Jim’s Random Notes

I have been carving quite a bit, actually, but haven’t taken the time to post anything here.  I carved quite a few of those little bears while I was in Phoenix, and a few other things, as well.  Here are a few of my miscellaneous doodles.  You can click on any of the pictures below to see the full size image.

I carved this letter opener from a piece of mesquite that I picked up in Phoenix.  After sanding, I put a line of super glue on the edge and sanded it again.  It works really well.  The blade is about 2-1/2 inches long.

This, too, is a letter opener.  It’s 8 inches long, with the handle and blade being of equal size.  The wood is called Indian Rosewood (Dalbergia Sissoo), again from the Phoenix area.  After sanding, I gave it a light coat of mineral oil to bring out the grain.  I like the way it looks, but it doesn’t open letters very well.

The … whatever it is, above, started out as a branch from an oak tree here that didn’t survive last year’s drought.  I had intended to carve one of my little bears, but the wood is so hard that I became frustrated.  It’s kind of cute, but mostly a very good reminder of just how hard it is to carve oak.  The piece is 3 inches tall and about 1.25 inches in diameter.

This little doodle is another piece of Indian Rosewood.  I started just whittling a relief that curved around to capture each knot on the branch.  Somewhere along the line I got the idea to try making a corkscrew.  Nothing more than a curiousity, really.

I carved all of the above pieces with my Buck pocket knife.  There’s nothing real special about the knife other than it’s quite a bit sharper now than when I bought it.

I know these pieces aren’t exactly high art, but working on them did keep me amused and occupied during a particularly difficult period.

We’ve all experienced it, the anger and frustration that ensues when we try to open one of those clamshell packages that contain whatever new geegaw we picked up.  You can’t open it with your bare hands.  Normal office scissors are ineffective.  If you’re lucky you can puncture that plastic armor with your pocketknife, and if you’re lucky you won’t cut yourself with the blade or with the packaging itself.

The term for these feelings is wrap rage.  Consumer Reports officially recognized the phenomenon in 2006 when it created the Oyster Awards for products that are particularly hard to open.

It’s so comforting to know that I’m not alone.  A YouTube search for “wrap rage” results in almost 100 hits, including local television news stories, product demonstrations, and parodies of all sorts.  It’s the product demonstrations that amuse me more than anything else.  Some resourceful entrepreneurs who experienced wrap rage themselves decided to make a buck.  There are dozens of different devices designed to simplify the process of opening the clamshells.  Millions of units have been sold.

Amusingly, some of those devices are themselves distributed in clamshell packages, resulting in something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

The reason for this type of packaging is apparently theft deterrence.  If things are that hard to open, it’s unlikely that a thief will be able to remove small items from oversized packages and slip them into a purse or pocket.  I suppose it works, but at what cost?  Large retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are willing to annoy and inconvenience their customers with these packages rather than come up with a less intrusive way to deter shoplifting.

I have to admit that I’m surprised by the almost complete lack of outcry by the environmental movement regarding these packages.  Small items, especially, are often surrounded by many times their weight in protective plastic–plastic that more often than not ends up in landfills because even dedicated recyclers often don’t know whether the clamshell packaging is recyclable.  Environmentalist groups boycotted Big Macs back when they came in Styrofoam containers.  But clamshell packages?  I hear crickets.

I’m also surprised that, as much as people complain about these packages (and I don’t know anybody who extols their virtues), there hasn’t been a huge revolt by consumers.  Why aren’t there more people (or more vocal people) agitating for the abolition of this unfriendly, environmentally harmful, and dangerous to open packaging?  Again with the crickets.

After fighting one time too many with opening an armor plastic package to get at something that I found wasn’t worth all the effort, I will now make a concerted effort to avoid those packages whenever possible.  I’m done risking life and limb to open things.  If retailers want to sell me stuff, they’ll have to make it convenient for me to buy and to open.

I use Horde for my web-based email here at mischel.com.  Not because I particularly like it, but because it’s the best of the three options I’m given by my ISP.  The other two options are Squirrel Mail (aptly tagged “Webmail for Nuts!” because you’d have to be nuts to use it), and the interestingly named RoundCube Webmail, which is two oxymorons in one.  Not that Horde is so much better.  It’s just the best of three bad options.  To date, it hasn’t aggravated me enough to make me want to go to the trouble of switching.

