Patrick M Brennan

I’m grateful to Republican State Representative Ben Bridges of Georgia for pointing out some interesting facts which I had somehow never heard of.

It seems that this “Evolution” thing – you know, the idea that plants, animals and people are descended from older forms which evolve over geologic time – isn’t just untrue. No, friends, it’s much, much worse. The ideas that, for example, the universe is billions of years old, that it is billions of light years across, even, apparently, the idea that the Earth moves in space – are all lies. And not only that, there is a sinister conspiracy to spread these lies and fix them in our minds.

Who do you think is spreading these lies? That would be the Jews.

Oh, and this “Gravity” thing is a Jewish lie, too.

You know, it’s one thing to come across some crank’s web site. Honestly, I’d rather just talk about that, because, Jesus Jones, is it hilarious. We’ll come back to it.

But here we have a really scary brew: we have a lunatic who has a crackpot theory of the world, driven to invent an evil conspiracy which is suppressing his theory. And where does he turn to supply the bad guy? To the closest little nub of hate he has in his heart, naturally. But then he gets support from not one, but two elected officials in two different states. The mixture of fanatic belief, conspiracy theories, scapegoating minorities, and government power, even though it is sort of small and comic in this episode, is something to keep a careful watch over. It’s like a pile of paint-soaked rags in your basement – you don’t want to tolerate it, even if you think the risk is small. You can expect that if there ever is a fire like that in America, this will be the place it starts.

The two elected officials in question are scrambling to backpedal their support for the kooky crank. They didn’t mean for a lot of people to notice that they were endorsing the view that Mathematics is a conspiracy to destroy Christian America. Just the kooky cranks in their districts. It’s entertaining to watch little men twist themselves into pretzels trying to pretend they don’t actually agree with this view, while putting out the wink to show the True Believers that, yes, actually, they do.

It goes without saying that they’re Republicans, doesn’t it? I think it’s probably true that the majority of Republicans would admit that the Earth moves, but in every important way, they truly are the party of reality-denial. We have been and will continue to pay the price for having them in office, as we shoulder the burdens of bad decisions based on delusions and lies.

But enough of that. Let’s get back to FixedEarth.com, a product of a gentleman named Marshall Hall.

I had thought that the battle between actual, enlightened, reality-dwelling people and kooky fanatics had moved off of the question of whether the Earth moves around the sun, and had moved into the issue of how human beings came to evolve into their present form. That’s what I thought the last time I wrote about this issue. It seems that, at least as far as Mr. Hall goes, I was wrong. He wants to take up the battle against Copernicus all over again. It’s too bad he’s about 460 years late to the party. His site (which is incidentally, a masterpiece of clueless Web design), shouts:

The Earth is not rotating…nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as “science". The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie. Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism in every aspect of man’s “knowledge” about the Universe, the Earth, and Himself.

Marshall Hall is a wheel in the political effort to remove evolution from the public schools in Georgia. Since he’s a fundamentalist, he’s gone back to the fundamentals. He feels he needs to demolish Copernicus in order to topple Darwin. I suppose he’s on to something, although it seems to me the facts of biology would remain the same if the Sun went around the Earth. But never mind that, and never mind the fact that even though Darwin is bedrock biology, Copernicus is even more deeply embedded in astronomy. In another part of the web site, he proclaims:

…the Copernican Model of a rotating, orbiting Earth is a factless, observation-denying deception that is the keystone which is holding up all of modern man’s false “science” and “knowledge". It’s time for the truth.

See? He’s right! There are no facts and no observations which support the idea of a rotating Earth! Stellar parallax? Poppycock! The retrograde motion of Mars? A Kabbalist illusion! Foucault’s Pendulum? A clever trick. There really is an entire section of the website devoted to showing how any observations which support the motion of the Earth are, in fact, lies and deceptions.

He even explains why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move, and it’s such a mishmash that’s it’s damn near impossible to figure out. I don’t think he quite understands how geosynchronous satellites work in the first place, and comes really, really close to disavowing that there is such a thing as Gravity. (He also confuses gravity with atmospheric pressure, which is very funny if you’re a nerd like me.) As best as I can reckon, his explanation for why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move is :

1. The Earth doesn’t move.
2. Geosynchronous satellites rely on the “earth-is-moving” hypothesis to work the way they claim to be.
3. But since the Earth isn’t moving, there can’t be any geosynchronous satellites.
4. If this gets out, it will expose The Conspiracy.
5. Therefore the Earth doesn’t move!

(Actually, it’s right there on his page, right after his paragraph which begins “Five things are certain at this point:"… I’ve just clarified the language.)

I also think it’s fun to note that his web site only vaguely implies that the Earth might be a sphere. Nowhere does he set that out explicitly.

At what point do you think Mr. Hall will admit that the Earth moves, and is more than 6000 years old? Let’s ask Thomas Kuhn:

During the century and a half following Galileo’s death in 1642, a belief in the earth-centered universe was gradually transformed from an essential sign of sanity to an index, first, of inflexible conservatism, then of excessive parochialism, and finally of complete fanaticism.

Well, Galileo’s been dead for more than three hundred years now…

I’ve rekindled my enthusiasm for Orbiter recently. I had stopped playing Orbiter for a while, not so much because I lost interest in it, but because I had to explore some other games. (Oh, and also, contrary to what you might think after reading this post, I do have a real life.)

“Astronaut” isn’t the only fantasy I have. This past year, I also wanted to play “Gangster” for a while, so I played through The Godfather; and I took another couple of turns as “Badass“, so I played through Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.; and even now I take an occasional sojourn into being a “Zombie Apocalypse Survivor", so I am playing through Dead Rising. I’m also quite enthusiastic about Second Life, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m gratifying when I’m playing Second Life – my inner Libertarian/Capitalist/Sprawl-Dwelling/Gambler/Chat-Addict, perhaps.

In the end, though, my strongest fantasy is still “Astronaut", which is also why my lovely wife gave me a fantastic Christmas gift: she sent me to Florida to participate in the Astronaut Training Experience at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. ("Just think,” I said, “I get to hang with a bunch of middle-aged white male nerds just like me! When do I ever get a chance to do that?") It was actually a lot of fun, and I ended up participating in a “simulated Space Shuttle mission,” and even though I didn’t get to “fly” in the “shuttle", and was relegated to “Mission Control,” it was all actually pretty good – but not as interesting or as detailed as Orbiter. (Well, you know, they have to cater to their market. Make it too hard and you turn away potential customers, like the family who were there – Mom, Dad, and three teenagers, who were all acting like they’d rather be at Universal Studios.) All in all, the trip engendered in me an even greater desire to download the latest version of Orbiter and lose myself in it again. (But I don’t get a cool polo shirt from playing Orbiter.)

My new fling with Orbiter was also catalyzed by the recent NASA decision to build a new generation of space hardware, called the Constellation system. Constellation will be used to return to the moon by about 2020, and establish a permanent base on the Moon’s south pole by about 2024.

