Older comments

11/17/97  I've found a way to significantly reduce my stress level while watching network news programs. I went to a toy store and bought a plastic spring pistol that shoots suction cup darts. Now whenever a network weenie asks an obviously dumb question, or otherwise insults my intelligence, I can just let him have it, pow! Sam Donaldson looks a lot less sinister with an orange dart stuck to his nose.

If this sounds like fun, make sure you try yours against your hand a few times first. This would be a really stupid way to break your TV.

10/05/97  In the business world, it's been a long time since anybody asked "do you have a telephone?" They just ask "what's your phone number?" Depending on what sort of business you're in, it's getting to be that way with email addresses ... "what do you mean you don't have email?" Since most of us can have free email accounts now, it's hard to understand why not.

By the way, a little etiquette note: we do not call people on the phone on Sunday afternoons in the fall. Can you say "football"?

10/02/97  There's a current fad for using periods as separators in telephone numbers, as in 800.555.1212, instead of dashes and parentheses. You see this both online and in things like bidness cards and advertising. I think this is really dumb. I guess it's meant to imitate the legitimate convention of periods in Internet IP addresses, which are sets of four numbers that look like this: 204.227.186.253 Any Internet address you use, like "www.iea.com", gets translated by a dingus called a DNS server into this kind of IP address.

Phone numbers are just phone numbers; use hyphens and parentheses in the regular way. Nobody will think you are cool if you put periods in there.

08/11/97  Push this ... I have yet to be convinced that "push" technology is actually beneficial. I mean, it replaces your screen saver, right? But a screen saver is what happens on a PC screen while the user is busy with something else. I suspect that ninety percent of "push" content plays to the back of people's heads, or to empty cubes. And if someone is sitting there staring at PointCast ... why wouldn't they be working instead? "Push" seems to me like a giant productivity sink. People might as well be playing Solitaire, or Doom. Give me clients that hop to it on demand, and get the heck out of my way at other times.

07/20/97  I spent some time yesterday looking for a "Grim Catholics" Web site. I intended to point to it on my links page and dedicate the link to Cookie, the (sometime soon, I hope) nursing student. But there doesn't seem to be a Web page about grim Catholics yet. Amazing.

top

07/08/97

<RANT>
Somebody needs to explain to the Safety Gestapo that it is in fact possible for safety measures to cross over the line between "enough" and "too bloody much." Third brake-lights in the back window, whether you want one or not. Motorized passive seatbelts. Daytime running lights. Bicycle helmets, forsooth, and if you don't wear one of the silly things you're a bad example to children. Bat puckey. You don't avoid getting hurt on a bike by wearing armor, you avoid getting hurt on a bike by looking where the heck you're going and not riding into trees and stuff. Any minute now I'm expecting a big Safety First campaign for special protective headgear to be worn in the freaking bathtub.
</RANT>

07/04/97  Mars Pathfinder is down and functioning on the surface of Mars. I watched the entry and landing on a Web page that updated every thirty seconds; I saw reports of cruise stage separation and the "lander down" signal. I had a downloaded JPEG of the landscape and the opened lander, with the retracted airbags and the Sojourner micro-rover ready for deployment, before the end of the day. Happy birthday, America.

06/20/97  Here's a big current American myth: everybody who doesn't already have a cellular phone wants one ... or at least a pager, if they're cheap. BZZZT, WRONG. At least in my case.

I think telephones have a very essential impoliteness about them. When you make a telephone call you are demanding that the recipient drop whatever they might think is important in their life at the moment, and attend to what you want RIGHT NOW. In my opinion, answering machines' basic significance is as a first attempt to civilize telephones: to allow you to ignore the damned things at will. Cell phones and pagers are a step in the wrong direction. Having a cell phone is like being a dog in a yard chained to a tree. Especially if it's provided by your employer.

If you want to send me information, or ask me a question, or ask me to do something, send me email ... when you feel like sending it. I will send you email back ... when I feel like attending to it. This is called civilization.

When telephones first started replacing paper mail, no doubt many observers thought phones were uncivilized ... and they were right. But there was no better alternative available at the time. Anyone who has ever had a transcontinental or trans-oceanic email conversation, with several conversational volleys back and forth within a half-hour, knows that this is no longer true. In fact, almost anybody who has a computer and a phone line can get a free email account now.

top

06/12/97  For no especially good reason, I'm going to describe my all-time favorite cinematic moment here. The last time I tried to tell this story I really screwed it up; maybe I can tell it better this way.

Hitchcock's film Rear Window and three other movies, if I'm remembering this correctly, were kept out of circulation for ten years after Hitchcock's death, and then released one by one in the early 80's. I think Vertigo and Rope were two of the other three. In Rear Window Jimmy Stewart plays a photographer stranded in a wheelchair in his apartment by a broken leg, and reduced to watching his neighbors out the window for entertainment; he becomes convinced some of them are up to no good. Nobody makes eye contact with him during all this voyeuristic peering out the window through most of the movie, until Raymond Burr's bad guy finds an incriminating note and suddenly, menacingly looks up, straight into his eyes.

I saw Rear Window at the Varsity Theater on "The Ave" in Seattle's University District, with two hundred other college kids, all of us seeing it for the first time. When the Raymond Burr character looked up and looked the protagonist right in the eye, everybody in that theater gasped. It was a wonderful moment: from ten years beyond the grave, the old master reached out and made goosebumps on two hundred college kids.

06/03/97  Look, Blackhawks, Apaches and Kiowas all have four-blade rotors, where the old Hueys and Cobras had two-blade, so they sound different as well as look different, and the Army's painting them a darker green than they used to, but there aren't any black helicopters, okay? They probably look black against the sky, and I bet they look pretty darn black at night (which was probably the idea) but when you see one on the ground you wouldn't call it black. Some of those folks in those "black helicopters" you were chewing your fingernails about may well have been your neighbors doing their weekend in the National Guard or Army Reserve.

Hueys and Blackhawks are utility helicopters, meant to carry troops, cargo, light armament, or some combination. Cobras and Apaches are attack helicopters, tank killers. The Kiowa Warrior is something new: a small highly maneuverable two-seat scout helicopter with light armament and a special sensor pod above the rotor hub. They're peculiar looking but very useful.

By the way, I'm getting really tired of all this millennial horse-s**t on the boob tube. I saw a few minutes of The X-Files the other night and caught the line "science is their religion." Good grief! I watch Profiler sometimes just to listen to Ally Walker talk, but other than that, as far as I'm concerned Chris Carter can go sell real estate.

top

06/01/97   I've been following the MIT "wearable computing" experimenters with interest and some amusement for about a year, in print and online. I'm now starting to get more personally interested in one of their keyboard/mouse substitutes: a one-handed gadget called a Twiddler. This uses "chording" combinations on 18 keys (twelve for your fingers, six for your thumb) to produce all keyboard characters plus mouse-style pointing input. Keyboards and pointing devices have always been among the most troublesome parts of laptops and palmtops; what if you could eliminate them in favor of something much smaller and sturdier? Maybe my next PC will be a portable after all. (for details on these topics see my Links pages, Hardware section)

05/11/97  I read in a magazine at the library today that in some circles the Internet is now considered to be somewhat passé. If you feel that you've checked out the Internet, found it unsatisfactory, and now feel justified in turning your back on it—"been there, done that"—maybe you don't understand the Internet quite as well as you think you do. For one thing, I think we're still closer in time to its birth than to its maturity. On the other hand, I don't have a problem with those folks at the universities who want that "Internet II" thing, if they can make it work.

top