How do you get a recommendation ...

When I search for companies and services on the Web, I also try to find recommendations and reviews. It's getting harder and harder to do this, I think. Searching for the word 'reviews' is part of the problem. Many web sites will explain that there are no reviews, but they have many different ways to say that, and I get hits for them all. Recently, I looked for a low-cost website provider. There are lots of reviews for such companies, but most of the positive ones are obviously written by the companies themselves; they sound too much like marketing documents. The negative reviews sound like they are written by asylum inmates who have been utterly destroyed by their provider and have an urge kill.

By the way, Can anyone recommend an inexpensive website provider that will give me an easy-to-use webpage builder, and also let me post integrated pages of my own html?

The good news story today is that I found a new way to find recommendations. We need a company to do some work on our house. For this type of work, there are many companies that are obviously not local, that service our region. I found no reviews for any of them. And in any case, a review by someone in, say, Indiana would not help me much. But while looking for reviews, I discovered that some of our local real estate agents recommend local businesses. In one such page, I found the recommendations I needed. And like everyone else, I know a few more local real estate agents ...

... and a Bowling Ball:

Keith Malley, of the Keith and the Girl podcast (#998), recently stated that it's always better to have a bowling ball with you. (For those of you who know nothing about bowling balls, picture 16 pounds of heavy solid plastic, about 8.5” in diameter, that you can cradle in your arms, or try to hold by hooking thumb and fingers into its close-set holes.) Keith gave a few excellent examples: wouldn't you like to be able to throw a bowling ball down the aisle of a bus? Wouldn't you like to take a bowling ball with you when you go camping in the woods?

Now it seems to me that there are a few rare moments in life when I would rather not have a bowling ball. And I'm not thinking about that moment when I got married. I'd rather not have a bowling ball:

• on a unicycle
• in a plane toilet
• in a steam room
• while rock climbing
• near the top of Mount Everest
• on a seesaw.

Have I left anything out? Anything at all?

When Eddy Interviewed Ruth Slenczynska:

I think about Ruth Slenczynska every year. She was born in 1925 and (I believe) is still alive. In 1957, she was about as famous as she could get. She was recording and concertizing, and her (ghost-written?) autobiography, Forbidden Childhood, was much talked about. You can listen to some fragments of her marvelous playing here (but be sure to read the terms and conditions on that page; I have no idea whether they state the law accurately).
She had been an awesome child prodigy pianist, and she developed into a very mature pianist. The pressures of being a child prodigy got to her, and she did not perform between (according to Wikipedia) 1940 and 1954.

Her autobiography told the familiar story of a father driving her much too hard to succeed, and a family giving all its love to their other children while expecting her to practice and perform. For me, the most memorable anecdote in her book concerns her father's parsimoniousness: when the two of them traveled to her concerts, he always shared a hotel room with her. But one day the clerk listened to her father order a single room; and then the clerk said, "the young lady will require her own room." And after that she always had her own room.

I can't remember Eddy's last name. He was a friendly, middle-aged fellow with some knowledge of classical music, and he talked his way into running an interview show on one of New York's classical radio stations. My (pianist) aunt Lucy knew him and regarded Eddy as a bit of a confidence man. Of course, in 1957, there had to be an interview with Ruth Slenczynska. I believe her recording of all 24 of the Chopin Peludes Op. 28 had recently been issued to acclaim. In the interview, Eddy asked Ruth which prelude was her favorite. She replied that she had no favorite. Surely, he said, she must prefer one of them. She replied that they were her little children, and she was their mother. And like any parent, she loved them equally. Eddy could see where this was going, and he gently commented that a parent might prefer one child to another. "No," she said, "a parent always loves all the children the same."

Thinking most definitely of Slenczynska's autobiography -- most of his radio listeners were doing the same, I'm sure -- Eddy said, "I've heard of cases where a parent might love one child more than another." Ruth Slenczynska went right on denying that such a thing could ever happen, throwing the accuracy of her own book into doubt.