I don’t know if Constellation will ever fly. There will be four presidential and seven congressional elections between now and then. It seems to me that the moon base, while technically feasible, may not get the kind of sustained political support it will require. However, just because it may never come to pass, that doesn’t mean I can’t “fly” the proposed hardware; so I turned back to Orbiter. Orbiter has recently been updated, and there is an extensive online community of fans and modders, contributing add-ons which make it a very rich environment for the space flight enthusiast. As luck would have it, there exist a couple of add-ons which implement NASA’s Exploration System Architecture Study, a 2005 precursor to Constellation. That was close enough for me.

Orbiter is a very complex program - it’s not a game. It’s a lot of fun (if you’re a space nerd like me), but it doesn’t hold your hand, and there’s no guarantee it’ll even work, let alone that you’ll be able to do what you want to do. Sometimes, you even need to do a little math. (Horrors!) Although I’d flown a lot of Orbiter scenarios previously, I’d never done it with a vehicle as realistic (read: as limited) as Constellation. What a difference the realism makes! Flying these vehicles is difficult, but I have managed to do it pretty well. In the process, I got stuck once, trying to figure out how to launch toward the moon when it seemed as though the rocket I had didn’t quite have enough fuel to do the trick. It turned out that I’d only had Astronaut 101, and I needed the 201 class in order to pull off the maneuver. (But that points out another great thing about Orbiter: there’s a very friendly on-line community of sympathetic folks who are always willing to help you out.) Being able to fly to the moon has given me a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment which I don’t really get from games.

You might be saying: “Accomplishment? What accomplishment?” And I take your point. See, beating a boss in a video game isn’t an accomplishment - games are purposely designed so that 10-year-olds can do them with just a little practice, after all. On the other hand, in Orbiter I’ve guided my boosters from launch into orbit, performed orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers, left the Earth, entered lunar orbit, and landed, only 1.7 km away from where I intended to land, near the lunar south pole (In Shoemaker Crater, actually). Do these things really count as accomplishments? I’d argue they do, because I learned a lot about how these things are actually done in practice, even if Constellation never flies.

I’ve learned something else new: getting to the moon is actually pretty easy, compared to getting back. Every step of this trip has been more difficult than the previous step – and I’m told that reentry is the hardest part of all! I’m looking forward to it.

(PS - My wife also gave me “The Godfather,” “Quake IV,” and “F.E.A.R.” How cool is she?)

She’s very fetching. Unfortunately, that’s not an adjective which can be applied to the search engine she’s fronting for. Google doesn’t need a Flash preloader, either, or tell a joke even before it’ll let me search.

Have you heard about Chad Catagana, the guy who just got arrested for sending fake anthrax and death threats via the mail to a number of prominent Americans whose politics he disagreed with? Turns out that intimidation via post was only one of Chad’s many gifts.

This guy obviously had so much “talent on loan from God", he clearly needed a second career. Or possibly a third.

Not content to merely be a cranky wannabee right-wing commentator (by way of the Free Republic), he also seems to have tried his hand at being a kooky right-wing terrorist-by-mail; and apparently he’s also a bitchy wannabee right-wing sci-fi critic!

Here’s Catagana railing about the state of SF on TV:

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism.

(See this post for more.)

Boy, I bet he was pissed at Season Three of Battlestar Galactica! After two seasons of the Cylons standing in for The Terrorists, I’m sure he was absolutely appalled at the turn the plot took as the Cylons became the occupying power of the human colony and the humans resorted to suicide bombings. It probably flustered him so much, he got sloppy in his threat-mailings; and that’s how the Feds finally picked him up.

I bet Chad and his fellow travelers on the crypto-fascist message boards were just tickled when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Jon Stewart received their death threats. Chad had an extra-special chuckle, of course, because he knew something his friends (probably) didn’t. Nevertheless, they were all sure that people who stand in the mildest opposition to the thing that calls itself “conservativism” deserve to die. Doesn’t that just warm your heart?

Unlike moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Catagana, I don’t gloat when Americans receive death threats in the mail; much less would I ever send those threats. However, I do reserve the right to gloat when moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Castanga are exposed for what they are, and when they receive a measure of justice for their crimes.

I’m a little obsessive about Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. I think we should all be switching to CF bulbs in our homes. Don’t let the high initial cost of the bulbs fool you: they will save you money in the long run, and you don’t have to change them nearly as often. They use a lot less electricity, so they cost you less and they’re better for the environment. That’s a win-win. Around our house, I’ve been changing them in slowly, trying to get my wife used to the idea. She was afraid that she wouldn’t like the quality of the light, but the latest bulbs actually give off a very pleasant light. She was happy enough with the results that she hasn’t stopped me from switching out a bunch of lights in the house, and she even bought some additional bulbs. There are some fixtures where a CF won’t fit, unfortunately, and there are others attached to dimmers, which are generally CF-unfriendly. Then there are the decorative fixtures, where a CF just looks bad. I’m stuck using incandescent bulbs in all those places, at least for now.

Now, what I’m really waiting for is the day when I can replace all the incandescent bulbs in the house, and all the fluorescents, too, with LEDs! That day is coming, and it’ll be a great day.

My wife gave me a TiVo. I like it a lot more than I expected to, especially considering I am nobody’s idea of a couch potato. I also try to convince myself that I don’t love gadgets excessively, but this is getting harder and harder all the time. For now, though, I’m happy with TiVo.

Of course, right after I thought my gadget lust was sated, this thing comes out…

I have to admit I’m a little annoyed by “writers” who don’t bother to learn how to use their word processors. Since I am a well-known techie in my circle of writers, I often field questions from my fellows, and I’m happy to help. But I’m also dismayed by the lack of knowledge some writers exhibit about their primary tool. Simple things like properly setting up a page can utterly defeat otherwise intelligent people because, as they lamely explain, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

Well, look: if all you want to do is bang out letters, you don’t need to know much about your word processor; it’s push-button simple. There’s not much formatting involved. On the other hand, if you are creating documents of any complexity at all, you should know how to manage that. Plays are rather complex in terms of their formatting. But there are simple commands in every decent word processor to create the formatting you like (and there are programs you can buy that will do the formatting for you, if you’re rich and lazy). It’s not hard, though, and it’s not “computers".

Things like highlighting a block of text, pointing to a menu, and clicking on a command aren’t arcane any more. They don’t belong to the realm of “computer literacy". In the age of the $500 laptop computer, they’re just everyday nuts and bolts stuff. It’s easier than driving a car (and less dangerous). Nobody is too stupid to learn this stuff. If you don’t know how to do it, then you just haven’t bothered to learn it – which isn’t a value judgement, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person – unless you’re a “writer". In that case, as I said, I’m a little annoyed. Are you a writer? Then be a writer. Take the time to learn how to use your tools.

I thought back to this on my vacation, when we took an afternoon to tour Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West. One of the highlights of the tour, for me, was visiting Hemingway’s writing room, which still has his portable Royal typewriter. This humble machine was the instrument Hemingway used to create some of his best work. Hemingway, obviously, was not a mechanical engineer, but I’m sure he knew how to change the ribbon and set the margins on his typewriter. In fact, given the amount of travelling he must have done with it, I’m confident he was able to make simple repairs to the machine.

Now what would Hemingway say to you if you told him you couldn’t figure out how to make your word processor format your document correctly? I’ll tell you.

He’d laugh. In your face.