Tonight I went searching in my Trash folder for a message.  Since their search function is, to be kind, somewhat lacking, I figured I could more easily find the message by sorting the folder by the From field.  Then just scroll down to the ‘M’s, (the message in question was from my sister Marie) and locate it.  So I sorted, scrolled down, and … there were no messages from Marie!  Where are they?  Why, they’re sorted further down with the ‘O’s, of course, because her email address starts with ‘O’.

That’s just stupid.  I could maybe understand it if the program showed me the email addresses in the From field, but it doesn’t.  It shows me the name.  So what I have is a list that’s sorted by email address, but shown in what appears to be random order.  You want a sample?  How about the following?  The first column shows the names as they appear in the list when I sort by the From field.  The second column shows the email addresses, which aren’t shown in the user interface.

I think you get the idea.  If you’re searching for that email from Amazon, are you going to look for it with the rest of the ‘A’s, or with the ‘M’s?

(Spammers and email harvester bots, please pick up those email addresses and spam the hell out of them.  They do it to me.)

Is there any wonder that people think computers are confusing?  What moron decided that sorting by email address and displaying the name would be a reasonable user interface?  Whoever designed and implemented that should be sentenced to three months working with Microsoft’s Business Desk, as well as a boot camp like refresher course in user interface design.

The really odd part is that sorting things the way they did it is more work than doing it the way that makes sense.  The From field in an email address appears in one of two ways:  either it’s a naked email address (jim@mischel.com), or it’s a name followed by an email address in brackets (Jim Mischel <jim@mischel.com>).  A simple sort by the From field would have placed things in the proper order:  by name if there is one, otherwise by email address.  To sort the wrong way, they had to parse the From field, extract the email addresses, and then sort.

More work to produce less useful output.  Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Idiots.

I’ve had enough.  I’m looking for a better email solution.  It has to be web-based, and it has to let me keep my current email address.  Oh, and the interface has to be at least as good as Yahoo’s.  (And I’d rather not use Yahoo for my email because it does stupid things.)  Preferably, I can keep my current ISP and either change the DNS entry for mail, or I can have the other mail provider reach to my ISP and get the mail.  Either way, I have to free my email from the Hordes.  Suggestions?

I still have a hard time referring to the new crop of mass storage devices as “flash drives.” The “flash” part is correct, seeing as they’re built with flash memory, but the “drive” part is just … wrong. There aren’t any moving parts. It’s like referring to “dialing” a telephone. Or the telephone “ringing.” You don’t hear that good ol’ Ma Bell … bell … anymore.

In any case, solid state storage has come a very long way in the two years since I last talked about it.  You no longer have to build your own device from parts cobbled together.  Today you can get flash “drives” in the 2.5″ form factor with capacities up to 512 gigabytes.  That’s right, half a terabyte of solid state storage.  Granted, the 512 GB units are ridiculously expensive, but the 128 GB units are pretty reasonable.  We just got one in the office for about $300, delivered.  That’s expensive compared to conventional storage ($2.35 per gigabyte compared to 10 cents per gigabyte), but it’s still an incredible deal.  It’s less than you would have paid for a 128 gigabyte hard drive five years ago.

The new crop of solid state storage devices really is worth taking a look at.  The one we got (G.Skill Falcon), claims throughput of 230 MB/sec on read and 190 MB/sec on write.  In initial tests, we were able to sustain very close to the 230 MB/sec read rate, and our sustained write rate was close to 150 MB/sec.  That’s about three times as fast as we can read a convential hard drive, and four times as fast as we can write.  We won’t be replacing all of our hard drives with these units, but we certainly can use the speed in a couple of critical I/O-bound applications.

Earlier generations of these solid state storage devices had some interesting limitations.  The first generation units were almost universally slower than or, at best, just a little faster than conventional hard drives.  Many of them also used more power than a spinning hard drive.  And some were just unreliable.  Things have improved quite a bit.  Hard drive manufacturers have gotten power consumption down to the 6 or 7 watts range, but that’s still 50% more than the 4 watts or so that the SSDs are taking.

The cost per gigabyte is huge and even a 200% performance increase doesn’t justify that price for the normal user.  But imagine you’re a developer with a laptop computer that has the typical slow laptop hard drive.  A lot of my development tools are I/O bound on my laptop.  Just try starting up Visual Studio some time.  Tripling the I/O throughput could very well greatly improve the development experience on that machine.  That would be $300 well spent.

