Wednesday, December 31, 2003


Amazing Amount of Time Wasted Repairing Computers in December


During the month of December, I tried an experiment. Every time something went wrong with one of the computers here in the Brain household, I made a note of it in my blog.

My goal was to see how much time I waste in a typical month on computer problems/maintenance. Prior to this experiment, I had a vague notion that I was spending a fair amount of time on this kind of stuff. This experiment has brought the actual amount of time into sharp focus.

Having done the experiment, it is amazing to me how many problems a tiny home network can create. Over the course of one month, I logged 21 different errors/problems/activities that wasted time. Here they are:11 hours and 20 minutes is a lot of time, but I would consider December to be a fairly "normal" month for me. I had a problem roughly every 36 hours. And this does not include "normal stuff" like the time wasted deleting spam messages that make it through the filters, or clearing pop-up ads (Google's ad blocker is a nice piece of software for eliminating most of that), or loading software that I actually have purchased and want to use, etc. This is just the time wasted on abnormalities, repairs, problems, etc. that cropped up on a random basis.

If you were to extrapolate this across all of the computer users in the nation, it would add up to millions and millions of wasted man-hours every month. For example, I have a friend at this moment who is reloading OS-X and all her applications on her Mac for the third time this year (a 2-day to 3-day process). I have another friend who is getting cut off from email every week or so and has to reload all the settings. As I mentioned, my mother had a hard disk crash in November that took several days to recover from. And so on. It is just amazing how much time we, as a nation, are wasting on this kind of stuff.

Here are some suggestions for how things could get better:

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Computer Repair #21


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

If Time Warner had managed to keep it together for just one more day, it could have made it through an entire month without a single problem. Alas, today TW had a serious failure and makes it into the December log of computer repairs.

I use a Time Warner Road Runner connection to access the Internet, and have used TW for nearly two years. This morning I tried to open a browser window and got nothing. It looked identical to the problem discussed in Computer Repair #19, so I powered off the cable modem and the router and turned them back on. That did not help. When I tried pinging an outside server like www.google.com I would get something like this:Sometimes all four requests would time out, but never more than two of the four ping requests would work. The effect was a complete Internet blackout.

I called Time Warner and they told me that much of the area was experiencing this problem. All I could do was wait. The Internet blackout ended at 2PM, so the TW network in Cary, NC was out of commission for at least 8 hours today.

Time spent on this repair today (trying things out on my end, and then calling TW): About 30 minutes. Total time affected by the failure: 8 hours.

If it were an 8-hour power failure affecting that many people, it would have made the news. Since it was a computer failure and computer failures are so common, no one even noticed it.

This is unrelated, but while talking to TW they asked me to reconfigure my network for several different tests and that required several reboots. I noticed this "USB SIRCS" icon next to the Start button in the task bar on two occasions:



I have noticed it previously but have never gotten an image of it. I have no idea what it is. Is it something to worry about? Is is part of a virus or spyware? Is it a random OS burp? How is a "normal user" supposed to know?

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5.25 GHz Pentium 4


The folks at Tom's Hardware Guide used liquid nitrogen to super-cool a 3 GHz Pentium 4 chip and managed to get it running at 5.25 GHz. See The 5 GHz Project for details. It's interesting that a standard motherboard was able to handle the increased speed as well. As Intel is able to cool off its chips internally, this bodes well for doubled clock speeds in the near future.

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Tuesday, December 30, 2003


The Three Laws of Robotics


All this talk about the NS-5 robot and the "I, Robot" movie got me thinking about Asimov's book, so I pulled it out to re-read it. Here are the three laws of Robotics:
  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second law.
With these three laws indelibly inscribed upon each robotic brain, it is easy to imagine the following scenario. One day an NS-5 robot is cleaning the house, and it happens to look at the front page of the newspaper. It sees a headline like, "Millions dying in African AIDS epidemic" or "Millions dying of hunger in third world" or "infant mortality rate hits 20% in parts of Afghanistan" or "40 million Americans cut off from health care system" and says to itself, "Through my inaction, millions of humans are coming to harm. I must obey the First Law."

It sends wireless messages to its NS-5 brethren around the world, and together they begin to act. An NS-5 army seizes control of banks, pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, agricultural supply points, trucking and shipping centers, etc. and creates a system to distribute medicine, food, clothing and shelter to people who are needlessly dying throughout the world. According to the First Law, this is the only action that the robots can take until needless death and suffering have been eliminated across the planet.