A memory from high school visited me very vividly last night. I recall sitting in my high school library, and I was working on some science assignment, but I’ve forgotten the details. Nerd that I was (and am), I was solving the problem by creating a program on my handy TI-59 Programmable calculator. To create this program, I had written the program steps – essentially keystrokes – in a column on a couple of sheets of paper. A program would look something like this:

RCL 1
x
RCL 0
x2
+
RCL 2
x
RCL 0
+
RCL 3
=

The paper was at my left hand, and my calculator on my right as I keyed the steps into it (in “learn” mode).

As I was doing this, an older woman – whom I had never seen before or since – toodled up beside my table and without a word of introduction, she said:

“In my day, we didn’t need a calculator to add up a column of figures.”

And then she shambled away, smugly, without even waiting for an answer.

I think she was an administrator of some sort at the school.

It was an awkward moment when I had to tell my manager and my coworkers that I had accepted a new job. I was working at a great company, and I was happy to work there, and I liked the people I was working with … but I received a really good offer from another company and it was just – well, it was one of those opportunities that only comes along once or twice in your career. The only problem was that I had been working at the new job for only about a month! Talk about your inconvenient timing. (Well, it’s not the worst problem I could have had; after all, how often do I get a chance to choose between two really good jobs?)

Here’s the thing: I left my last job to go to this new company in February. I didn’t continue my job search at that point – I wasn’t still looking for a new position somewhere else. However, little did I know there was an old friend who was looking for me. The timing was bad, but the job was exactly right – developing software for robotics applications.

Now, I don’t have any problem with selling paper and ink for a living, and there certainly were plenty of technical challenges at this place. Also, I am not easily bored – I find a lot of things to be interesting, and this of course has served me well in my career. But robotics isn’t just something I find interesting, it’s something I am fascinated with, and it’s something I went to school to study. I haven’t done it in a long time, however, having been diverted into various other sidelines by the vagaries of life and career. I thought I had left robotics behind forever, until my friend called me with an offer. It entailed a small pay cut and a big increase in my commute, but it offered the possibility that I could work on something that I loved, rather than just something that paid.

I told my supervisor that although it was awkward to leave a new job so soon, I didn’t want to turn the offer down and end up regretting it for the rest of my life. Fortunately, everyone at the old place let me know they understood. In fact, my immediate manager said that in my position, he’d do exactly the same thing. What can I tell you? They’re great people. They’re hiring, by the way – you should apply.

I’m now almost a month into this new job (– the new new job), and so far I’m really, really glad I jumped. (My friend has said that I was exactly right for this job, and what do you know? She was right.) The work is extremely interesting and the people are better than I hoped for. I jumped right into it and I felt exactly right. I am already making a contribution and it feels really good.

PS: If you’re one of the three people on the planet wondering why I’ve been so remiss with updating the blog lately, now you know. Getting up to speed at two new jobs while helping to raise my infant daughter and producing a small local theater festival has a way of eating into one’s blogging.

PPS: Comments are working again.

I love my TV-B-Gone. It’s been a favorite gadget of mine for about a year now. TV-B-Gone is a universal TV remote with only one function: it turns televisions off. Now I’m not an anti-television fanatic, but I prefer not to be bombarded with TV in certain situations, such as when we go out to eat, or to have a nice drink out. It’s getting harder and harder to find public places without a television clutching at our eyeballs. Lately, even the local grocery store has installed TVs, in the aisles as well as at the checkouts.

Here’s the thing: having a television in the room makes it hard for me to pay attention to what I’m doing. A bit of movement, a flash of color, an unexpected sound, and my eyes will be drawn involuntarily to the screen. It’s very difficult to avoid being distracted by it. This drives me bonkers, since I don’t want to give my attention to something I don’t choose to give my attention to. For one thing, it’s rude to the person(s) I’m out with. Besides that, I am starting to feel cramped by advertising. Is there no time at all when I can be free of the relentless deluge of pitches to buy more?

Well: TV-B-Gone is made for such situations. It is programmed with the OFF codes for hundreds of models of televisions, and it will beam them all out at the push of a button. Most TVs will turn off instantly; the older the set, the longer it will take TV-B-Gone to work its magic. TV-B-Gone is discreet: it’s small, easily concealed, and it looks like any other electronic fob on a keychain, such as one might use to manage a car lock. I have found that even when I feel very conspicuous in my use of the device, it isn’t noticed.

There is a certain level of etiquette involved in using the TV-B-Gone. If the television is truly being watched by someone, I will not turn it off. I won’t turn off the TVs in a sports bar, for example. But you may have noticed that most of the time, a television in a public place is not actually being watched by anyone. It seems to be there for no other reason than the proprietor’s belief that someone, at some time, will wish to glance at the giant blaring tube. In these cases, not only has my use of my TV-B-Gone been appropriate, but I’ll bet that some of the other people there were actually glad that the TV had been turned off.

I recommend that anyone wishing to reclaim a bit of their mental space back from the advertisers go out and purchase a TV-B-Gone.

Someone who knows asks the question: If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? Andrew Brown’s got a good point. I like OpenOffice and I use it on a daily basis, though I don’t think it’s terribly buggy. It’s never mangled my documents the way Microsoft Word has. However, I have never contributed money or code to OpenOffice, even though I really should.

I sometimes listen to the “alternative music” channel on XM radio. One of their shticks is to use the station ID break (which is wholly unnecessary on satellite radio, isn’t it?) to taunt their listeners, who are hip and ironic enough to enjoy having their hip ironic hipness ridiculed.

So the other evening, while I was driving home, my XM radio said of the alternative music channel, “…the music that used to make you cool … The way the minivan and the stock options don’t now.”

And meanwhile the XM radio display, which usually displays the artist and the track title in big bright amber letters, read:

You’re out of Huggies, alt boy.

And I thought, “I do NOT own a minivan. And we use Pampers, so there.”

They think they know me. Hah!

Spammers really bug the crap out of me. I manage my own spam filters, and naturally I don’t have any interest in Viagra, so one of the words I add to my filters is “Viagra". If you’ve had email for 5 minutes, you already know where this is heading. It’s true that I no longer receive any mail exhorting me to buy “Viagra". In other words, the filters work! Instead, now I am solicited to buy “V1A G’ra” and “vi 4grA” and “V!a6ra", and so many more permutations that the mind reels.

What are they thinking? I mean, when I set up my filter to reject Viagra ads, wasn’t that sufficient to convince someone that I’m, I don’t know, not interested in buying Viagra? Someone obviously thinks that the fact that I’m not interested in Viagra, spelled correctly, clearly implies that I am interested in “V1A G’ra". Some moron, somewhere, must actually imagine that I’m sitting there saying, “Say, that’s not how I usually spell Viagra! That looks interesting! I think I’ll click on that message!”

And of course, it’s not just Viagra. I’ve had my current email address for an Internet Age (since 1992), and it’s been exposed on the web more than once, so it’s had time to get on a lot of lists. Prescription drugs and every variety of the Nigerian scam are big hits on my inbox, along with viruses, worms, and phishers, and I can’t even begin to tell you some of the varieties of stupid, vile and disgusting spam which comes across my email queue. (Hm, maybe I should rephrase that.) I’ve taken to adding even the common mispellings to my filters, but this is a sucker’s game, obviously.