There are other advantages of SSDs besides the performance boost, but again they won’t justify the cost increase for the average user.  The reduced power consumption mentioned above is less of a benefit than you might think because the hard drive takes relatively little power when compared to the CPU, RAM, and display.  Still, any little bit helps by reducing generated heat and increasing battery life.  Shock resistance and temperature tolerance are much higher on the SSDs, and since there are no moving parts the thing is absolutely silent.  It seems that the lack of moving parts would make the thing more reliable, too, but it’s hard to say.  I don’t know if I can believe the 500,000 hour (57  year) MTBF that hard drive manufacturers claim, much less the 1.5 million hours claimed by the SSDs.

One of my coworkers pointed out that the SSD or something similar is essential to private pilots who are flying unpressurized aircraft over 10,000 feet.  Modern avionics packages often include computers that display moving maps and download real time weather data.  That data has to be stored somewhere, and a conventional hard drive becomes unreliable at high altitude because  there isn’t enough air to float the head over the platter.  Considering what avionics packages cost, an additional $300 for an SSD wouldn’t even be noticed.

I wouldn’t recommend the SSDs for normal users, simply because of the high cost per gigabyte.  But if you need a relatively inexpensive way to increase your I/O throughput, if your computer has to run in areas that are outside a conventional hard drive’s operating environment, or if you just want to have the latest geeky toy, then by all means pick one of these up.

A while back, a wind storm tore a branch from one of our elm trees.  Figuring it’d make good fodder for my new found carving hobby, I trimmed it, stripped the bark, and put it up in the rafters of my garage to dry.  All except for one piece:

I knew immediately what I wanted to make from it, but I left it sitting on my desk for months because I was afraid I’d mess it up.  Last week I cut most of the jagged end off with my coping saw, and started carving.

The resulting piece is just under 6 inches long from toe to heel.  It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I did all the carving with a utility knife (box cutter) and my pocket knife.  For finish, I just sanded it and then let it soak in mineral oil overnight.

More pictures in the gallery.

Kameeke got her name from the little boy next door whose attempt to say “come here, kitty” sounded like “ka mee kee.”  Debra acquired the cat in early June of 1989, about two months before we met.

Kameeke had been a part of our lives from the first time I went to pick Debra up for a date.  Debra showed me in and asked me to sit for a few minutes while she finished getting ready to go.  She said that the dog (Sandy) didn’t like men very much and would probably be standoffish.  The cat, she said, was unlikely to appear, as she always hid when company came over.

When Debra came back downstairs after about five minutes, the dog was plastered against my leg on the couch, and Kameeke was curled up in my lap, purring.  When she saw that, Debra says, she figured I couldn’t be all bad.  If the cat and dog liked me, there must be something good about me.

Kameeke wasn’t a hugely affectionate cat.  She’d come by now and then for some loving, but then would hop down and go off to her corner.  She liked being in the same room as the rest of the family, but didn’t need to be reassured every moment.  That suited me just fine, as I don’t think I could handle having a cat lying on my chest and drooling on my face all the time.  A few minutes here and there was quite sufficient.

Kameeke carried her age well.  She started slowing down, of course, but she’d still tear through the house from time to time, and she never lost her fascination with string.  It was only just recently that the years started catching up with her.  At some point we realized that “cure” wasn’t an option, and when it became evident that all of our efforts were just prolonging her suffering, we acknowledged that it was time to let her go.

We’re richer from having known her for 20 years: countless smiles, some real belly laughs, and most importantly the love she showed when she crawled up and asked to be petted while she purred.  We’ll miss having her, but will always remember.

Rest well, Kameeke.

It’s been a long trip—about two weeks longer than we expected it to be.  But that’s the way these things go sometimes.  Debra’s dad was in the hospital, in a rehab facility, in ICU after a procedure called kyphoplasty, and finally in a hospice facility where he’ll likely stay.

To say that it’s been a difficult time would be an understatement.  One of the most difficult parts has been dealing with bureaucracy.  So much so that I have said, more times than I care to remember, “The wheels of bureaucracy grind you under very slowly.”

I often release tension by blogging, but I don’t feel quite comfortable detailing what all we’ve been through in the last three weeks.  Perhaps some time from now, when emotions aren’t quite so high and I can reflect on things a bit more clearly.

One thing I’d like to mention, though, is that the ICU nurses do a very difficult and demanding job, sometimes while having to deal with uncooperative or even abusive patients and family members.  And yet they go about their tasks competently and seem to always have a smile.  I was so impressed with their work that I carved them a little bear in recognition of their efforts.

I don’t suppose the nurses are terribly impressed with my carving skill, but they seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment.

