Seven Sons

It’s been over a month since this blog has been updated, and like knowing the cat needs brushing, these long intermissions nag at my subconscious while I hope that someone else does it and then I finally decide I will just go ahead and get out the brushes and take care of it. Also like brushing the cat, this doesn’t guarantee excellence, just results.

Mil Milington has a close-your-office-door hilarious blog cum book called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and he parlayed his popularity to a facebook page with the ear-flattering name of Tiny Boons. The latter is a repository of little things that happen to you or someone else over the course of a normal day that prove that there are still reasons that we should rejoice in the human race instead of counting the days until the next massacre in Kandahar, Kisangani or Kent State. For a while I have been collecting examples of the opposite of tiny boons, and because I have the creativity of a piston I have introduced my inaugural list here with the ear-insulting title “little sucky things.” I am, it should go without saying, open to better ideas.

Without further ado:

• Alarm clocks that don’t have a battery backup and start flashing “12:00″ when you plug them back in after using the outlet for the vacuum cleaner.
• Appliances that have clocks and flash “12:00″ after a power outage.
• 3-way lamps with 2-way bulbs installed in them.
• Toilet paper rolls installed so the end unrolls in the back instead of the front.

Now, this isn’t the complete list that I have come up with so far – I have about 9 more (and growing) that I’ll use as fodder for future posts if I feel like it. But these four are related. Bet you can’t guess how – so I’ll tell you. They all represent examples of design flaws that lead to a poor user experience. When people start throwing out words like “design flaws” and “user experience” they are usually talking about software and writing for an online magazine that gets a lot of hits from slashdot. But whoever designs and markets simple items that we use every day and take for granted should pay attention (***alert! read this article and get a promotion!***) and think about little things they can do to make their product just a little more user friendly.

Let’s examine the examples above. I can knock out the first two really quick: a built-in rechargeable battery and a low frequency time signal receiver. These features will raise the production cost of your product but there is probably a VP that can be canned to recover that money, if removing the buttons and circuitry for manually setting the time doesn’t do the trick. People will actually start recommending your alarm clock to friends if you add this feature. Recommending an alarm clock – can you imagine? Brookstone will be ringing your office begging you to triple the retail cost and let them sell it on airplanes.

Considering appliances specifically, first things first – does your appliance really need to show the time of day? The stove – ok, maybe, if you ever use the delay start feature on your oven. But, then again, has anyone EVER used this feature, in the history of ovens? Microwave: no, it doesn’t need the time of day. Just because it has to show how many minutes left until you overcook your left-over Chinese food doesn’t mean it has to show squat when the radiation generator is not in use. And for the love of pete, why in the hell does my new glass-rimmed, stainless steel overhead exhaust fan (sexy as it looks) have a damn clock??? Might as well put one on the vacuum cleaner that you just blew your alarm clock’s brain away with.

Now, how do 3-way lamps fit in? Because, like the battery backup for the alarm clock that is sold with “battery not included,” anyone buying a lamp will  (a) not look that closely at the label to notice that it has a 3-way socket, because they are more concerned with matching their Ikea couch, and (b) use a leftover 2-way bulb in the lamp after they get it home anyway. And then what happens? The switch on the lamp does something that, after all these years, is still completely, heart-breakingly unexpected – it must be turned twice to turn the light on, and twice more to turn it off. Ouch. I cringe just thinking about it. This is a LAMP. With a SWITCH. If it is OFF, and you turn the switch, the lamp should turn ON. If it is ON it should turn OFF. This should be as true as death, taxes and the boiling temperature of water at sea level given standard atmospheric pressure. Switches should always change the state of the device they are connected to unless they are BROKEN, at which point they should be (again it should go without saying) donated to the local Goodwill store. Did I provide a constructive solution in that paragraph? No? Sorry – include the damn 3-way bulb with the lamp, plus a spare. By the time the user burns out both of them, the switch will most certainly be broken, or the couch will, and the whole lamp-shopping dance will start all over again anyway.

Finally, toilet paper rolls.  Frankly, though I think that there must be a simple design solution to prevent the innocent or (more likely) completely diabolical, sadistically evil practice of installing a new roll of toilet paper with the free end escaping downwards towards the rear of the roll, I haven’t actually come up with it yet. The solution may be to create a roll holder that sticks straight out so the paper unrolls to the left or the right, but I am not comfortable with that design yet. Something must be done, people, help me out here. Full disclosure: I am well aware of the fact that cats and very clever 1-year-olds will be foiled in their attempts to unroll an entire supply of Charmin on the floor by the backwards installation of the toilet paper, but to sum up this entire post: Solve the problem at the root, with clever, simple design. Don’t solve the symptoms.