By the way, I'm older and wiser now, and I can see how Ruth Slenczynska could have ignored her own painful family experience while insisting that any mother will love her children all the same. What seemed embarrassing to me then, now seems poignant.

Little Birds for Michael Jackson:

I shall not partake of the memorializing for Michael Jackson.

I'm biased. I love many kinds of music, and I believe that hearing must be the primary sense that perceives it. Live performances are wonderful, and the eye is a great aid to enjoying them; but live performances seize all of the senses, and sight is not the primary one.

Michael Jackson's great skill in dance and movement, and his creativity, helped to kickstart the age of music videos. These strange creations, in which, when we must hear them without seeing them, we will inevitably try to imagine them as they were shown to us, are at best a sidestep on the grand march of music through the millenia.

Music videos, and Michael Jackson (indirectly) damaged the career of a much finer composer and musician: Stevie Wonder, whose blindness made him unsuited to this era of video. (I'm sure Wonder holds no grudge; he has collaborated with Jackson, and he sang at Jackson's memorial.)

But enough of the music; let's consider Jackson the human. For many years, every reference to him has reminded me of a short story by Anaïs Nin, the title story for one of her books. It's called: Little Birds.

The Lemon Malted:

I recently purchased some excellent malt powder, and I was naturally reminded of my adventures, many years ago, with the Lemon Malted.

I've always liked the taste of malt powder, so it was quite a natural thing for me to order a “malted”, rather than an ice cream soda, wherever malt powder was available. (As far as I can determine, a “malted” is just an ice cream soda to which malt powder has been added.) When I was young, I always looked for opportunities to demonstrate what an oddball I was, so once I requested a Lemon Malted, that is, a lemon ice cream soda with the special addition of malt powder.

How do you think malt would affect the taste of lemon? I've drunk this malted several times, and the result can be quite sophisticated, with the malt flavor subtly changing the quality of the lemon. But a lemon malted can also taste like cheap beer. My great dream was that some day, when I ordered this drink, the restaurant I requested it from would realize what a great drink it was, and add it to their menu.

The last time I ordered this drink, I watched with gathering excitement as the waiter prepared it. I could see he was making an extra-large batch, and when he poured my drink, he poured what was left over into a separate glass. He brought my malted to the table, and it was good, one of the better renderings of my drink. A minute later, he was back with the second glass, and this is what he said: “We were really curious what your lemon malted was like, so we made some extra and tasted it. We all think it tastes terrible. Would you like the rest?”

Another great secret about cooking with eggplant (barbecue sauce):

Morningstar Farms has introduced a new product to its line of soy burgers. I tasted it and realized that I was eating their usual soy product, steeped in barbecue sauce. I figured I didn't need to buy their product for this, I have my own barbecue sauces. The first thing I tried was this:

Zap a thick slice of eggplant in a microwave. cover with barbecue sauce and eat. Delicious. (Our incredibly weak 450W microwave requires two minutes for this.)

Barbecue sauce is great with almost everything. To think I used to assume it should be reserved for barbecues! Try it on a cheese sandwich. Why not? It's good.

My Little disfunctional Margie:

Gale Storm has just died. I almost hate to admit it, but I was a little too young for I Love Lucy, and "My Little Margie" came along at the right time for me. I watched it every week. I've looked at some of the ink about this show on the internet, and I think the reviewers and historians have missed a central point about this show: it was one of TV's earliest forays into the Dysfunctional Family sitcom. Tolstoy probably has the best explanation of why there are few normal families in TV series, but it took the networks a while to discover how much fun they could have, when they left "normal" far behind.

Margie's (Gail Storm's) "family" consisted of a widowed father and a grown daughter. The episodes, again and again, revolved around attempts by the father and daughter to "get even" with each other. The tricks they wanted to play got more and more elaborate. The "getting even" premise was so routine that you tended to accept it as normal relations, although -- think about it -- it was bizarre. Here's an obit for Gail Storm, and here are two analyses of: My Little Margie.