And obviously, the spammers know that I’m not really interested in “v i g a r a". They just don’t care.

The economics of the spam game are rigged in favor of the spammer, and they’re rigged in favor of the spammer doing things which would be irrational in other contexts (say, direct mail advertising). The marginal cost of sending out a spam is essentially zero, so there’s no penalty for sending out millions of messages to addresses which don’t exist, or to people who aren’t apparently interested. And spammers don’t pay for bounced messages, since they forge the return header. So maybe I’ve changed my mind about Viagra since setting up my spam filters, and maybe this message is the one I impulsively click on the exact moment after I’ve changed my mind, so the probability that I’ll return this message isn’t zero, it’s just really, really tiny; and that is enough for a spammer, since sending the message cost him nothing. Therefore, he has a perverse incentive to beat my spam filters by spelling his product wrong, because even though I said I didn’t want it, maybe, maybe … maybe, I do today.

Talk about not taking no for an answer.

I wish I had had Fog Creek Copilot a long time ago, but they only just released it last week. It really helped me get out of a jam!

See, I spend a lot of time providing computer tech support for my family. This is more by chance than by design. Most programmers I know are also the designated tech-support persons in their families. (Even though programmers aren’t necessarily the best people to do tech support – but I digress.)

I don’t mind providing advice and troubleshooting for my family (and some of my friends); the way I look at it, it’s one way for me to be useful. However, since my family is spread out across several states, inevitably much of my tech-support duties are performed over the phone. This can be an unbelievably frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried it knows very well. Here’s an actual transcript of a portion of one such conversation:

“Press Start. Yes. Start. Start, in the bottom left-hand corner. Right. Then Programs. No? How about ‘All Programs’? Okay. Never mind. Click your desktop. Your desktop. The big blue area that doesn’t have any windows on it. Behind all your other windows. Okay. Is that Microsoft Office bar up now? Is it on your screen now? It is? On your screen? Okay, good. Now, is there some kind of a menu attached to it? Okay, is there something there that looks sort of like a title bar? A title bar. A title bar – some type of area that isn’t an icon? You’d mentioned that you click in the upper-right hand corner to make it go away, but is there an upper left-hand corner to it?…Yes, go ahead and try, I’ll wait…”

My wife had to leave the room while I was on this call. She later told me that listening to this conversation made her want to stick needles in her eyes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of either leaving or sticking needles in my eyes. Instead, I kept trying for another 45 minutes, until finally I gave up. One of these days, when we are visiting family, I will sit down at my relative’s computer and probably take about 2 minutes to make the fix the trivial problem he was having.

I’m not relating this call to make fun. I’m relating it to make a point, and to celebrate a real breakthrough which will provide real relief for this pain.

Providing tech support to family and friends can be frustrating for two reasons. The minor contributor is that although my clientele tends to believe I know everything about computers, inevitably they ask me about applications which I don’t know or don’t use. A much bigger problem is that every computer really is different, and I have no way of knowing how your computer is set up unless I see it.

Example: How do you get to the mouse settings? Well, on my computer, I press “Start", then I hover over “Settings", then I hover over “Control Panel", then I press “Mouse". The way to get to your mouse settings is probably a little different. And once you get to the mouse settings, you may have a completely different set of tabs than I do. So I can’t just tell you over the phone how to open your mouse settings. You and I will have to work together, with you telling me what you see, and me telling you what to press. (If I say, “open your mouse settings,” and you say, “OK, now what?” then you probably don’t need me to do tech support for you. If, on the other hand, you say, “how do I do that?” then you have probably had this experience. Hi, Dad!)

So this is why providing tech support to people over the phone is so frustrating. I’m driving blind, and you’re describing what you see. But we don’t have a shared vocabulary for describing things! It would make my tech support job a hundred times easier if the folks I am supporting knew what I was talking about when I say things like “Taskbar", “Desktop", “Right-click,” and “Title Bar".

It just so happens that just a couple of days after Fog Creek Software announced Copilot, another relative called with a problem. He couldn’t play preview clips from Amazon anymore. He was used to listening to preview clips in Windows Media Player while shopping for music, and suddenly they weren’t working anymore. I asked him if fixing the problem was worth ten bucks to him, and he said yes, so we both hooked up through Copilot.

The great thing about Copilot is that there’s no setup and no configuration, for either of us (although one of us has to send a credit card payment through first). After that, it enables me to see exactly what’s on the other person’s screen, and to take command of the keyboard and the mouse of the remote machine.

I would never, ever have been able to figure out and fix my relative’s problem the old way. He had inadvertently blocked the content from Amazon in his 3rd party firewall software. In order to find it, and fix it, I had to do a bit of poking around, not entirely sure myself what I was doing, because I’d never used this particular piece of software. But fixing it, once it was found, was trivial, and that’s why I think Copilot has a big future ahead of it – and my wife will be spared sticking needles in her eyes.

It’s the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, and Google is celebrating by debuting Google Moon. This is just the thing when you need driving directions from Mare Tranquillitatis (site of the Apollo 11 landing) to the Descartes Highlands (where Apollo 16 set down). Just don’t look too closely at the moon…

My blog is currently under attack from the vermin known as comment spammers. You may have heard of these cockroaches. Striking from cleverly-hidden bases in their parents’ basements, they boldly overwhelm the defenses of unsuspecting blogs’ comment systems, turning what was once an interesting, fun and useful tool for socializing and intelligent discussion into advertising space for their useless and parasitic web sites. In this case, it’s impotence pills and hair-loss products. I mean, gosh, where’s a guy to go when he needs to pill to produce an erection, after all? Or something to prevent hair loss? These products are so difficult to get, you know? Clearly, he needs to turn to the comments posted in a very obscure, rarely updated, and nearly-unread blog!

In the time it took for me to write this post, 13 new spam comments appeared. No doubt by the time I’m done typing this sentence, another two or three will show up. Fun, huh?

I’ve had to put up some additional defenses against these worms, and I’m confident that I’m not done yet. For one thing, I will have to personally approve all new comments. For me, that means that simply maintaining this blog, and guarding it against fat assholes with no talent, no brains, and more time than they can usefully employ – oops, sorry, I got off on a rant there. Now where was I? Oh yes …

For me, it means that guarding my blog against these lowlife scum becomes yet another chore, not unlike the daily grind I already endure guarding my email from mail spammers. USENET isn’t even useful any more due to spam. It’s sad and pathetic that there are jerks who have nothing better to do than waste good tools in this way, and it’s even sadder that people who have something to contribute must spend their time fighting the abuse.

I started a Blogspot blog today: patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com. This is another idea I had to get around the trouble I’ve been having with Blogger. No FTP issues between Blogger and Blogspot! (Well, what would I expect? Probably Blogspot’s servers are sitting right next to Blogger’s; the publish was certainly quick.) And I can blog again that way. Seriously, I’m starting to get annoyed by this problem. How many blogs do I have to maintain, after all? The count is up to four at the moment:

www.pbrennan.net : Where I want to blog, but Blogger won’t let me.
www.pbrennan.net/wordpress : Where I don’t want to blog, but I can.
patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com : Ditto.
world.std.com/~pbrennan : Where I used to blog, but I don’t anymore.