It’s 9:30 PM on Friday in Phoenix.  Debra and I will be on the road by 6:00 AM.  From where we are in the West Valley, it’s about 1,100 miles to home.  Figure 17 or 18 hours.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

The New York Pizza Department in Goodyear, AZ serves the best pizza I’ve had the privilege of enjoying in a very long time.  Of course, it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get the pizza once you order it, and it ain’t cheap.  But it’s good.  Debra especially liked the white pizza:  ricotta cheese, fresh tomatoes, fresh spinach, garlic, and mozzarella.  My pepperoni and sausage with fresh basil was quite good, too.  Highly recommended.

Debra saw a beer called Four Peaks Kiltlifter on the drink menu there at NYPD.  Always willing to try a new beer, I ordered one.  What a delight!  This beer has some very good flavor.  A little sweet, and a smoky flavor that at first reminds you of baker’s chocolate.  At 6% alcohol you probably don’t want to have more than two of them in a short period.  We’re going to buy at least a sixpack of this stuff to take home.  Maybe I can figure out how to duplicate it.  Again, highly recommended.

Another beer I recommend is Red Hook ESB.  It’s a lot more popular now than when I last had it several years ago, but it’s as good as I remember it.

There’s a Black Bear Diner here, just across the parking lot from the hotel.  Debra and I have eaten there three times now, enjoying our 10% hotel guest discount.  The service is definitely better than what you’ll get at the big chain pancake places, and the food is very good.  My only gripe is that the portions are huge.  Even the “smaller” portions are more than I normally eat in a single meal.  I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to find a Black Bear, but if there’s one nearby when I’m hungry, they’ll get my business.

I don’t claim to be a great user interface designer, but I’ve designed a few programs that people have found useful.  And, like many computer users, I know a bad design when I have to struggle with one.  And, like users of other devices, we know when the interface is cumbersome.  It’s a sad thing, really, that we often don’t recognize good designs, but rather just the flawed ones.

The motel room here in Goodyear is nice enough, but it has some oddities, one of which is particularly annoying.  First, the room layout.

As you can see, the room was designed to accept two beds, but this one is fitted with a bed and a fold-out couch.  That’s all well and good and, as I said, it’s comfortable enough.   But putting the bed right next to the HVAC unit wasn’t such a good move.  The bed should be over where the couch is.  That would make entry into the room much less cluttered, and would allow air from the HVAC unit to circulate better.

The room also includes a writing table on the other wall, along with a dresser with a TV and a refrigerator/microwave stand.

It’s actually a pretty nice table with enough space for me to put my laptop and work reasonably comfortably.  Except for one thing:  it’s too high.  The table top is 32 or 33 inches from the floor.  Standard desk height is 29 to 30 inches.  That extra two or three inches makes a huge difference.  Without an extra cushion in the chair (I knew that couch was put here for a reason), I feel like a little kid sitting at the big kids’ table without a booster seat.  The table would be perfect height except for the casters.  For some reason somebody decided it’d be a good idea if the table could roll.

Finally, the bathtub fixture is just a bad idea:

The instructions read:

1. To turn WATER ON – Move HANDLE UP
2. To turn WATER OFF – Move HANDLE DOWN
3. For HOT WATER – Move HANDLE UP and to LEFT
4. For COLD WATER – Move HANDLE UP and to RIGHT
5. Once Water is Running, Move Handle Right to Left until you have Desired Water Temperature.

Please to not twist or turn handle, as this will break the shower handle.  For help, please call front desk.

Thank you for your Cooperation!

You just know that the instruction placards were printed and placed after guests had destroyed several fixtures.  I can only hope that the people who selected those fixtures don’t make that mistake again!

Phoenix is crazy.  I thought the Austin area was overbuilt with new housing developments, shopping centers, and strip malls.  Austin has nothing on Phoenix.  Friday we drove the 101 freeway from Scottsdale to Peoria, skirting around the city on the north.  It was like driving through one huge shopping mall.

Saturday we drove out to Buckeye (20 miles west) through yet more shopping malls and strip centers.  There are plenty of new housing developments, some of which have a huge number of vacant houses.  I also saw many “Coming Soon” signs for retail or residential developments that have been abandoned in various stages of completion.

I think what surprises me most is that I can’t see how the number of new homes could even come close to supporting the glut of retail development we saw.  They overbuilt on an astonishing scale.  How they managed to forget the lessons of 20 years ago, when the Phoenix area was one of the hardest hit by the S&L crisis, is beyond me.  I suppose everybody was once again saying, “this time is different.”  It wasn’t.