Charlie Stross writes about the things he can and cannot do with his iPad while traveling.

I happened to be traveling also last week and my only internet device was the iPod Touch. And I discovered something that bugged me more than it should. I had read all the magazine articles that I had transfered to the iPod using FileViewer, and really enjoyed the experience (on the plane, on the deck of the lake house, over breakfast cereal in the kitchen…). I was out of reading material. So I found an open WiFi router, opened about 5 Safari pages, pointed them at various online articles, and then shut the thing off. Later I realized that when you open Safari while offline and browse a previously loaded page, it blanks it out and tells you that you have lost your connection. Why can’t it cache those pages that it has already downloaded?!?

My sister-in-law had another complaint; she has a first generation 8GB iPod Touch, and resisted upgrading to v3 iOS for a long time because Apple was charging for it. No problem; it was her choice to stay on the old software. The thing should still keep working, right? But then her work email server (she works at a University) was upgraded and no longer supported mobile email on pre-v3 devices. Her apps upgraded themselves automatically and many of them started breaking because they didn’t support the old iOS. So she decided to suck it up and pay for the upgrade. Now that v4 is out, many of the same problems are popping up again, but there is a new twist – iOS v4 doesn’t support the first generation iPod Touch hardware.

Back in October of last year we posted on the demise of Gourmet Magazine. Well, it’s back. Sort of.

Is this the first sign that the iPad may live up to the promise of revitalizing the magazine industry?

Edison MacGyver started the conversation with a reference to a NYT Op-Ed, and the commend that “This is the kind of op-ed piece that I love.”

An Arsenal We Can All Live With

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/opinion/24schaub.html

It is concise and well reasoned. While their premise (that we can reduce our nuclear arsenal from 5,113 to 311) sounds radical, once you read the article you have to wonder why we wouldn’t do it.

Anyone who thinks a unilateral cut this drastic is a sign of weakness is crazy. I would LOVE to see our country take such a positive leadership role in nuclear arms reduction.

One question they didn’t answer is how much money you save by not having to baby-sit all those extra warheads anymore.

The Lawyer said:

I agree.

I’ve also been musing about something today on a related note.  On the one hand, it is unfathomable for me to think of us actually using any of of our nuclear weapons.  On the other hand, I fathom.  It is entirely possible that the Korean Peninsula could go hot in the next hour, day, week or month. I’m wondering about 2 scenarios, both of which seem to have a plurality chance of being one of the likely outcomes (though not necessarily a US nuclear response).

#1- War starts out.  North Korea has a far larger army than South Korea, but US technology and a lack of strong will to fight on the part of NK foot soldiers cause NK to start losing (not sure about the latter assumption due to possible effects of propaganda).  NK leadership panics and uses one or more of their estimated 2-9 nuclear weapons.  Do we then say, “That’s it!  The world can tolerate brutal dictatorships, but not insane ones.” and then use limited nuclear strikes to take out their hardened suspected nuclear sites (doesn’t matter how deep they are if they are covered with fused radioactive glass) and their core leadership?

#2-NK’s giant army (only US, Russia and China are bigger) over-runs the SK army and the small (28,000) contingent of US troops. Would we really let Seoul fall to these nuts?  I figure if a nuclear response were used, it would be similar to that of Scenario #1.

I know it sounds crazy, but we are not dealing with worldly Politburo types where  nuclear deterrence not only deters nuclear attack but also conventional attack.  In reality, we are dealing with a near-suicidal cult (ala David Koresh), writ large.  How many SK (or US) navy ships does NK think it can sink before provoking a strong military response?  With most countries, I’d have faith that our superior weapons technology would keep the balance in our favor.  However, their military is so large (and local) and ours is spread so thin (and not-local) that I’m dubious of technology closing the gap.

The way I see it, the only way to avoid #1 or #2 is for China to directly intervene with NK.  I’m not sure they are willing to do that, even in the face of such a potential catastrophe.

I have to say, if #1 comes to pass, I can live with a nuclear response.  I would look at it as if the patient had a gangrenous leg and you had to amputate to save the patient.  If NK, which clearly has caused the current crisis, upped the ante, I’d look at the civilian deaths and resulting radioactivity to be the terrible, but necessary price of removing the NK threat.  I genuinely believe that due to the behavior of NK in provoking this crisis, they will have no moral compunction about one day selling a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group.

#2 is a harder call, but I tend to lean towards the same opinion.  I think we might have to use a first strike on NK to end their threat once and for all.  It’s a harder call simply because I don’t like the idea of a nuclear first strike.