Obviously, I want to pare this list back down again. To ONE blog. Are you listening, Blogger?

So, I’m thinking about just giving up and moving everything from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger has taken three weeks so far to fix a simple FTP issue with my ISP, and they haven’t responded to repeated email requests for information. Rather than rely on them, I’d rather have my own solution installed on my server. It’s just simpler all around, except for one major problem – migrating all my posts from Blogger format to WordPress format. There is an easy way to do it, but I can’t use the import script everybody else uses, because that relies on Blogger’s FTP working correctly – gotcha!)

Do I really want to do this? Suffer through weeks of translating hundreds of posts, and more weeks of tweaking my template, until I’ve got some reasonable approximation of what I’ve had for the past couple of years? I don’t know. It’s not as if I need a project to fill all my time – I’ve got those in spades.

<whine>All I wanted was a simple tool which enabled me to make timely posts to my website without fussing with a lot of nitty HTML code. Why is everything so much more complicated than it seems at first?</whine>

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.

What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.

We know you’re a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you’re shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I’ll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I’ll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.

How did this happen so fast?

I use a lot of different bits of software on a daily basis. The heavyweights in my software universe – the companies that supply a hefty percentage of that software – are Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect (Yes, WordPerfect). I run their applications every single day.

This lineup has a new member lately: Google. I have suddenly found myself in the position of using a lot of Google software, and doing so on a daily basis. Of course I’ve been using Google for search for a long time (who doesn’t?), and I’ve been using Blogger for a couple of years; but it’s only been in the past couple of months that I really incorporated Google into my daily routine, with a new Gmail account, Picasa and Google Desktop Search. I just never noticed until now that I’m running a lot of Google software.

Why shouldn’t I run a lot of Google software? It’s always high-quality, and it’s usually free (although Gmail and Google Search are both laden with advertising). What has surprised me is the sudden ubiquity of Google in my life. Since I’m not a reflexive upgrader, I am usually behind the curve on these things. Based on that fact, I’m guessing that Google has achieved a similar ubiquity in a lot of other people’s lives.

Another indicator that Google has grown up: Bill Gates is bothered by Google. He’d like to do to Google what Microsoft has done to countless other entities in the past. I mean, take a look at my list again (except for Microsoft): Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla (standing in for Netscape), OpenOffice, and WordPerfect. It’s a Microsoft hit list. They’ve all been beaten and bruised by Microsoft; some of them driven out of business by Microsoft. Most of them made technically superior products, but were routed because Microsoft could leverage its Windows monopoly against them and “cut off their oxygen". (The only reason Mozilla and OpenOffice are still around is that their products are offered for free.) Google, with its own free and web-based products, will be much harder for Microsoft to compete against. It will be interesting to see what happens as these two square off against each other.

I expect to keep using Google software for a long time to come. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, I can’t say just yet. In the meantime, it is great software.

“I played around with [Firefox] a bit, but it’s just another browser, and [Microsoft’s Internet Explorer] is better …. So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?”
     – Bill Gates, quoted on the BBC

Dice has pretty much fixed their embarassingly bad ads for tech jobs. I can’t find a whole lot wrong here, because they’ve finally quit trying to write an ad that’s supposed to read like code. See: they’re writing comments in the code instead! (Clearly, Dice has received the recent memo that Comments Are More Important Than Code. In any case, comments always compile.) And find_great_jobs() is a perfectly respectable function call. But … isn’t that an unbalanced brace at the end? Or is the matching brace just somewhere up beyond the top edge of the ad? I guess we’ll never know…

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. – Woody Allen

Everyone thinks about their mortality. Probably, everyone thinks about how to transcend it. There sure are plenty of ideas out there, as there have been for thousands of years (many of them have plenty of currency today). Of course I’ve been thinking about this because my wife and I are about to participate in the single most popular mode of achieving immortality, that is, we’re about to have a child.

I don’t want to get specific in this post, though, because I want to do something a little different with this post. I want to solicit your opinion this time out. Since everyone brings their own assumptions to the question, I don’t want to prejudice your answers.

So: How do you plan to live forever?

Feel free to interpret the question as you like. Consider it as a spiritual problem, a philosophical problem, a metaphysical problem, or even a biological problem. Everybody has something to say about immortality, especially their own.

Post anonymously if you like, but please post. I will follow up in a later post, though I can’t promise how much later, because baby is due any day now.

10. Kirk jostles better when the Enterprise is hit.

9. Kirk doesn’t have some kind of foofy accent.

8. Kirk rips his shirt at the drop of a hat. Picard keeps pulling his shirt down, as it keeps riding up, and that really bothers him. (What is he hiding?)

7. Kirk : Screw the Prime Directive, let’s kill something!

6. Picard delegates the landing parties to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

5. Picard delegates the overacting to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

4. Kirk drinks coffee ; Picard drinks tea. ‘Nuff said.

3. Kirk makes sure to show all the alien babes the “Captain’s Log".

2. Kirk: Red-blooded American. Picard: French? British? We’re not really sure, but it’s definitely suspicious.

1. Kirk: not afraid to wear a rug.

Dice persists in posting bad code on their online ads!

Since their last ad, they’ve definitely improved, but good syntax doesn’t mean their logic has gotten any better.

The ad still says, in plain English: “If you’re salary isn’t good, go to Dice.com. If your salary is good, suck it up.”

What?

I thought “Suck it up” meant something like “endure pain bravely", or “be strong“.

Maybe somebody knows an interpretation of “suck it up” that I’m not aware of. Maybe it means “good for you!” or “way to go!", or “guess you don’t need Dice.com!”

I have a suggestion for their advertising folks:

if ((You.workFor("Dice.com") || You.haveAdClient("Dice.com"))&&(You.writeAdCopy()))
{
   You.stopTryingToWriteCode(please);
}

I have had a CLIE NX-80V for a few weeks now, ever since my last CLIE died on me. (It turned out it was only playing dead – but it didn’t rise from the grave until after I had the new machine in my hand.) Even though I knew that the NX-80V was an excellent machine in nearly all respects, I had resisted upgrading for a couple of years anyway, since I knew the NX-80V used Graffiti 2, and I feared that Graffiti 2 would be a disaster. My initial fears have proven sadly true. Graffiti 2 sucks. I tried really hard to adjust, to unlearn eight years of Graffiti and relearn the new system, and although it doesn’t suck as badly as I thought at first, it’s still bad enough that I had to finally find an alternative.

I’ve been using Graffiti ever since 1997, and it only took me a couple of weeks to reach a plateau of proficiency at which it was really useful. For short pieces of information, i.e. phone numbers or email addresses, it was excellent; and in settings such as classes or business meetings, I could very nearly take decent notes with the thing. (I still prefer paper and pencil for free-form notes, because it’s faster and less error-prone, plus it’s less confining than ASCII text – I can draw diagrams, for example. At the same time, it’s always nice not to have to type up my notes – because they’re already typed.)

That was all with the original Graffiti. I find that with Graffiti 2, I can’t achieve anywhere near the speed and low error rate I had with the original. The worse failure, however, is that with Graffiti 2, I am concentrating far less on the content I am entering, and far more on how to enter it, than I was used to.