A funny think about concordance programs:

I need a program that will take a plain text version of my novel and list all the words I use in it, with a count of how many times each word appears. It's likely to be called a concordance or index program of some sort. I've been searching for one on the web, and the search results are very frustrating, for an interesting reason.

I hunted for the same program about two and a half years ago. My main problem then was that I found commercial programs that cost too much, considering what they would do for me. My current problem is that I can find many concordance programs on the web, but they almost all seem to have a different goal: to enable people to detect plagiarism, by comparing phrases in a paper to phrases on the web. I have never worried that my own writing would be targeted by plagiarism. This "side door" plagiarism inconvenience is ironic.

Michael Jackson and 24/7 news:

Michael Jackson's ambulance got him to a hospital, and then one of the TV news networks had its "breaking story." They newsed about MJ continuously, stopping only for ads. He may have been dead before he got to the hospital, but that put no dent in the amount of speculation and on-the-spot reporting that fueled this network's on-and-on "stories." As one comedian put it: "I've been told that there was other news besides Michael Jackson, but I don't believe it."

The network's overreaction to this story just has to be added to the long, long list of events that herald the end of civilization as we know it. Beam me up.

Stop Password Masking:

Jakob Nielsen has made an eloquent statement at useit.com: Stop Masking Passwords!. He martials excellent arguments for stopping the dumb practice of making it hard to see what password I'm typing. Stop and think for a moment: how often is a miscreant watching you type a password? How often has an unexpected keyboard response driven you crazy when you entered a password? There's more to say about this issue, and Nielsen says it well.

I believe the practice of masking passwords began when people typed passwords on PAPER. In the 1960's, the usual "terminal" that accessed a computer system was a teletype. Everything you typed appeared on its paper printout. Before you typed a password, the computer printed and overprinted to make an ink-black region in which to type.

I would like to see a button next to a password field that I can click to "generate a mask." But masks aren't the perfect solution to anything, as you know, if you've ever typed your password in the 'name' field by accident.

Doing time in the Unemployment Office:

I was unemployed for a few months in 1985, and so I enrolled with the state of NJ for unemployment benefits. This office treated the unemployed like cockroaches. We had to stand on many long lines, with no place to sit. They hadn't heard of "take a number and sit down." After the first time there, I always brought my own folding chair. When people saw me sitting, they felt I was 'beating the system', and they cheered me.

At last, I queued up on the longest line, to get an actual check. When I got to the front, I faced a tired old lady, murmuring in a singsong voice, "our computers are down, we have to do everything the slow way, you'll have to wait ..."

I told her, "I'm a computer programmer. I know how frustrating it is when computers go down. I sympathize with you."
"No!" she screamed. "You CAN'T sympathize with me!"

Microsoft is a piece of Merde:

It's great to have a blog. It gives you a great place to bitch. I just tried to sign up for Windows Live. Microsoft requires me to type in 8 characters that it shows me in a hard-to-look-at scribble. I tried ten times before I succeeded, and each try required thought. Their stupid letters and digits were very hard to read! Along the way, I tried their alternative, listening to almost incomprehensible audio.

When I finally got the letters and digits right, I got an error, telling me that Live signup is not working now; it asked me to try later. OOOOOOOOhhhhhhh ....

Weird (a dog):

A large dog with bristly white hair has appeared in my dreams: just three or four times, this spring. Each time, the dog and I have rehearsed the same scene: it approaches me warily, snapping its jaws, aggressive and unfriendly. I hold out a hand, making a fist with my thumb inside, guarding all my fingers. The dog sniffs my fist and licks it. And that's it.

In last night's dream, I met the dog's owner, a slim young man. It seemed important to persuade him that his potentially dangerous dog must not be allowed to run off-leash. I have no clear recollection of this conversation, but I must have been too persuasive, beacause -- later in my dream -- I discovered that the owner had had his dog killed.