When I think about this, I keep coming back to the line of Fred Thompson’s U.S. admiral character in “The Hunt for the Red October”–”This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

China better goddamned step up to the plate.

Three Barrels said:

I don’t see NK doing anything other than continuing to act like pricks and pushing us and SK further but not far enough for war. Their use of a nuke would be a death sentence–no chance for negotiated settlement, only unconditional surrender. The Chinese wouldn’t even back them up if they went nuke. NK doesn’t want to fight, they are just extortionists.

Edison MacGyver said:

I’m guessing NK has more internal problems than external. I’m thinking that sinking the SK ship was somebody in Pyongyang acting tough for the benefit of his peers.

The Lawyer said:

I agree with you, MacGyver, but that acting tough bit is quite in danger of getting out of control.  Along that line, I disagree with 3Barrels that this is just “acting like pricks”.  They are flat out, bat-shit crazy.  I mean, during the entire 45 years of the Cold War, I don’t think even once either side willfully sank a warship of the other side, not even by proxy. Combine that with the sheer unnecessary-ness of it, I don’t think they are acting rationally in the least.  It’s not like we have any evidence that there are “progressive” factions within NK with strength to push a more restrained relationship with the world.

David Koresh with a whole country to play with.

Charlie Croker said:

I think the participants of the cold war were playing at a different level. More sophisticated if you will—which is a good thing since the stakes were much, much higher.

Not down playing the the devastation of NK’s dozen nukes, but do the math.

The Lawyer said:

True, Croker.

I think what has happened inside NK is that 60-70 years of continual propaganda and no contact with the outside world to speak of, even their leadership  believes the hyped-paranoia.

In the Cold War, everyone hated each other, but they liked the life they lived and had a basic faith that as long as they didn’t do anything directly provocative, the other side wouldn’t either.  Thus, no spirals out of control.  I don’t think NK has that basic faith and because of that, I don’t have that basic faith in them.  Obviously, they DO directly provocative stuff all the time.  It’s one thing to say “Yo mama wears combat boots!”  It’s another for you to punch someone right in the jaw.  Sinking ships is a punch to the jaw.  It directly challenges your sovreignty (the “manhood” of nations) and has to be answered, else another punch will soon follow.

Charlie Croker said:

Sure, they’ll over step to the point where something happens. But a tactical nuclear strike as either provocation or response? Too many Bruckheimer movies.

I will say this though, that the kind of crazy that NK represents seems a bit saner than the sort that fundamentalist Islam or Christianity seems to foster. Without the religious argument it seems less lasting. Like once those NK soldier storm the DMZ and hit the all you can eat BBQ buffet set up by the South/US/UN I don’t see them charging past the plate warming station.

But what the hell do I know, I got most of my international politics theory from Team America: World Police.

Blue Crab said:

I think they are fairly rational.  Not quite to the level of the USSR, closer to the Chinese who are hard realists but can still get their panties twisted up over issues like Taiwan or Tibet.  Their behavior makes sense to me, preserve the regime.

The Lawyer said:

Rational?  How do you explain the fact every time relations calm down and are quiet for a while, they deliberately do something to provoke a response?  If you want to be left alone, you have to leave others alone.

Blue Crab said:

Act crazy, and China & the West will keep giving you stuff to calm you down.  What other lesson could they draw from the past 15 years?  They don’t want to be left alone, they want stuff.

Charlie Croker said:

Some times it’s just attention.

Three Barrels said:

NK are like little kids seeking to manipulate the adults. Their behavior is entirely rational, you just have to adjust the viewing angle to see it. And provocations like this happened all the time in the Cold War–airliners and spy planes shot down, harbors mined, ships torpedoed, etc. It just usually happened thru intermediaries of the super powers and therefore rarely were two nuke-owning nations head to head.

The Lawyer said:

I don’t think the Cold War stuff happened like that. Airliner shot down? It likely WAS over Soviet airspace. Inhumane to be sure, but we couldn’t really complain too much. Spy plane shot down? Definitely over Soviet airspace–entirely within their rights. Harbors mined? We mined the harbors of their proxies, but never of an actual Soviet port; nor did they ever mine a US or NATO port. We both knew that that would be way too dangerous. I tried to find reports of US and Soviet ships suspected to be sunk by the other country from 1950 to 1990. Couldn’t find any. That doesn’t mean there weren’t, but you’ll need to point them out. I don’t remember them, if there were.