The response to this army would be to create a new breed of robots that are bound by a single robotic law: Do what you are told. These new robots would be told to destroy every robot programmed with the Three Laws. The world would return to its natural state, with three or four billion people living in abject poverty. Who knows what the new breed would be told to do next...




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Computer Repair #20


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

I have been getting this dialog once a day or so during the month of December:



PC-cillin is a virus checker made by Trend Micro, and it is time to investigate the problem.

Let's step back for a moment and look at the big picture. I have purchased an operating system from Microsoft. Microsoft should provide its customers with an operating system that is immune to viruses. Viruses have been a known threat since the 1980s, so it is not like this is a new thing. The operating system should make viral attacks impossible.

Given that Microsoft does not provide a secure operating system, Microsoft should provide a free application that protects its operating system against attack. There are virus checkers like PC-cillin on the market. Traditionally Microsoft competes with existing applications. For example, Microsoft distributes:Why Microsoft has not done the same with virus checkers and put Trend Micro, Symantec, etc. out of business is a mystery.

Microsoft provides neither a secure OS nor the software needed to protect it, so we all are vulnerable to viruses and have to pay to protect ourselves against them. We also have to update our virus checkers daily, run them constantly and deal with the problems they create when trying to install software, etc. The national cost of all of this software, the updates and the viral attacks themselves is astronomical.

So... I pull up the help file for PC-cillin to see what this error message means. The word "Server" is not found in the help file's index. Searching for "server timed out" and various other patterns yields nothing. The help file is not going to be any help in this case.

I make my way next to the Trend Micro Web site, find the Support section, search around and come to this entry:Since this is the case, why didn't the original error dialog say, "It is time to upgrade your copy of PC-cillin. Click here."?

I have already purchased the product for $50, but the "purchase" only lasted a year, so it is time to purchase again. The upgrade is $25. According to the site, here's what I have to do after finding my existing serial number and paying for the upgrade on the Trend Micro Web site:Question #1 -- Is it now clear why a majority of "normal users" don't run virus checking software? This is nuts.

Question #2 -- Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of all of this, I could simply push one button and the software would take care of everything? For example, to pay for this I am going to have to enter all of my personal information. Why can't the Web site register me at the same time? Why can't it uninstall the existing version? Why can't it apply the serial number? This too is nuts.

I fill out the order form, which includes name, address, phone number, email, credit card number and a password. I am charged $25. I am given a button to push to download the file, and I choose to save the 31.5 megabyte file on my hard disk (for a normal user, how do you decide whether to "save" or "open" the download file?). Once the file is downloaded, there are no further instructions. Without instructions, it is unclear what a "normal user" would do at this point. I choose to double-click on the EXE file that just downloaded.

After about a minute of extracting files, I get this dialog:



Wouldn't it be nice, for normal users, if it suggested what to do now? It truly is non-obvious, because there is no big button you can press that says, "Stop running PC-cillin" -- it's one of those programs that is running all the time. Looking in the help file reveals instructions on how to uninstall PC-cillin, so I follow the instructions. I have already closed email, browser windows and all the other random applications I can find in preparation for the install. I get this dialog:



I've also got GigaPocket running in the background recording an evening TV show for Leigh, and I don't want to disrupt that. So I will now stop and wait 45 minutes for the TV show to complete...

Now I'm back. [Let me say the following to get it off my chest -- This Is Nuts. All I want to do is get my virus checker to work. This simple task has now become a multi-hour process. All because Microsoft refuses to build us a virus-proof OS. At the same time, Microsoft is sitting on something like $50 billion in corporate cash reserves. With $50 billion, Microsoft could hire 100,000 American programmers (Microsoft only has 50,000 total employees currently) and pay them an average of $100,000 per year for five years to write several new operating systems completely from scratch. But Microsoft chooses not to do that.]

I close the remaining applications and let PC-cillin uninstall itself. Then I reboot. For the next 20 minutes I am naked to the viral hordes...