We managed to arrive in Phoenix during NASCAR weekend.  Phoenix International Raceway is in Avondale, which is right next door to the city of Goodyear, where we want to stay.  But with the race, hotel rates are sky high:  the Super 8 Motel wants $155 per night!  We stayed the first two nights with family in Scottsdale, but it’s 50 miles from the hospital.  Last night we stayed with another family friend out west, but he doesn’t have Internet access and we really do need to be connected.  We’re hoping that we can get a reasonably priced hotel after tonight.

Right now I’m sitting in the Starbucks inside the Safeway grocery store in Goodyear, AZ, connected to their wireless.  Free wifi is a wonderful thing for checking email or making a blog entry, but I don’t think I could do any serious work here.

Debra and I are on our way to Phoenix, driving rather than flying because we’ll be there a week or so and will need a car to get around. We left home just before 6:00 this morning. We’ve covered the 650 miles from Round Rock to Las Cruces, NM in 10 hours. You can really eat up the miles on I-10 in West Texas with the 80 MPH speed limit.

Debra’s driving now while I check my email and make a blog entry using the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection supplied by the company she works for. It’s not especially fast, but we’ve had pretty good service throughout the trip. Ain’t technology wonderful?

It’s been 12 years since the last time I made this trip, and things have changed quite a bit. I’m especially interested in finding out more about the wind farm near Bakersfield, TX. There are hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of wind turbines lining the ridges along a 20+ mile stretch of I-10. With the speed of this Internet connection, it’d probably take me until my battery expires to find more info. So that’ll have to wait until I’m checked in at my hotel in Phoenix.

New road food: Doritos Toro Habanero chips. Yum!

Update:  It’s called Indian Mesa Wind Farm.  The Web site says that there are 125 turbines producing up to 83 megawatts.  I know I saw more than 125 turbines in that area.

1,050 miles.  16.5 hours.  I’m beat.

Goldie is my third 5 Minute Bear. It’s made of basswood, about 3 inches tall and 1 inch square.  I named it Goldie because I painted it with a very thin gold paint.

This is not (yet?) really a five minute project.  It took me about an hour to carve, and another 15 minutes or so to paint.  Still, it’s a far cry from the many days it took to create Pounce the cat.

I completed the cat carving Friday evening.  This morning I gave it a first coat of mineral oil and took a few pictures.

I call the cat Pounce, because that’s what it looks like he’s doing: crouching on the shelf, ready to pounce on anybody who walks by.  Pounce is about 4.5″ from nose to tip of tail, and about 1.5″ from the shelf to the tip of his ear.

I did this carving without instruction, starting from three pictures (top, side, front).  I’d carve a little, then look at the piece and the pictures trying to figure out how to free the cat from the wood.  The result doesn’t look a whole lot like the pattern, but it does resemble a cat.  So I’ll call it a success.

I’m going back to simpler carvings for a bit, to learn a little more about technique.  First stop:  the five minute bear.

I started carving a kind of cartoon cat a few months ago, but then got busy with other (non-carving) things, and only recently got back to the cat.  If all goes well I should complete it this weekend.

I found the Woodcarving Illustrated message board shortly after I started carving back in November.  There’s an unbelievable wealth of knowledge there, and the members are, as a rule, very willing to answer questions.  They’re extremely patient with beginners.  As with any message board, the quality of answers varies widely, but the experienced carvers really do provide excellent advice.

Many of the carvers post picture or video tutorials that show, step by step, how to make various types of carvings.  For example, Lynn Doughty’s Out West Woodcarving blog has dozens of projects with detailed instructions and sometimes hundreds of photos on the accompanying Picasa photo album.  I consider Lynn’s projects a bit beyond my current abilities, but perhaps I’m just being timid.  I’ll certainly look into them when I’m ready to try caricatures.

Gene Messer, another very skilled carver who frequents the forum, started making video tutorials and posting them on YouTube.  I’ve watched a few of the videos and, although I haven’t yet tried to do the lessons, I’m pretty sure they will be very effective.  As soon as I finish my cat, I’m going to try my hand at his 5-Minute Bear project.  He has a couple of other short and simple projects that look very appealing.  The 5-Minute Wizard, for example, would make a great Christmas tree ornament.

It’s no surprise that carvers specialize.  But I was pretty surprised at how narrowly some specialize.  There’s a fairly large subgroup, for example, that specializes in carving Santas.  Arleen, a carver from Pennsylvania, has produced a couple dozen videos that walk you through carving simple Santa figures.  She also includes basic carving techniques and some information about painting.  She, too, makes the carving seem very approachable.