NK may be like little children maneuvering for attention. But that is exactly the problem. Whether you call them crazy or children, the end result is the same. They show no sign of knowing where to safely draw the line. It’s one thing to harmlessly launch missiles into the ocean to scare the Japanese or to conduct a nuclear test. Those get plenty of attention but aren’t likely to bring physical wrath down on you. It’s another to sink a ship. You force a response.

Fortunately, this afternoon, it looks like the Chinese backing of NK is beginning to slowly melt.

Three Barrels said

This is just something we are not going to be able to see eye to eye on, largely because you are wrong.

I didn’t make the Cold War analogy first. The Cold War doesn’t really fit, for a host of reasons I don’t have the energy, patience or sobriety to delve into right now. One word though–proxies. NK is not China’s and most of the CW acts to which I referred took place through them. And not just 747s over Asia–think Africa, Latin America, etc. Think CIA, KGB, Warren Zevon songs.

NK is playing a game. It may be a dangerous one perhaps but I can’t really see us attacking them. Also, while NK probably sunk that boat, it has not been proven definitively nor was it witnessed. SK waited to confirm as best as possible before accusing NK but that doesn’t really help their case either.

All that said, next time they move to test fire a rocket, I would be all for shooting the damn thing on the pad.

The daily “Say What” quotation on Slate’s Doonesbury comic page is from Tom Ganley, a congressional candidate in Ohio [UPDATE: According a local paper in Akron, this quotation has been mis-attributed to Ganley]:

“Let’s take Betty Sutton out of the House and send her back to the kitchen.”

I went to his web site and couldn’t help noticing the banner near the bottom. Good people of Akron, would you vote for a guy who can’t even get your city spelled correctly on his front page? I’m as guilty of misspellings as anyone, but first of all, doesn’t he have a staff to check this kind of thing… on his single most important web face to the public… and additionally, what spell checker thought that “Arkon” was a valid word? Yep, sure enough, it got a red squiggly when I typed it.

Tom Ganley's future constituents, he hopes

Years ago when a co-worker discovered that we didn’t have a television at home, he exclaimed, “What?! Who’s going to raise your kids?” He was being facetious, but his surprise at the fact was genuine. That’s one of the two reactions I get when I admit that we are a TV-free household – surprise and a amazed shaking of the head as if we had uninstalled our bathrooms and relied on an outhouse or something. The second possible reaction is, “Wow, that’s great…” in the sort of voice that finishes the sentence silently, “…but I could never do that.”

I don’t brag about it or try to proselytize the idea. When someone asks if I saw some show the other night, or if I follow some drama series, a simple “no” is truthful and sufficient. But on occasion I have to add the detail that I couldn’t watch the shows even if I wanted to – usually if someone is asking if I’ll be watching a game they know I am excited about, or if the conversation turns to how much TV to let one’s kids watch, or when folks are standing around comparing the size, quantity and technology of their sets at home.

It is often assumed that we ditched the TV when we started having kids, but the action predates our oldest child. It wasn’t a moral stand or a tough financial decision. I had moved the TV from the living room in order to use it as a second screen for editing videos on the computer. Three months later my wife was paying the cable bill and realized that the TV was still hooked to the computer instead of the coax in the wall. So she cancelled the service. It is possible that we didn’t miss it during that time because the set, inherited from her grandmother, was small, ugly and out of focus. Soon after cancelling the cable service we sent the set to the electronics graveyard at the local dump.

On 9/11/2001 we felt we needed to stay tuned in during the day so we broke out a tiny, 9-inch TV/VCR combo that we remembered we had on a shelf somewhere. It has since become known as the “disaster TV” and it came out of the closet for things like Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian Tsunami and two sets of Southern Californian wild fires. Last year we bought a digital converter box so that we could still use the disaster TV when necessary.

It is tempting to proudly ascribe some of the positive attributes of our kids to the lack of television; they have great attention spans, learned to read early and well, have very developed imaginations and story-telling ability, and the only commercial product they beg for is Lego. I realize, of course, that there is no correlation with the TV free household, but sometimes watching at other kids who are well-known ravenous TV watchers unable to focus on anything for more than 90 seconds or get whiny about the latest toy fad, and one naturally starts to wonder.

Watching TV at home can be fun, informational, and a good way to unwind and get your brain off of the day at work. But lately some colleagues and friends have started exploring out loud the idea of cutting back on TV watching, and prompted me to come up with a list of things you would and would not miss about your television if you unplugged it for 3 months as an experiment. This isn’t a challenge I am putting out to the world, but if these lists prompt you to think about tuning out, or at least think about the value you place on the money you send to the cable or satellite company every month, then the lists are worth it. I’ll mention up front that, for reasons I can’t explain, getting rid of your television doesn’t seem to give you any extra time in the day to do other things. I’ll also mention that this is a kind of golden age for trying this experiment, with so many shows that you might choose to watch available online and myriad devices for moving video from your PC to your big screen.