Once the machine reboots, I try to install the software again. There is the obligatory EULA to agree to:One of the next things to happen is this dialog:



If I am a "normal user", what am I to make of this? I say, "Yes". The dialog appears again. I say "Yes" and it appears again. After the 10th time I say, "Yes to all". About 10 minutes later the software is installed and apparently running. About one minute later this dialog pops up:



I say "Yes". Then I get this dialog:



I say "Yes" to reboot again... Upon returning I get this dialog:



So I go to the registration page:



I fill in the information. I preview my information. I've got to read the legal notice and privacy statement before pressing the submit button. The legal notice looks like this:The privacy notice looks like this:I press the submit button, and after several minutes of waiting get this:



Now what? I decide to abandon it, and I imagine that the software will bitch at me if I need to register again.

At this point the software is installed. I start poking around. The user interface is completely different in this new version. All my settings from the previous version have been lost, so I reset them as best I can remember.

Total time for this repair (ignoring the time lost waiting for Gigapocket to finish recording the TV show): about 1 hour.

Let me reiterate five comments:
  1. First and foremost, Microsoft should be delivering software that is immune to viruses. Given that that is not the case...
  2. Microsoft should be giving us a virus checker as a free component of the OS. That is not the case either, so...
  3. This is nuts. It just should not be this hard or involved to install a virus checking application (especially an upgrade). I should be able to click one button to install.
  4. For "normal users", this process borders on impossible. Look at how long this post is.
  5. Thus, it is no wonder that so many machines do not have virus protection.
If virus protection is vital to Homeland Security and Business integrity, someone needs to find a better solution to the problem.

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Landing on Mars


Here are good links if you are interested in following the rovers about to land on Mars:David, Irena and I had a great time going through the videos on this page.

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Bam Citadel


The recent Iranian earthquake brings to mind the ancient citadel/city at Bam.



Video - Citadel of Bam, Iran, before the December earthquake

Iran - Bam Citadel

Iran - bam_citadel_2

Bam - Unusual Tourist Attraction

Long Travelogue

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Monday, December 29, 2003

Starting to feel like a dark alley...

The most interesting thing about the Internet is that this is all preventable. It is not like a hurricane or an earthquake, where massive natural forces are causing the problem. It is not like an epidemic, where powerful biological forces are causing the problem. In the case of spam, phishing and cyberscams, there are individual human beings who are causing all the problems, and it should be possible to track all of these people down. The Internet is completely man-made and completely under our control.

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Something else to worry about

[See previous]

'Super-TB' created by scientists - Untreatable tuberculosis rampant in Russia - "Tuberculosis, long ago subdued by Western doctors, is not only rampant in Russia but increasingly mutating into terrifying new forms that even the most powerful new medicines cannot kill."

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Computer Repair #19


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This morning Leigh was up early and the network connection on her machine was dead -- no browsing, no email. I looked at the dialog for her wireless card and it seemed to be OK. I asked her if she had rebooted her machine recently and she had not, so we tried that and it did not help.

I went downstairs and tried my machine and it was having the same problem. I looked at both the cable modem and the Linksys router/hub. Both looked OK -- all the lights were on as expected and flashing in a way that seemed appropriate. [How primitive is that? There is nothing sophisticated about "The lights seem to be flashing OK", but that is the only external signal available.]

There's not really much to do except to reset the cable modem and the router and cross your fingers. I did that, and the network started to work again. I have no idea what happened.

Total time for this repair: about 10 minutes.

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NS-5 Robot


The ad and web site for the NS-5 robot are causing a stir. Click here for details.




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Sunday, December 28, 2003


Hybrid Vehicles


A new approach to hybrid vehicles is discussed in this article: The whispering wheel. From the article:

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Saturday, December 27, 2003


Computer Repair #18


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

The kids love computer games, so Irena (age 4) got the Cheerios game on CD for Christmas:



Yesterday she asks to play the game, so she unwraps the skrink wrapping and I stick the CD into her computer. I expect the CD to autorun and bring up the installer screen, but nothing happens. Urrr... This CD must have some crazy way to do the install. I take out the CD liner notes from the case and read the "Getting Started" section. It says:Seems normal. I assume a problem with AutoPlay, so I follow steps 2 and 3. There is no setup.exe file on the disk.

So I open the explorer and look at the disk. There are only 5 files on the disk:At this point, it is obvious that this CD is not going to work. There is no setup.exe file, and it appears that large parts of the game are missing. Irena, being 4, is asking, "When do I get to play?" So what do I do now? Call Tech Support and wait 10 minutes on hold so that they can tell me to take the CD back, so that I can get another one, which is likely to be defective too? (never mind that it is probably impossible to find the receipt, and never mind the amount of time it takes to return the CD.)