I wonder if I will ever dream about this dog again.

Phone Alarms:

I have a simple, old, cheap cellphone. It has alarms, so I assume that every cellphone does these days. You select the time for an alarm, and then – of course – you select any of your ringtones to announce the alarm.

It took me a while to discover how handy these phone alarms are, but now I use them a lot. I finally realized that they are the answer to an age-old problem: how to get out of a meeting, or some other situation that you wish to escape from. The old-fashioned way was to ask someone to call you at, say, 10:10. Your meeting has barely started when your phone rings. You pretend to talk to your confederate, and then you look up and say to the others, “Sorry, I've got to go.”

Today, you don't even need a confederate. You just talk to one of your phone alarms.

Email before SNDMSG:

Shaun Nichols and Iain Thomson wrote an article that proposes to list the top ten industry-changing software applications. I wouldn't dream of arguing with their choices, since they are getting a ton of comments on that subject. Nor do I quibble with the idea of naming the ten most important advances. Articles about "the N most X ..." tend to be “dug” to the digg.com web site. One of these days, just for the publicity, mind you, I might do a photo essay on the ten most common types of lint that collect in a gas dryer.

Item #4 on this list is “SNDMSG”, a 1971 invention. Here's what Shaun Nichols says, in part: ... a nifty little program called SNDMSG. The program allowed users to send messages through ARPAnet to users on computers connected to other networks. In other words, Ray Tomlinson invented email.

Only Ray Tomlinson didn't. I can testify that I was one of thousands using an email application in January 1968, and the technology I used was available in 1966. (The Wikipedia article on Email mentions Email on mainframes in 1965.) SNDMSG enabled people on different computers to exchange messages. But in the 1960's many, many people used teletypes to dial into to shared computers that acted as servers for email. We exchanged technical messages with our peers, coworkers and customers, and no one cared how many computers were involved in the process.

I might just mention two more things about email in the 1960's: It was slow (ten characters received per second). And, there was no such thing as spam.

My Email is ...

Many people find clever indirect ways to describe their email address, so that some robotic sniffing program is unlikely to harvest it and send them spam. I'm not one of these people. I've tried to be rather public and accessible. And that's a pity, because I accidentally (let's call it a typo) found a new way to obfuscate my email. Please mail me at: tobyr212gmail.com .
Got it?

Payphone with a restroom:

There are hardly any payphones left these days, but before cellphones came along, they were quite useful. It always fascinated me that restaurants provided a bank of payphones in a relatively private hallway near the restrooms.

Now suppose you needed to go to the bathroom, but you hated to admit that to the people you were dining with. You could say, "I need to make a phone call," and you could disappear, none the wiser.

Even better, suppose you wanted to make a phone call, but you didn't want anybody to know what you were doing. (Use our imagination here.) You could say, "Excuse me, I need to visit the bathroom," and you could disappear, none the wiser.

Gifted Athletic Peasants:

In April, William C. Rhoden wrote several columns for the New York Times about college recruiting violations and efforts to prevent them. I wrote to him on April 12, but sadly, he did not reply. I have very strong feelings about these attempts to keep honest rewards out of the hands of college athletes. Here's (approximately) what I wrote:

Dear William Rhoden,
I've been reading your columns on recruiting, and I believe you will have a sympathetic ear for a most important observation about major college sports: the players on these teams are employees. Most of the scandals, recruiting violations and “cheating” among coaches and alumni all arise from one simple matter: the desire of the colleges to keep most of the profits of major sports to themselves.

It's a myth that the players are “amateurs”. They work forty and more hours a week, and they work hard to perfect their abilities so that their college can rake in reams of money. In fact, these players deserve to be recognized as the stars who make their medium a success. They are entitled to the same percentage of total income as the athletes in pro sports. What a difference it would make if colleges were forced to pay their sports employees their fair share:

Alumni would probably fail to back their teams with the same gusto. The myth that these players are 'students' (not employees) stands behind many major alumni bequests.