I’m simply astounded at the wealth of information out there.  For free!  Even five years ago, you would have had to spend hundreds of dollars on DVDs or classes in order to get the quality information that you can find for free now on YouTube and on carvers’ blogs.  The sites I mentioned above are just a sampling of what I’ve found in my brief research.  There are surely more, on many different topics.

If you’re interested in carving—or in any other craft, come to think of it—you’ll probably be able to find a lot of very good tutorial videos on YouTube.  Take a look.  What have you got to lose?

Earlier this week, Time Warner Cable announced plans to expand their use of metered broadband:  charging customers by the gigabyte rather than providing the all-you-can-slurp service we’ve come to know and love.  As a TWC customer, I have mixed feelings about this.  I realize that they’re in business to make money.  But as a government-protected monopoly (a practice with which I strongly disagree), they should have a moral responsibility—if not a legal responsibility—to upgrade their networks in order to provide the best possible service.  It’s not like the explosion of media and online gaming came as any surprise.  If they can’t provide adequate service at reasonable prices, then they should lose their monopoly protection.

TWC is also harassing business customers who actually try to use the bandwidth they’ve contracted for.  Customers who have been guaranteed 10 Mbps service, for example, get phone calls when their usage approaches 75% of that.  As a TWC business customer, my feelings on this practice are not mixed at all.  They contracted to provide a certain level of service, and they should honor that commitment.

J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan, offers 160 Mbps service for about $60 per month.  They had to invest about $20 per home in order to upgrade their systems to support it.  Seems to me that, rather than trying to charge more for less, U.S. companies should learn from J:Com.  They’d make more money and have happier customers.

Cable companies, by the way, are in danger of becoming no more than utility providers.  With sites like Hulu and programs like Boxee, you can view TV programs and movies from your Internet connection.  Why pay a middleman who wants to sell you two good channels and a package of crap when you can get everything for free? 

This conflict of interest could be a major reason why U.S. cable operators are reluctant to provide inexpensive high-bandwidth connections.  Doing so would further cannibalize their cable television operations.

Content creators, too, need to start thinking about how they’ll get paid.  Without the cable company packaging model, pay channels will have to sign up individual subscribers.  Ad-supported channels will likely have to find a format other than the traditional commercial break every 10 minutes.

I think motion picture studios are okay for a while. People are still willing to pay $10.00 or more for the privilege of watching movies in a theatre on opening weekend. However, I think DVD sales will begin to decline as more people move to on-demand video services.

Since its inception, the whole business of media has been based on the scarcity of content.  Today, Internet users have almost infinite choice.  A large portion of what’s available is dreck, but there’s a lot of really good stuff out there, too.  Big record labels are in their final death throes due in large part to the ubiquity of good music available for free or by direct purchase from the artist.  As bandwidth and storage become cheaper, cable companies and video media providers will find it increasingly more difficult to make money in the old way.

Companies like Time Warner Cable, who cling to the old idea of scarcity as the way to make money, will find themselves losing customers to companies who make it their business to provide high quality service at reasonable rates.  As far as I’m concerned, it can’t happen soon enough.

For most of the ’90s, I was a part of TeamB—a group of volunteers who helped answer questions on Borland’s Compuserve forums.  I met a bunch of really great people doing that, got some free Compuserve time, a few trips to the Bay Area, and lots of Borland products.  But mostly, I learned a heck of a lot by helping to answer users’ questions.

When Borland, Microsoft, and other development tool companies moved their online technical support to the Internet, their support was mostly done through newsgroups, and I found the signal-to-noise ratio there almost unbearable.  Except for the moderated newsgroups, which were few and far between, asking a question was like talking to a wall.  Worse, even, because a wall won’t give you wrong answers or call you stupid for doing something different.  Even with the advent of forums rather than newsgroups, online technical help was virtually non-existent for a number of years and I just stopped trying.

Enter Stack Overflow, a free programming Q&A site where you can ask questions, share your expertise, or just browse for nuggets of programming wisdom.  Stack Overflow works.  In many ways it works better than the old Borland Compuserve forums that I enjoyed so much.

Why it works is simple: they’ve found a way to reward people for supplying good answers and, to a lesser extent, asking good questions.  It all has to do with reputation:  ego.  You gain reputation points for supplying good answers, and asking good questions.  “Good” is determined by a simple up- or down-votes by site users.  As you gain reputation points, you gain the ability to help moderate the site: re-tag questions, vote to close, edit questions, etc.  And your current reputation is prominently displayed beside your name.  There are also awards (”Badges”) given for a number of different things.