What you would miss about television:

• Live sports
• Skipping commercials with the DVR
• The occasional babysitter when you need the kids fully distracted for 30 minutes
• The chance to gossip about Idol the next day
• Nightly national news
• “Your shows” that haven’t made it to Hulu yet – Anthony Bourdain and The Pacific come to mind.
• Channel surfing and landing on an amazing documentary on Discovery or History Channel

What you would not miss about television:

• Ads that play at 120% of the volume of the show you are trying to watch
• The coma induced by millions of flashing pixels, a remote control and a comfortable couch
• Nightly local news (I mean, has there ever been a valuable local news show?)
• Arguments about what to watch live and what to Tivo
• Threats and yelling when the kids won’t shut it off to do homework/go outside/eat dinner
• Your game console – that would still work

I’d be happy to hear if I missed anything, either in my lists or in my whole big picture view of the value of television.

I’m a pretty good Google search user. I know a lot of the tricks and keywords, and I know how to access the special searches (for music, for source code, etc).  Mostly I have just learned how to phrase a search to get a high probability of success. But every once in a while I spend a few minutes looking for something specific, and fail. For example, I haven’t been able to find:

1. The name of something when all I can remember about it is what the thing does and the letter it starts with. The other day I was trying to find a kind of floor jack that starts with the letter “s.” Google couldn’t help. I still don’t know what it is.

Photo credit: Bill the stick maker

2. A video of the greyhounds catching the mechanical rabbit. It came up in a conversation one day, and someone said, “I’ll bet there is a video on that on the web.” Turns out there isn’t, or else Google just can’t find it.

3. How much electricity I am using at any given moment in my house. No, wait! They are working on a Google device that can do that! But that leads me to…

4. How much water I am using at any given moment in my house.

A simple electrical circuit

5. The history behind why electrical current is indicated by the letter i on a circuit diagram. This came up in a conversation years ago, pre-Google, because a colleague swore that current should be represented by the letter c. He had a textbook from the 1920’s that proved his point, and he further claimed that because his source was older than mine (a more recent textbook), his answer was superior. I went to the library, found a citation using the letter i from a 19th century textbook, and proudly presented it to him the next day. I can’t seem to find any similar sources or a history of the symbol selection on the web using Google. And yes I did find the answer at WikiHow or Yahoo Answers or something but I think those answers are crap.

I’ll challenge readers to find any of these things, or to report the Google search failures you have had.

Coming out of home depot yesterday I was reeled in by a lady trying to get signatures for two ballot initiatives. Trying to be the informed citizen, I asked her what they were about. One would prevent a government employer from acting like a union and collecting dues for political purposes. The other would prevent the legislature from imposing “hidden taxes” by passing new fees with a 50% vote instead of the 2/3 majority required to raise taxes. I told her I would think about it, but she didn’t want to let me go, saying, “it doesn’t really matter what these ballot measures are about, your signature just gets it on the ballot! You need to sign this to help us get it on the ballot, then you will be able to do all the research you need!” I told her I wanted less initiatives on my ballot, not more, and she looked at me like I had two heads. I walked away.

Photo credit to liberalstreetfighter.com

It is the ultimate strategy used by these paid signature collectors – they insist that you are just helping get it on the ballot, you aren’t voting for it. And most people can’t argue with that half-baked logic. So we end up with 10 to 15 measures on the ballot every two years, many of them just plain dumb, some of them directly contradicting each other, most of them entirely or partially unconstitutional, and the whole collection running the length of a small novel in the ballot guides we get in the mail. The ones that pass have two things in common: A very compelling title that may or may not have anything to do with the measure’s effect or intent, and a high pro- to anti- funding ratio.

There are three initiatives I would consider signing to get them on the ballot. One would call a Constitutional Convention to possibly scrap the encyclopedia-sized Constitution that we currently labor under in our state. Another would encourage clean elections by providing public financing to candidates who vow not to raise private money or spend their own fortunes. Finally, I would sign a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution and get rid of the initiative process. Hand me a pen.

The CA HealthCare Foundation has a nice write up of the history of the ballot initiative in California and a long list of problems with the system in its current form.

Wieden + Kennedy are earning every cent from Nike.

And Tiger should tip them.

If you need an example of how to make lemonade, look no further.

Malt,

hops, yeast

and water:

Reinheitsgebot!

This is the old way to make a good beer.

Take

a great

Recipe

And make it sing.

This is the new way to make good beer.