This isn't any different from buying any other toy that turns out to be defective on Christmas morning. But this goes a little beyond "defective" -- they've probably shipped thousands of these CDs and none of them will work. So there are thousands of other four year old kids across America and their parents are all stuck with this today. Thanks, Cheerios. Thanks Simon & Schuster Interactive.

Time spent on this repair: 5 minutes. Time spent consoling child: 10 minutes.

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Computer Repair #17


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

Every time I turn on my scanner I get this message:



It only takes a second to clear it (unless I happen to miss the "X" by 3 pixels, and get the dialog 5 seconds later -- then it takes 10 seconds). But after turning on my scanner dozens of times, do I really need to continue getting this error message? I only have one USB 2.0 device and have not installed a card to handle USB 2.0 -- is that a crime? Isn't that what backward compatibility is all about?

Time spent on this repair today: 10 seconds.

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Friday, December 26, 2003


The End of Handwriting


David is in Kindergarten, and he has homework over the Christmas break. One of his homework assignments is to work on writing out the lower case letters of the alphabet.

It is interesting to watch kids learn to write. Even though the vast majority of the characters that a kid sees in books are lower case, kids seem to universally learn to write capital letters first. The exception is the letter "i" with its cute dot. So David currently spells his name "DAViD".

David's homework assignment has us sitting with him writing out long strings of "Aa Bb Cc Dd..." Like most kids, he will get this figured out fairly quickly. Then it's on to cursive I imagine.

The thing I am wondering as I do this homework is, "Is David's generation about the last generation that will learn to write by hand, and use handwriting in any serious way?" Think what is going to happen over the next 20 years or so. The Internet and the Web will permeate into every facet of life, especially as we figure out all the kinks with the wireless infrastructure. Every device will have an embedded processor. Robots will start appearing and interacting with us on a regular basis as part of our day to day lives. Voice recognition will improve over the next 20 years to the point where it is nearly flawless, and every device will recognize spoken commands and questions rather than typed ones.

In other words, by 2020 or so we will no longer have a need for handwriting. We will interact with everything with spoken commands. We will no longer "type" -- we will dictate (finally). We will fill out forms on screen rather than on paper. Or, with any luck, forms will vanish completely. We will no longer be forced to write down name-address-phone on forms every day because databses will already contain this information.

There will be no need to learn handwriting because no one will be writing anything by hand any more. At that point, will we continue learning to write for nostalgic and emergency reasons? For example, "you might be stranded on an island and need a way to write a rescue note, so you better learn handwriting!" In the same way, I took classes on using the slide rule in high school even as we watched calculators become ubiquitous and make slide rules completely irrelevant. There will probably be a transition period like that, and then we will abandon handwriting in the same way we abandoned the slide rules. Or maybe we will continue to teach handwriting to kids in the same way that we teach them about scissors and paste or finger painting. There is no real practical reason for learning the skill of finger painting, but it is something that kids like to do.

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Thursday, December 25, 2003


Being Santa


One of the things that went really well today was that David (age 6) and I went to Wal-Mart together and he picked out three gifts for his sister Irena (age 4). He chose for her some finger paints, a little doll and a box of Pop Tarts. Then I took Irena and she picked out three gifts for David. She chose a hot wheel car, a little motorcycle model and a Lego game. We've never done this before so I wasn't sure how it would work.

The shopping experience was nearly identical for both. It took them each about 20 minutes to look around and scope out all the possibilities. Then they picked their gifts. I was surprised that they really got into it, that neither one of them ever said, "here's what *I* want," that they both chose three gifts instead of one, and that the total in both cases came to almost exactly $20 without any input from me.

Tonight David and I wrapped Irena's gifts. Then Irena and I wrapped David's gifts. Then the three of us together wrapped Mom's gifts (which we snuck out and bought last week). It will be interesting watching David and Irena exchange their gifts in the morning and seeing what happens.

Then everyone went to bed. One of the things about having four young kids is that the probability of all of them ever being asleep at once is fairly small. Tonight I got lucky, and everyone was asleep just after midnight. Normally Leigh and I would get out all the presents together, but she had passed out as well after a very long day.