If you don’t care about reputation, that’s fine.  You can use the site anonymously and still ask, answer, and comment on questions.  But Stack Overflow works because a whole lot of people there do care about their reputations.  Giving more experienced users the ability to help moderate keeps the flaming and other invective to a minimum, and the constant peer review ensures that (in general) the higher-rated answers really are the best.

My only real complaint with Stack Overflow (and it’s not huge) is that the format doesn’t encourage an ongoing threaded discussion as was available on the Compuserve forums.  That’s not a problem in most cases, but there are times when arriving at a satisfactory answer requires much back-and-forth, and it’d be nice to see questions and answers displayed in threaded newsgroup fashion.  The ability to see answers ordered by date helps a lot, as does the comments feature, and I suspect that adding a threaded view would be of only limited additional help.

Despite a few nitpicks, I’m seriously impressed with Stack Overflow.  If you have a programming question on any topic, you should search for the answer there.  And if you don’t find it, ask.  You’ll probably be surprised at the speed and the quality of the answers you get.

My dad’s mother was a coin collector.  When I was seven or eight years old, she bought me a Whitman folder to fill with pennies from 1941.  Grandma Mischel taught me to always check my change for pennies that I needed to fill my book, and also for certain other coins (for example, dimes, quarters, and halfs minted before 1964, because they contain 90% silver).

For those difficult-to-find coins needed to fill my penny book, she suggested that I go to the bank and buy several rolls of pennies.  That worked, although I probably went through 20 rolls before I got all the coins I needed.  Filling the non-labeled spots in the book (probably four years’ worth–up through 1975) was trivial.  I just had to wait a few years.

When she was younger my grandmother would go through her change periodically and pick out the interesting ones.  She apparently stopped doing that at some time.  When she passed away, she left many jars full of coins.  As I recall, a sampling of the jars showed that most of the coins were worth no more than their face value and the jars were sold by weight.  Some collector ended up with thousands of coins that he had to sort through, by hand, to find the few that had any numismatic value.

Looking at my own change jar (Debra and I throw all of our change into a vase and then cash it in once it’s full), I got to wondering about whether there are any valuable coins in there.  I know there are a few coins that would carry a small premium (for example, a one-cent piece minted before 1959–a “wheat penny”–is typically worth two to five cents), but it’s unlikely that there are any coins that would carry a huge premium.

I could go through the coins manually and extract those few that are worth more than face value, but it’s a terribly tedious task, and I’d probably miss a few either through inattention or because I’m not a collector:  I don’t know enough to know which coins I should be interested in.  For example, until yesterday I’d never heard of the Wisconsin quarter error or the 1995 double-die Lincoln cent. 

Coin sorters have been around for decades, but most are purely mechanical devices that sort based on size.  I got to wondering if it’d be possible to create a coin recognizer that could look at a dime, say (identified as a dime by a coin sorter, most likely), and determine if it’s a Mercury dime or a Roosevelt dime, and read the mint date.  Based on the type and date, the machine could put the possibly rare coins in a different slot.  All of the common coins would get bagged or rolled.

There’s been some research on image-based recognition of ancient coins in an attempt to prevent or at least diminish the trade in stolen coins, and I found another paper called Classification of coins using an eigenspace approach, but I haven’t found anything commercially available.

How hard would it to be to build such a thing?  How quickly could it classify coins?  It’d be a very interesting project to work on, and it’s kind of fun to contemplate the possibilities, but would this device be practical?

One of the benefits of what I’m doing for work (we’re building a media search and discovery site) is that I find all kinds of different music all over the Web.  Sure, there’s lots of commercial music out there that shouldn’t be, but it’s a relatively small part of what’s there.  The crawler’s incredible breadth has allowed me to find lots of new (to me) music from many independent artists who post samples or full songs on their Web sites.  They know that their biggest problem is getting people to discover them.  Piracy is a problem only for hugely popular artists.  Small artists’ biggest enemy is obscurity.

A good example is guitarist and composer Randy Ellefson, whose music I discovered on an instrumental podcast.  I’ve become quite a fan of his music (I like early ’70s rock,  which his music resembles), and I’m impressed by the way he’s making his music available.  He allows podcasters (with permission) to feature his songs in their podcasts, and he also makes some of his songs available on his Web site.  For example, he’s released two albums.  On his main page, you can listen to four full songs from each album.  There are also links where you can download a half dozen songs:  three from each album.

Randy Ellefson, like many independent artists, understands that giving away a few full tracks encourages people to buy the rest.  He also accepts PayPal as well as credit cards, so purchasing his music is incredibly convenient.  If more artists made their music as easy to find and buy, we wouldn’t need the big record companies.