Colleges would no longer see football and basketball (etc.) as big business opportunities, once the employees got their fair slice. Colleges might go back to offering truly amateur sports as a good way to balance real studies. (As my Alma Mater, Columbia, says: a sound mind in a sound body.)

Please bear in mind that every 'recruiting violation' you report on is yet another attempt to keep college athletes from gaining even the tiniest pittance of profit beyond their college scholarships. “Can I have some more, sir?” Evidently, NO!

A Culinary breakthrough with sour cream:

I'm sure I'm not the first person to get this idea, it's so simple and delicious. And low-calorie, too. And you can vary the recipe to suit your taste. You'll need a hand-blender or a hand mixer for this.

Pour six ounces of Diet Coke into a twelve ounce glass.
Add 1.5 tablespoons of sour cream.
Blend and drink.

You should start the blender at a slow speed, so that the soda does not avalanche out of the glass. You may wish to speed the blender up when the soda is under control. Very satisfying, for about 45 calories.

Baby Shaker Furniture:

I enjoy the TV quiz show “Wheel of Fortune”, especially their use of “before & after” phrases. WoF is a quiz show in which contestants gradually discover phrases by guessing the letters in them. “Before & After” refers to run-on phrases, like “May I spend a penny for your thoughts.” The show's writers are very clever at thinking up before & after puzzles.

This is dedicated to the one I ...

My cousin Michael, about five years older than I, had a wry sense of humor. But on one occasion, instead of dealing a gently acid punch line, he fed me a fine setup. I'm almost embarrassed to toot my own horn here, but in the interest of Historical Accuracy, I shall relate this incident.

Michael was visiting my family. While he talked to my father, I sat at the piano, attempting to play the beginning of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The first four bars are far and away the easiest part of the sonata. In fact, my grandmother told me that this is the way to appear to be a fine pianist: you learn to play those first four measures. At the end of the fourth bar, you rise up from the piano and say, "I'm just not in the mood."

So there I was at about measure three. My father said, "That's a little composition my son is writing. what do you think of it?"
"It reminds me of moonlight," said Michael.
Whereupon I said, "I'm thinking of dedicating it to countess Julia Guicciardi."

Fourteen runs in the second inning. Fourteen!

The Yankees suffered (or did they? See below) the worst possible insult in their brand new ballpark. Having previously scored nine runs in one inning, Cleveland did even better, scoring 14 runs in the second inning alone, as they beat the Yanks 22 to 4. This game raises an interesting question: how is it possible that the Yanks have never been maltreated like this before, in their 100+ years of history in baseball?

I beieve there's an interesting answer to this question, but let me advise you that I may not have any idea whatsoever what I'm talking about. I suggest that we divide the long, long history of baseball into three eras:

• Up to about 1940: Leave the starter in, even if he obviously had too much to drink last night.
• To about 1990: Quick hook, get the relief pitchers in there at any sign of trouble.
• To the present: don't use up the pitching staff if you can help it.

Now let me explain: Historically, baseball relied much less on relief pitchers. There's an anecdote about Bobo Newsom, a journeyman pitcher who played for many teams for many years, compiling a roughly 50/50 record of wins and losses. One day he was losing 15-0 (see? No reliance on relief pitchers). A teammate said, “Just don't have it today, eh, Bobo?” To which he replied, “How's a guy going to win when his team doesn't score any runs?” Now you may ask why those starters didn't sometimes give up 20 or 30 runs, or 15 in an inning? I suspect that in the old days, every lineup had a few really bad batters, making it easier for a bad pitcher to get out of trouble. There also used to be a bit of courtesy (misguided in my view) that you don't beat up on a team when they are obviously defeated. That courtesy might make a team less likely to try to score more than seven or eight runs in one inning.

