes, so losing grass is inevitable.

Recently a strip of grass near a new building was ripped up. Gravel was laid there, and -- from the look of it -- pressed down with a steam roller. I used to walk through that grass strip, and for the last two weeks I've walked over the new gravel instead. I calculated its size, and that's why the title of this item mentions 2,500' sq. It was hard to figure out why they laid this gravel. I thought it might become a small parking lot, but there was no entrance to it. In the last two weeks I once saw a truck that had climbed the curb to park there.

Well today the gravel is gone, plowed under. That same strip of land is now a sea of big dirt clods. I wonder what they're going to do next, but right now, it looks like somebody turned a strip of land into gravel by mistake.

Micro-adjusting my watch band:

I'm still happy with the new Cadex watch I told you about on April 18th. But its watchband is not ideal for me. It's psuedo-leather with buckle-holes in it. I almost always wear my watch on my left wrist, and the correct hole to stick the buckle in would be third from the end. There's a horizontal band that you push up to lock the pin into its hole. (I'm not describing this well, but this arrangement is very common in watchbands.) The band does not hold well at the third hole, so I could lose the watch. And the fourth hole is too tight. And there's no in between.

But I happen to know that my right wrist is narrower than my left. So I've given up on a lifetime habit, and I'm learning to wear my watch on my right wrist, where the fourth hole is perfect.

Strangely, this is the second lifetime habit that I've given up in a year. I wear my PDA, mp3 player, flash memory and phone in little packs that I hang on my belt. The belt goes through loops on these little packs, so the there's no chance the packs can fall off, except for the pack at the open end of my belt (where the belt-holes are). When I open my belt (in a bathroom, say), I might be spacey enough to fail notice a pack sliding off my belt. That means the important, expensive stuff has to go at the other end of my belt, where the buckle makes it impossible to lose anything. But the buckle-part of my belt was always on my left, and I wanted the unloseable stuff to be on my right! So I reversed my belt. After a liftime of threading my belt one way around my waist, I've had to learn to thread it the other way. Getting used to that took weeks. But I haven't lost anything, so it must have been worth the effort.

A Triumph for the 36-watt CFL:

You've heard me carp about the new compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Well, they're not nearly all bad, and here's a case where a CFL made me happy.

There's a lamp in our front yard that used to have a conventional 40 watt bulb. It died recently, so I replaced it with a 36 watt CFL. That lamp will use a little less electricity now, while burning much brighter, but that's not the exciting part.

Each time this bulb burns out, I have to stand on tiptoe and reach up with my arm, yet down with my hand, to barely touch the old bulb to remove it. Screwing in the new bulb is just as awkward. But these CFLs: the more watts they use, the longer they are. It was easy to screw in the 36 watt CFL, and it will be just as easy to replace it with another, similar bulb, when the new one dies much, much sooner than the manufacturer claims.

Where would I look for ...

I've been carrying around an ID badge, and some papers, for an activity that I'd like to tell you about someday. I had a very nice bag to keep these items in, but I needed that bag for another purpose. I took my ID stuff out and did something really dreadful: I put it "where I couldn't possibly fail to find it."

I found it four weeks later, by which time I had admitted it was lost in my house and had gotten a duplicate ID. And then I found it. Really, I had put that stuff in a place where it couldn't be missed. But that's not good enough, is it? Not for me, anyway.

The next time I need to put something away for awhile, I hope I will do two things. One: I'll make a note in my email telling me where I've put it. And then ... Two: now this is my new idea: I'll try to imagine myself looking for this thing, and I'll put it where I think I would look. I'll let you know if that ever works.

I've been getting a lot of Nigerian news lately:

I'm not talking about spam. I have a new Nokia N800 PDA, and of course I want to get news about it. I set up a Google News Alert for "N800". After a few disastrous days, I changed that to: N800 -nigeria. 'N' is a money abbreviation in Nigeria, so I get news stories about anything costing n800. The "-nigeria" is not nearly a good enough filter. After all, in the US, we don't say "USA" every time we mention dollars. Unfortunately, "N800" seems to be a common amount of money in Nigerian news (in thousands or millions).

I once performed a solo concerto with orchestra:

During the depression, there was federal money for all sorts of unlikely projects to keep people in work. Some musicians got a grant to build a Hurdy-Gurdy, the crank-driven instrument you've seen pictures of, that accompanies Italian Organ Grinders and monkeys. The grant covered writing out parts for one of Haydn's Hurdy-Gurdy concertos, and programming the Hurdy-Gurdy to play the two solo parts. (That's right, there were two solo parts, not one.)

The musicians on this project must have been a little puzzled about what they were doing, because they built the wrong instrument. The Hurdy-Gurdy of old is a violin with a round, spring-drive mechanism that continuously "bows" the strings, and a set of push-down pegs that play notes. It sounds pretty sickly, but it's a lot easier to manage than a real violin. Haydn wrote concertos for pairs of thiese old Hurdy-Gurdies. It was child's play to program the new windup H-G to play two notes at once, heck, it can play a lot more than that.

The conductor of the Columbia University undergrad orchestra, Howard Shanet, specialized in digging up unusual music, and this find was a humdinger. The orchestra parts were easy to play, and how hard is it to play a H-G? You just turn the crank handle at the right speed, and the notes come out. Shanet decided that the librarian of a music collection in Philadelphia, who had often loaned us orchestra parts, would get the reward of performing the concerto in concert. For rehearsal, Columbia orchestra's own librarian would play the H-G.

The first rehearsal was a disaster. It was almost impossible to crank the H-G at a "wrong" speed, but our librarian could not stay in synch with the orchesra. For some reason, the problem was immediately obvious only to me, and in between "takes" I tried to coach the librarian, but he just didn't "get" it. Finally, an impatient conductor snapped at me, "You know so much about it, you do it." I toook over the H-G part and all was well.

The problem was finding the downbeat. You had to crank the H-G once, all the way around, for each measure. It seemed to be "human nature" to crank DOWN for the first beat -- that would be six o'clock if you imagine the crank going around a clock circle -- but the first beat was actually on the way up, around ten o'clock. I played H-G for all the rest of the rehearsals.

The day before the concert was a tense time for me. I wanted to perform the concerto, and I thought I really ought to. What was the chance that the Philadelphia librarian would find the downbeat without a single rehearsal? If I may be frank, I would say that my tension came from this: I could not decide what ached me more: the risk that the Philly librarian would make a fool of himself; or my great desire to be the soloist.
Hours before the concert, Howard Shanet informed me that the Philly librarian would not be able to make it. I still wish I knew what he told the librarian during their phone call. Anyway, I had a ball.

Lively Fishing Worms:

My father liked to fish, often using worms as bait. He would go outside in summer, about an hour after sunset, to collect the nightcrawlers that came out looking for mates. I remember some fun evenings joining him to catch worms. Dad experimented with media to store the worms until he was ready to fish. He found that the best way to keep them alive was to put them in a can with topsoil and coffee grounds.

One recent morning I had to go out and do things without benefit of my morning coffee. I got to thinking about these worms and suddenly it hit me: Of course they were lively, from all that caffeine!

$5000 or more ...

I can't resist mentioning this: a radio ad suggesting that you should call them if your credit card debt is "greater than $5000 or more." If my debt was infinity (greater than Aleph null, that is), I guess I would be eligible to call.

I understand their expression thus: Greater than [$5000 or more].