When developing a new program—especially when trying out many different things—it’s common to pepper your code with various messages that are displayed when the program reaches a particular point or when it encounters a condition that you thought was impossible.  I suspect every programmer has run into a message or assertion that says, “this can’t happen.”  The joke is that it did happen.

It’s also common to be pretty liberal with terse comments that are little more than notes to oneself about the current technique being tried.

Both are understandable.  Every programmer I’ve known has done similar things.  However, it’s also quite common to leave those comments and messages in the code after the problem is solved and you’ve moved on to other things.  Particularly in a fast-paced environment, you often have little time to go through and “clean up” your code once you have it working.  And therein lies the problem.

All too often those comments and debug error messages are…well, let’s just say “colorful.”   In addition, programmers are known to editorialize in their comments—often to the point of ranting.

You may think that when you’re working by yourself or in a small team, such things shouldn’t matter.  After all, you know that your fellow team members won’t be offended by your use of colorful language.  Thinking that way is a mistake because eventually somebody else is going to see your code.  Perhaps you’ll bring on a new team member who is offended.  Or maybe you’ll want to present the code as a sample in an interview for your next job.

Either of those two would be embarrassing.  But suppose one of your colorful messages pops up on the screen when your boss is demonstrating the program to a potential client.  That could be disastrous.  I’ve seen it happen.  Fortunately it wasn’t one of my colorful error messages.

You’re mistaken if you think that source code comments pose less of a problem.  I was involved with a company that was acquired by another, and part of the “due diligence” involved having the acquiring company’s lead programmers look over the source code.  They were mostly looking for stuff that shouldn’t be there (stolen code, for example), and verifying that everyting that should be there, was.  Early on, one reviewer stumbled upon a long and profane ranting comment in the source code and as a result was highly critical of all the code he reviewed.  Fair or not, that one comment colored his perception of the entire project.

Even if you’re working by yourself, the likelihood of your code being seen by others is very high.  The likelihood of somebody else seeing the output from your programs is even higher.  People will judge you by the contents of your comments and error messages, just as they will judge you by the quality of your code and how well your programs work.

Unless you’re absolutely certain that your program will not be seen by anybody else, you should treat it like any other type of formal communication.  You wouldn’t include profanity or ranting editorializing in a design document you’re presenting to a client, so such things shouldn’t be in your programs.

Our amateur radio club is in the process of starting another class for people interested in getting their ham radio license.  One of the more difficult tasks is finding a place to hold the classes.  We need a room that’ll hold 25 or 30 people, available after hours or on weekends, and free.  We don’t charge for the classes, so we can’t afford to pay for a room.

In Round Rock, a local hospital has generously donated use of a conference room on Saturday mornings.  That’s great for people in north Austin, Round Rock, and Georgetown, but people who live in central or south Austin are understandably reluctant to drive all that way.  We finally found a place in central Austin, but telling people where it is has become something of a comedy.

The Combined Transportation, Emergency, and Communications Center (CTECC) in Austin brings several state, county, and municipal government agencies together under one roof so they can share command-and-control resources in the area.  It houses traffic management and emergency communications for public safety.  The agencies involved include:

• City of Austin (911 dispatch, police, fire, EMS)
• Travis County (911 dispatch, sheriff, constable)
• Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the local bus system)
• Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) for the freeway

That’s all well and good, but where is it?  Searching the Web for “CTECC Austin” leads to any number of articles about what it is and what it does, but the only location I could find amounts to “on Old Manor Road at the old Mueller Airport.”

So I thought I’d ask for the address on my club’s mailing list.  All I got was a bunch of confusing directions with questionable landmarks and that ended in “look for the building with all the antennas on top.”  No published street address because, as one person said, “they have a real Homeland Security concern in advertising their presence.”

That’s just silly.  I can’t imagine that hiding their street address will inconvenience anybody who has evil intentions.  “I was going to attack the Austin emergency communications facility, but I couldn’t find their street address.”

If “Homeland Security” is the real reason that I can’t find an address for this facility, then they probably shouldn’t advertise its existence at all and they certainly shouldn’t allow a bunch of amateur radio operators and students to use their facility.  Or will they make us submit to a detailed Homeland Security background check before they allow us on premises?

Sorry, but I don’t buy the “Homeland Security” excuse for not posting an address.  Anybody have a real reason?

By the way, a little fiddling with Google Maps reveals an approximate address of 5020 Old Manor Road.  Am I going to get a visit from Homeland Security for posting that?