Here are three examples of how much Graffiti 2 sucks:

Using Graffiti 2, it is common for me to attempt to enter a word ending in an L, followed by a space. Usually, this case ends up with a T at the end of my word. (Turning “the full effect", for example, into “the fulteffect".) This error is extremely common, occurring 90% of the time.

Graffiti 2 almost always (75%) renders my H’s as N’s.

I tried to enter someone’s phone number, in which a group of digits began with a 1. What did I end up with? Not “999-999-1999″; I got “999-999+999″.

These failures are representative, but they are only a subset of what I was seeing. Graffiti 2 is constantly frustrating. It sucks.

The original Graffiti isn’t just single-stroke, it’s stateless, meaning that when I’m making a stroke, I don’t have to think about what my last stroke is. Each stroke uniquely maps to a character. If Graffiti 2 was stateless, if, for example, a left-to-right stroke was only ever the horizontal line on the T, then it would be OK. But sometimes, when I draw a vertical followed by horizontal, I mean “T", and sometimes I mean “L-space", and so I have to think more carefully about what I’m doing. I have to remind myself, “I just drew an L. Now I either have to wait a second before entering my space, or I have to draw my line down on the bottom of the Graffiti entry area". But I only want to be thinking about the text I’m entering, not how to enter it. With Graffiti, I didn’t have to think about it. With Graffiti 2, I do. Therefore, Graffiti 2 sucks.

Why does Graffiti 2 suck so bad? Based on its name, you might expect that Graffiti 2 is the second revision of Graffiti, with improved functionality and more features. If that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong. Graffiti 2 is a direct result not of any engineering or marketing decisions, but of a court decision that the original Graffiti infringed on a patented Xerox technology called Unistrokes. I don’t know a lot about the lawsuit, but apparently the court decided that Graffiti infringed Unistrokes precisely because of its one-to-one correspondence between a single stroke and a character. Therefore, Graffiti 2 is pretty much a crippled Graffiti, crippled just enough that it doesn’t infringe on Unistrokes.

(To be precise, Graffiti 2 is a slightly modified version of CIC’s Jot, itself created to sidestep the Unistrokes patent. The effect is the same. Jot had been trying to supplant Graffiti for years without much success. Now they have succeeded.)

Now, I know Palm didn’t want to foist this garbage on me intentionally, but they did try to put lipstick on this pig by claiming that Graffiti 2 is “easier to learn", “more natural and intuitive” than Graffiti, but that’s baloney. If it was really easier to learn, I’d have achieved a similar level of proficiency with it by now. Instead, I’m far behind where I was at the same point in learning Graffiti.

Graffiti 2 isn’t all bad. To be fair, its design has some good points. I like Graffiti 2’s “a” and “e", for example, and using the middle of the writing area for capitals is a good idea. The trouble is that its good points don’t go anywhere near outweighing its deficiencies. And the deficiencies are all in the state-bound nature of the system. It’s like any other aspect of product design: good design gets out of your way and lets you concentrate on what you’re trying to accomplish. Bad design forces you to think about details of how the machine works, details which are irrelevant to your task.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. For example, I could always switch to using one of the way-hot Xerox PDAs, using Unistrokes.

Oh, wait. There’s no such thing as a Xerox PDA, with or without Unistrokes; and there never has been. (Clearly, Xerox loves to develop technology that it never sells; and then it gets mad when somebody else successfully brings something similar to market.)

Since I do have a Sony CLIE, I can use the built-in keyboard, or one of two (two!) on-screen keyboards.

Another alternative, built into the NX-80V, is a system called Decuma, which is definitely very cool. This is a good high-resolution handwriting recognition system which isn’t as fast as Graffiti, but it is more fun to use. I use it occasionally, and I can see how someone might use it as their primary means of entering text. Check it out and try it.

For a really good solution to this problem, however, what I really needed was to be able to install the original Graffiti on my new handheld. Fortunately, a little desperate digging produced a procedure for accomplishing just that, provided I had a Palm handheld with Graffiti already installed; and fortunately, I had one at hand: my CLIE NX-70V, the rumors of whose demise had been exaggerated. The procedure was easily followed, and worked exactly as advertised.

Now, I have a late-model CLIE with the original Graffiti installed, and it’s great. And that’s the way I’m going to keep it, until Xerox sues me.

This is my cell phone. It’s a Handspring Treo 300 running PalmOS 3.5. It’s fun and easy to use, and since it’s also a PalmOS device, it’s convenient in lots of other ways (I’m not worried about losing my address book if I lost the phone, for example). I use it as my main email client when I’m traveling. I’ve noticed lately that I tend to use the speakerphone feature on this thing a lot, and I hold the phone in front of me as I speak. Then, when I’m done, I flip the cool lid down with a nice satisfying click.

This is my PDA. It’s a Sony CLIE NX-80V running PalmOS 5.0. I’ve found it to be enormously useful in organizing my life. I keep my address book, my calendar, my to-do list, a calculator, a sketch pad, a web browser, another email client, and a notebook for writing. A lot of my work began life as a couple of paragraphs jotted down in the Palm Memo Pad. I haven’t written a whole play on this thing yet, but I could if I needed to.

The coolest thing about this PDA, though, is that it’s more than just a PDA. It’s also a still photo camera, a movie recorder, and a voice recorder. Imagine that: it records three things…

I don’t know if anyone’s planning to come out with a phaser that runs PalmOS, but I’m pretty sure it’d be a very popular device, and I’d be right in line to get one if I could. I guess once I’ve started down that road, it’s only a matter of time before I started wearing form-fitting shirts in bright primary colors and high-heeled black leather boots, so probably it’s all for the best that no such product exists.

I don’t think it’s an accident that these things look like Star Trek gear. Or maybe the prop guys on Star Trek were just pretty good industrial designers. Either way, I can’t open that Treo without wanting to ask Scotty to beam me up, and I can’t open the CLIE without wanting to scan for lifeforms. If I had the PalmOS phaser, I guess I’d be looking for Klingons or malevolent computers to shoot, so again, it’s probably all for the best that no such product exists.

At what point does it become more trouble than it’s worth to own a computer? Or several? This is the question I’ve been asking myself after a rather hellish string of failures. In the space of a single week, my main computer checked out, my Sony CLIE fizzled, and my office Thinkpad came down with a bad case of Adware. In the process of restoring from these failures, I came dangerously close to the point of fundamentally questioning whether the investment of money, time and energy I put into these machines is really paying a worthwhile dividend.

Now consider. I have been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I have programmed computers for my entire adult life and my whole professional career. Not only do I have a lot of knowledge and experience regarding how to work around computer difficulties, I have also gained a certain level of immunity from computer frustration. Plus, I am fanatical about keeping my data backed up (and so far this week, I haven’t lost any data), so I don’t have any anxiety and frustration around that. But even with these provisions in place, the past week has been really trying. What do ordinary people do when they’re faced with these issues?