Eventually, teams fielded excellent relief pitchers, and used them quickly when a pitcher just didn't have it. Some managers are famous for their 'quick hook', their tendency to relieve a pitcher the moment he appears shaky.

Modern pitching strategy has changed, because teams now have excellent statistics about what happens, over whole seasons, when pitchers are overworked. I heard about the Yankee's game on the radio last night, and then I couldn't wait to see the box score. The game might show Cleveland, in that 2nd inning, trouncing one Yankee pitcher after another. But I suspected that modern baseball strategy was at work. And it was.

Just two pitchers – the starter and the first relief guy – absorbed those 14 runs. The starter was obviously left in there too long, but that happens sometimes; you think he's having a rough start and will settle down, and all of a sudden it's too late for that. The poor relief pitcher who followed him was stuck. His job was to use up some innings so that the rest of the staff could rest. If you follow live baseball games, you will often hear announcers explain that a pitcher is being left in to finish the inning, no matter how many runs it takes, to “take one” for the staff. And that's what obviously happened here.

Now Cleveland did score eight more runs, but I suspect that rest of the Yankee pitchers were not exactly bearing down in concentration, pitching in a lost cause. So all this game proves is that the Yankee's starter, and his first reliever, had a terrible time; even though it looks like an embarrassment for all of baseball history.

In Which Howard Stern appeared Ridiculous (in 1989):

One day in 1989, I listened to a Howard Stern radio program with some excitement. Intel had demonstrated its first full “DVI” product to Stern, specifically the ability to see motion video on a PC. We knew that Stern was going to plug the product. (I had managed Quality Assurance for parts of the software.)

In the radio show, Howard Stern mentioned the product, and said how excited he was about it. He looked forward to seeing movies and TV on his PC. His sidekick, Robin Quivers, broke in at this moment with a skeptical question: “Howard, where is your PC?”
He answered, “In my bedroom.”
Listening to this, I was really puzzled. What was bothering Robin?
She continued, “And where is your TV set?”
“Right next to my computer,” he answered.
“So?” she said.
“That's not the point,” Howard responded. “I want to see TV on my PC.”
At that time, his words appeared to be a bold bluster, an attempt to keep his mention of our product positive. I had long forgotten this little exchange, but it came back to me today as I thought about all the advantages that are developing now, for TV on the PC. The screens can be bigger, the quality excellent. And there are tons of TV shows available on demand on the Internet. Within a few years, I, even I, may be watching TV on my PC.

A la recerche du temps perdue:

This story is exactly like Marcel Proust's experience with Madeleines, except for the considerable differences.

When I was young, my mother sometimes served canned yellow wax beans. I have always believed that these are the most disgusting food that anyone has ever made me eat, or even offered to me. I can still remember the metallic taste, plus ... euchh ... something else.

When I was about age nine, I categorically refused to touch them, and I never ate them again. I've had nearly sixty years of peace from canned yellow wax beans. But recently, I got to thinking: Might they taste better these days? After all:

1. My taste buds don't work as well as they used to, and:
2. There have been a few billion advances in food processing.

I decided to cook some canned yellow wax beans, to see if, just maybe, they wouldn't be so bad.

So there I was in the aisle of my favorite supermarket, looking for canned yellow wax beans. and not finding them. That does it, I said. Evidently they were so bad, that they just don't sell them any more. Wrong. Eventually I found exactly one brand of them.

While checking out, I told everyone nearby about my plan to revisit this awful food. The woman on line behind me -- she was about my age -- said, "They haven't changed the recipe." I brought them home and forgot about them for several days. Of course I forgot them! Why would I want to eat them?

Then I remembered them. I drained them, heated them in water, and performed the great taste test.

Memories of childhood came flooding back to me. The beans had hardly any taste at all, but I remembered what taste they had very well, and I clearly remembered the titanic fights with my mother when I tried to refuse to eat them. But that faint wax bean taste: it wasn't so bad. I'll tell you what I think:

1. My taste buds don't work as well as they used to, and:
2. The awful, awful metallic taste doesn't leak out from the can into the beans anymore. After all, there have been a few billion advances in food processing.

I ate a lot of the beans, actually. Now please, pass me a Madeleine.

Diverse Remarks:

While cleaning house, I came across a notebook in which I recorded a few pithy words and sayings. I think they make a good blog entry. I have carefully attributed them (or not) as appropriate:


This remark was said about a computer system that we had developed, and were supporting:
Some of our users are not as friendly as they would like our system to be. – Rich Klepacz, further edited by me.

This remark was said about a rather tragic software development project:
We have too many people to do this project the right way, and not enough people to do it the wrong way. – me again.

Creeping Elegance” is effort directed solely toward making work more eyecatching. – Craig Martin. Today we would say: Creeping Elegance is effort directed solely toward making eye candy.

This remark was said about a completely undocumented software project:
You've heard of the paperless office? This is the paperless project. – Tony Alfieri

99% compatibility is like closing your front door 99% when a maniac is coming up the front path. – John Bear

An unhelpful VAX system error message:
%NONAME - F -NOMSG, ERROR NUMBER 00000004

He reminds me of a time when I had bad taste. – Unattributed:

Here are a few handy made-ups. Please remember them and use them:

Jubilant Sardine: – unknown The sort of person who can squeeze into a jampacked celebration.

Huggly – Frank Naranjo

Intertwingled – Howard Lang

Our car was hit by a flying washing machine:

I was waiting at an intersection when a car turned onto my road. As it cornered, a small washing machine flew off the truck's low trailer and smashed into the side of my car. Somehow, the washing machine messed up four different parts of our car. Thank goodness it's drivable.

I've always felt that I have a good sense of anticipation. I was watching that washing machine before it began to move by itself, and there was still nothing I could do but collect the other guy's info and make police and insurance reports.

A flying washing machine. Sigh.

BY THE WAY, I plan to turn my computers off tonight, until I learn what the Conficker worm is up to, tomorrow. Let Conficker worry.

PigiGigabytes per Km:

One of the magazines that we subscribe to has a description of an unusual tourist experience, in Israel. After you visit this place, you can take one of their homing pigeons away with you. You put a message in its little carrying thing, and you release it, to return to the tourist spot. When they receive it, they send you an email with your message, to confirm the bird's safe arrival. (I'm pretty sure you're supposed to release the bird in Israel, not after you get off of your international plane flight.)

This homing pigeon thing interests me as a type of communications pipeline. I cut my computer teeth on terminals that transmitted data at ten letters per second. I've utilized many other speeds, including 300 bits per second, 1200, 9600, DSL and T1. And I've sent and received data on densely packed media, CDs and tapes. As many people have pointed out, a delivery of a bunch of CDs overnight can actually represent more speed than a T1 line, or even HDTV over the air. Noticing the various data speeds that we have to live with can be fascinating!

So naturally I thought about filling a little 32GB chip with data and letting the homing pigeon carry it home. That would be yet another communications media, and another interesting speed.

This way and tha about:

I've been experimenting with something, and I think it's interesting enough to talk about. Suppose you had written this phrase: “she looked this way and that.” You decide to change it to: “she looked about.” How do you type in your edit?

Chances are you will highlight the words 'this way and that' and type 'about'. The new word will replace the highlighted ones, unless you're using a bizarre editor. Done.

But you retyped the 't' at the end of the phrase, didn't you? Isn't that a waste? Over a lifetime, those extra keystrokes will add up. And it gets worse. If you want to replace 'exacerbated' by 'stimulated', should you carefully highlight 'exacerb' and type 'stimul'?

There are two really interesting issues at play here. The first is that your word processor is likely to make it easier to highlight full words. So you have to consider that highlighting just part of a word wastes time, unless you get really good at it. The other issue is that you can probably type 'stimulated' faster than you can type 'stimul'. You have a finger memory for words and word-parts that you have typed over and over. You can type them again, fast, without thinking. The business of typing partial words requires thought.