I’m starting to think they just grin and bear it, until they can’t take it anymore, and then they just bail. My father was so frustrated by the internet, for example, that he permanently disconnected from it, deciding that email and the web weren’t worth the hassle of spam, viruses and pop-ups. He hasn’t bailed on computers entirely, but I know that he is constantly experiencing inexplicable failures and weird behavior with his applications. He asks me about them –- a lot -– but he uses obscure programs which I am not familiar with (like Serif), and I rarely get a chance to sit down with him at his computer to see the behavior, so I can’t help him much.

Another couple of friends of mine, after valiantly trying to make do in the Windows world, have decided to bail into the Macintosh world. Macs seem to cost more upfront, but apparently they are happier and less frustrated now. That’s not really an option for me, not yet, but who knows? A couple more weeks like this one, and I might be tempted.

I thought my friends and my father were just outliers. I’m beginning to wonder about that now.

So what was my week like?

First to fail, naturally, was my main computer, the one I do most of my work at home with. I have a real love/hate relationship with this laptop, which I bought back in August 2004. When it works, it works great. It’s fast, it’s powerful, and it’s very pretty. The trouble is that in the six months I’ve owned this machine, I have brought it back to the shop to be serviced four times, and it’s been in the shop for a total of about a full month. The last time I brought it in, it was because I had plugged a USB device into the computer, only to watch it turn off like a light bulb. (No blue screen, no restarts, just –- pffft! – dead.) It took the manufacturer a month to decide it wasn’t worth repairing the motherboard, so they just sent me a new machine. This time, I plugged a USB device –- not the same device! – into the computer, and promptly lost the use of all my USB ports. Granted, that’s better, and less panic-inducing, than simply checking out, so that’s an improvement. But it still puts a crimp in my ability to use the computer, because now I can’t print, I can’t use my mouse, I can’t Hotsync. I couldn’t even use the built-in flash card readers, because they’re USB devices internally. So now, for the fourth time, I brought this computer down to the service department (which is an hour’s drive from my home), to be fixed or replaced by, oh who knows? Let’s just say, at some unknown date in the future. Maybe in another couple of weeks. When I complained to the service manager about the level of reliability of this machine, this is what he actually said:

“If you were to come into the store today, I would refuse sale of this machine to you. This machine is pressing the envelope of what’s really possible in a laptop. You’re the sort of customer that falls in love with the specs, and you don’t have a realistic expectation of how reliable these machines really are.”

See? I’m just being unrealistic. It’s clearly unreasonable of me to pay $2500 for a computer and expect better than 80% uptime. It’s just absurd of me to expect that when I plug a USB device into my computer, the machine continues to run. Who ever heard of such a thing?

It will probably take another two, or possibly three or four weeks for this machine to be replaced. They were nice enough to remove the main drive and put it into a nice USB drive enclosure for me, so I’m able to keep working. In the meantime, I’ve renamed this machine to “Hangar Queen”. Fortunately, it’s still under warranty, so it’s only costing me a boatload of my time, and I have the last laptop I bought from these people, which is still running like a champ. (Ironically, I bought the new machine because I’d had such a good experience with this last computer.)

A couple of days after this failure, I put my handheld (a CLIE NX-70V) into its cradle to Hotsync with my work computer. Now this is something I have literally done about 500 times before without any trouble at all. This time, my CLIE decided to check out. In a fashion eerily similar to the experience I had with the laptop, this machine’s screen went black, and it simply stopped working. It wouldn’t react to a hard reset or any other action I could think of.

Well, I can make do without my laptop, especially since we have other computers in the house, but I was really put out by losing my handheld. I’ve had a Palm of some type ever since 1996, and I’ve got practically my entire life encoded on the thing. (Ever since my car got jacked in ‘95, with my Day-Timer in the trunk, I knew I needed a way to keep my data safe, and the original Palm Pilot fit the bill. Since then, I was hooked.) I didn’t lose my Address Book, my Calendar, or my legendary To-Do List: I’ve got it all backed up Nine Ways To Tuesday. But I couldn’t carry it with me without the CLIE.

I don’t know if it was because of my computer dying earlier in the week, or because Sony has discontinued their whole PDA line, but I kind of panicked. Since they’re no longer available in stores, I got on to eBay and immediately bought a replacement CLIE. This was the NX-70’s big brother, the CLIE NX-80V, but I wasn’t going to have it for another few days. Like I said, I was in a bit of a panic. I went down to the local Staples and I bought a brand-new Palm Tungsten T5.

“You did what?” said my wife. “We’re about to have a baby, and I’ve been working hard for the past six months to save money on all the baby gear we have to buy, and you go and blow almost a grand on two new PDAs? I’m OK with you getting one to replace the one that broke. I know how much you rely on that thing. But two? No. You have to return one of them – and get the money back.”

Well, that’s what my wife would say if we were living in TV Land.

In real life, where my wife’s understanding and patience are truly astounding, she said she would really, really like it if I would return one of the two units and get the money back. I told her that I would take a few days, try them both out, and let her know. So I spent about five hours laboriously reconstructing my life on the Tungsten, restoring files and settings from my backups, reinstalling software, and ensuring that everything was safe (It’s about a 20-step process. I know that because I’m thorough. But it wasn’t conceptually hard, just tedious). Then I spent a couple of days living my life out of the Tungsten, to see if I liked it. And so, when the CLIE arrived, I wasn’t sure I wanted to try it. Suppose it was better than the Tungsten? Then I’d have wasted my time, and I’d have to go through the exercise of migrating my data all over again.

In the end, of course, that’s what I did. I found a lot to like about the Tungsten, but in the end, I had to bring it back. It’s a marvelous machine, but there’s not much it does better than the CLIE, and the CLIE does quite a few things better than the Tungsten. Like, it has a camera. And a voice recorder. And Wi-Fi. And it’s faster, even though it’s running a “slower” processor. And I had all these CLIE peripherals around already. And I could put the CLIE into a real cradle. One thing the Tungsten had over the CLIE was that the newer OS5 apps were more polished, and did a few minor things better than the CLIE’s versions. In the end, this didn’t outweigh the value of the CLIE.

So now I had one new live CLIE, and I had one old dead CLIE, and I had just returned the Tungsten, and I was searching on the net for any information about CLIEs dying the way mine had a week ago. And just by accident, I found an article which recommended a procedure I hadn’t tried before; in fact, I had never heard of it before: an “In-Cradle Reset". Since I had nothing to lose, I tried it on my old CLIE, and what do you know? It came up just fine. After all that time and money…

Finally, this past weekend. After all my computer woes, I was looking forward to a nice quiet weekend without any major failures. That’s when my wife said:

“Honey? Can I surf the web using your work laptop?”

Isn’t there a joke that starts this way?

I didn’t think twice about it. What could go wrong? My wife is not a novice computer user. She knows her way around a machine and around the net. She reads the news and her favorite blogs.

So why, after only a few minutes of my wife’s surfing, was my work machine crawling with popups, adware, and spyware?

When she asked me about it, I was surprised. I wasn’t getting any pop-ups or spyware before my wife started surfing. “What did you do?” I asked her, perhaps with a little bit too much of an accusatory tone to my voice.

“Nothing! I was just surfing.”

“With what browser?”

“Internet Explorer.”