Nonetheless, I'm trying to do it; I would type 'stimul'. The key to productivity here is planning ahead. Although I can normally type 'stimulated' faster than 'stimul', that's not the case if I think ahead about exactly what I need to type. And I have time to think ahead, while I'm highlighting the letters to replace!

This little blog entry has wasted all the time I could possibly save in my life, with all these editing shenanigans. So there!

A la recerche du temps perdue:

This story is exactly like Marcel Proust's experience with Madeleines, except for the differences.

When I was young, my mother sometimes served canned yellow wax beans. I have always believed that these are the most disgusting food that anyone has ever made me eat, or even offered to me. I can still remember the metallic taste, plus ... euchh ... something else.

When I was about age nine, I categorically refused to touch them, and I never ate them again. I've had nearly sixty years of peace from canned yellow wax beans. But recently, I got to thinking: Might they taste better these days? After all:

1. My taste buds don't work as well as they used to, and:
2. There have been a few billion advances in food processing.

I decided to cook some canned yellow wax beans, to see if, just maybe, they wouldn't be so bad.

So there I was in the aisle of my favorite supermarket, looking for canned yellow wax beans. And not finding them. That does it, I said. Evidently they were so bad, that they just don't sell them any more. Wrong. Eventually I found exactly one brand of canned yellow wax beans.

While checking out, I told everyone nearby about my plan to revisit this awful food. The woman on line behind me, about my age said, "They haven't changed the recipe." I brought them home and forgot about them for several days. Of course! Why would I waant to eat them?

I remembered them this morning. I drained them, heated them in water, and performed the great taste test.

Memories of childhood came flooding back to me. The beans had hardly any taste at all, but I remembered what taste they had very well, and I clearly remembered the titanic fights with my mother when I tried to refuse them. But that faint wax bean taste: it wasn't so bad. I'll tell you what I think:

1. My taste buds don't work as well as they used to, and:
2. The awful, awful metallic taste doesn't leak out from the can into the beans anymore. After all, there have been a few billion advances in food processing.

I ate a lot of the beans, actually. Now please, pass me a Madeleine. I need to get that yellow taste out of my mouth.

There was a little man:

My father used to sing a certain silly song. I wondered whether that song was, by chance, dropping out of sight forever, so I looked it up on the Internet. No fear, it's here. My link points only to the words, but it looks like the melody will survive okay as well. Here's a sample of the lyrics:
The chambermaid came to my door
"Get up, you lazy sinner!
We need those sheets for table cloths
And its almost time for dinner."

Exxon Office Systems: The gigantic database.

Exxon Office Systems (EOS) lost an immense amount of money for Exxon while trying to establish itself in the Office Automation business. Exxon threw in the towel in 1984, but before that, EOS operated the third largest IBM computer installation on the East Coast. (At least, that's what people said.) At that time, IBM mainframe systems were easy to expand, because you could always add (expensive) online disk storage. EOS added a ton of this storage. Maybe their sales were so poor that they had to pay salesmen high salaries. But they added to their operating costs by keeping a data base of every product sold: its location, its owner, its warrantee status, and its (often extensive) repair history.

EOS had no criteria for removing information from this database, it just grew and grew. One director at EOS was particularly annoyed about the cost, for two reasons. First, he thought that there's no point tracking the location of a piece of equipment that any adult can carry around. The equipment that EOS tracked – small printers, tiny Fax machines, typewriters and word processors – was all highly portable. Second, every time a product was sold or maintained, this database had to be updated, at a cost of – get this – $30 per entry (in 1982 dollars). EOS products required a lot of maintenance under warrantee, so this data base was a cost killer. And it was not at all clear what benefits it brought to the company, because Nobody was datamining for marketing strategies, or for ways to hold down costs.