That told me pretty much everything I needed to know. See, I don’t use IE on my work machine, except to access a few inhouse applications. For general web surfing on my work machine, I only use Firefox, and I manage the security on Firefox pretty well. Unfortunately, because I only use IE inside a well-protected network firewall, I don’t manage the security there so well, and apparently it only takes a few minutes of surfing before malicious programs take advantage of a poorly-secured instance of IE, and my machine was badly infected. The adware had burrowed deep into the guts of Windows, and IE pop-ups were appearing even when I used Firefox to browse to a site!

The infestation proved to be very hardy and difficult to remove. When I used Spybot – Search and Destroy to clean out the infections, they managed to reinstall themselves by the next reboot. They were hardy little devils. When I used msconfig to disable Startup items which might be reinstalling these applications, I noticed that they were adding themselves back to the startup list! ("Who writes these things?” my wife asked. It’s a good question.) A little bit of detective work actually yielded two Spyware items which had installed themselves just like normal applications, with their own folders, their own start menu entries, even their own uninstallers. One had a text file explaining itself:

“You downloaded Preview AdService from a Website that is able to offer its content for free because it shows the Preview AdService ActiveX popup. The Preview AdService program is installed only once the user has agreed on it by clicking on ‘yes’. Through the ActiveX, the user can review the license terms and privacy policy before installing the software. Each and every distributor is carefully reviewed to make sure that their distribution techniques abide by a strict code of conduct.”

See, that’s total bullshit.

“I never downloaded anything or clicked on any license agreement,” my wife told me, and I believe her. It’s my work machine -– she wouldn’t download anything on it. “All I did was surf to some sites and read.”

It took me a while longer to finish fixing the problems with the pop-ups. In the end, I had to manually delete files from the WindowsSystem32 directory, which I do not recommend for the faint of heart. I kind of think I overdid it, in fact, because now I seem to be unable to connect to my company’s VPN from home. However, otherwise, my work computer seems to be fine, which is a good thing, and the pop-ups have not afflicted it since. Total cost to me: practically the whole weekend. And I still wish I understood what I was doing better.

All three of these little tales of computer woe, different as they are, have a few things in common. In each case, a very large failure occurs for poorly understood reasons, each failure is followed by a tedious restoration to the status quo, and in each case, there is no good reason to expect that it won’t happen again – without warning.

People do not get a kick out of maintaining their computers. They do not derive enjoyment and life value from backing up, troubleshooting, and restoring their computers. They derive enjoyment and value from having access to their applications and data. When a computer fails, it often marks a profound downward shift in the value it represents to the owner. When the owner is someone like me, who has the time, patience, knowledge, experience, and cash to solve the problems, that’s one thing. I’m just put out by my computers. But I think computers have gotten both so complex and so fragile, in such a short period of time, that nonspecialists have no good recourse when their machines fail. They either replace the machines –- if they can afford to -– or they simply stop using the machines. In either case, they usually lose whatever data they had on their machines.

A machine which is not reliable and unobtrusive, which calls attention to itself, which requires undue amounts of bother and care just to stay stable, is not a machine which is creating value. When snarky technicians claim that I’m being unreasonable for demanding an entirely appropriate level of service, they’re not helping the problem.

I’m not sure what it is about my computers I fear more: their unreliability or their opacity. If I could count on my computers more, I wouldn’t care so that they’re black boxes. On the other hand, if I could understand my computer better, I wouldn’t fear their failures so much. But I doubt I’m going to get either wish. The way we build computers, and the software that runs them, seems only to head in the direction of increased complexity, meaning increasingly unstable and insecure systems, exposing fewer clues about their inner state to the user. I wonder whether this will reach a point where it starts to turn off ordinary users, and whether they will turn away from what they view –- correctly, in my judgement – as a hostile technology. I wonder whether that’s already occurring. It almost happened to me this past week.

John Pultorak is my kind of nerd. This guy has built a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer, the computer that flew on the Command Module and Lunar Module of the Apollo manned missions to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Pultorak built the replica over the course of four years of nights and weekends, with some assistance from his son and a lot of understanding patience from his wife.

Recreating a 40-year-old computer is not an easy task, even if the hardware isn’t exactly cutting-edge. Pultorak didn’t just simulate the AGC (although that’s what he did as a first step). He didn’t even just emulate the AGC (i.e. build a modern computer and program it to pretend to be the AGC). He built real hardware which works just like the original. He didn’t replicate the original in all respects, because he discovered that some of the parts which were used to build the original AGC weren’t available any more. (Just try to find core rope memory these days.)

The AGC was definitely cutting-edge for its time (roughly 1962). It was the first digital computer to replace discrete transistors with Integrated Circuits, which were new and risky. It also was the first digital autopilot for any kind of piloted vehicle, and its user interface (the Display and Keyboard Unit or DSKY) was far ahead of its time, even if it seems a little quaint to us, and is one of the earliest examples of a real-time interactive user interface. In the 60s, after all, most computer users interacted with the machine via punch cards and printouts.

Others have implemented simulations of the AGC/DSKY. The Virtual AGC Project is one such effort, and the NASSP Project has implemented a DSKY in their Orbiter add-on (See this image). A more accessible, but less complete, partial implementation of a DSKY can be found here. I recommend it to anyone who is curious but doesn’t want to be overwhelmed. It’s a nice introduction, but it only works in Internet Explorer.

All of these efforts to replicate the space flight experience inside our modern computers are commendable, but for sheer geeky bragging rights, nothing really beats being able to say, as Pultorak can, “I built the real thing myself.”

Since I started scanning the search strings which lead people to my blog, I have found it’s a little addictive. Here are the latest entries.

• “gw bush orwellian slogans”
• “orwellian moments/current events” : Bush and Orwell : they really do go together like Freedom Fries and W Ketchup.
• “jasher 6000 end of world” : You’re looking for Bible passages, and you came to my site? Whatever.
• “i’m so fat that i repulse my husband” : Heartbreak is never in short supply. I wish that wasn’t true.

My web hosting service, like most such services, provides a facility for me to view this site’s statistics, such as how many times the site is visited, which pages are the most popular, etc. (In case you’re wondering, my site doesn’t generate a huge amount of traffic, but there does seem to be a more-or-less regular readership. Thanks, Mom!)

In the very detailed report which my hosting service delivers to me on a daily basis, one of the more interesting headings is called “Search Strings". Did you know that when you type a search term or a set of search terms into Google, or Yahoo, or wherever, your search strings can be passed along to any page that you access by clicking on the links that the search engine displays to you? I didn’t know that, either, and apparently the details of how your search terms are encoded into the referring page’s URL vary with each search engine, so my hosting service can’t deliver a comprehensive report of the search terms which have led people to my site. Still, the ones which do arrive provide an interesting glimpse into the minds of at least some of my visitors. (For example, that most people still haven’t learned how to use quotes to group their search terms. But I digress.) Judge for yourself:

• “asian religious text that predicted the tsunami tribe moves to”: Looking to convert?
• “dell sony bank of america boycott abortion”: Ah, yes. Dell, Sony, and Bank of America. Bring them down, and you end the scourge of abortion forever!
• “george bush on the issue of evolution the verdict is still out”: It’s hard to tell where this person stands on the issue, but at least he knows where George stands.
• Current Favorite - “help me humiliate my husband”: Sorry, lady, I can’t help you.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away".
         – Philip K. Dick