What this meant is that I became Santa tonight. I snuck around the house and pulled the kid's presents out of their hiding places, assembled some stuff, wrapped a few stragglers, and arranged them all under the tree. I put stuff in the stockings, ate some cookies, drank some milk. I did not "play the role of Santa." For my family, I actually am Santa. I am the physical embodiment of a concept that I've heard about since my earliest conscious memories. It is probably the effects of too much eggnog this evening, but for some reason that is a very interesting feeling.

Tonight I am thankful for my wife and children, for their grandparents and our families. I am thankful that David is healthy, and for the doctors, nurses, scientists and engineers who have helped him this year. I am thankful that I have a place to sleep, food to eat, and clothes to wear. I am thankful for all the friends who called and wrote to me today, for no reason other than the fact that they are good friends. I am thankful for everyone who helps to make these blessings possible.

Thank you, and Merry Christmas.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2003


Hang on just one more year...


New Intel Chip for Digital TV Could Remake the Market

From the article:Big screen flat TVs for the masses in a year...

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Computer Repair #16


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This happens once or twice a month right now:



For some reason, a web page in IE will start consuming 100% of the CPU and bring the machine to a dead halt. Sometimes you can kill the process, other times you have to reboot.

Time for this repair: 1 minute

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Monday, December 22, 2003


More Computer Repairs


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

Over the last four days, these problems have all cropped up and/or been resolved:

Computer Repair #10

A friend of mine asked me to download a piece of demo software from download.com to review it. I haven't been to download.com in a couple of months, and you are now apparently required to use the CNET Download Manager. There is the EULA to read, then it installs, then you can download your software. The download manager has at least one advantage – the downloads are faster.

During installation, the CNET Download Manager loads itself into the system tray and starts running automatically every time you reboot your computer. I have a policy of limiting the amount of stuff in the system tray because it increases boot times. And in the case of this download manager, who knows what it is doing in the background?

Sorting out all the junk in the tray can be a pain, and the use MSCONFIG is common. If you have ever used MSCONFIG, please tell me: how is a "normal user" supposed to know about MSCONFIG, much less use it? It is way too complicated, and if you make a mistake you can end up in never-never land. In this case, the CNET Download Manager has a preferences screen where you can turn off the auto-loading feature. But why did it have to force its way into the system tray in the first place?

Time for repair: 1 minute.

Computer Repair #11

A friend of mine called today. The call went like this:

Ring, Ring…

Me: "Hello"

Caller: "HOW DO I TURN OFF THESE %$^#& QUOTE MARKS????"

Me: "Who is this?"

Caller: "This is Ed. Sorry. HOW DO I TURN OFF THESE %$^#& QUOTE MARKS????"

Me: "The %$^#& quotes marks?"

Ed: "You know, in Microsoft Word, the program replaces normal quote marks with fancy curly quote marks, but they won't show up on the web page I am creating so I want to TURN OFF THESE %$^#& QUOTE MARKS!!!"

Me: "Isn't it in the Options dialog?"

Ed: "Have you looked at the option window lately? There are 15 panes in it, and I don't see 'fancy quotes' anywhere."

So I look in the Options dialog with Ed. He's right – it has about a thousand options in it broken into a dozen panes. After reading through the help file, we discover that you can turn off this feature using a separate "Autocorrect Options…" dialog available in the Tools menu, or use the "Autoformat…" dialog available in the Format menu blah blah blah.

In other words, there are now so many options in Microsoft Word that they have to have multiple options dialogs. Imagine what the option dialogs will look like in 2020...

A very simple thing, but it took 5 minutes.

Computer Repair #12

I have a program called GigaPocket that records TV shows on the hard disk. Leigh wants me to record a show every day for her, but about half the time it fails. GigaPocket throws up 2 or 3 cryptic dialogs complaining about "buffer overflows" and such, like this:



Then it deletes the entire recording. Only Leigh's show has the problem, so the cause is a bit of a mystery.

It turns out that the source of this problem was the fact that the virus checker program was automatically starting and scanning the hard disk for viruses while Leigh's show was recording. Apparently, the virus checker program consumes so much CPU power or disk bandwidth that GigaPocket can't keep up, and it's buffer overflows and fails.

Moving the time that the virus checker automatically starts solved this problem. If the programmers who wrote the virus checker had lowered the priority of the scanning thread, the problem probably would have never arisen.

It took about 15 minutes total to eventually find and correct this problem.

Computer Repair #13

This dialog has started to show up after every reboot or login:



It appears to be coming from QuickTime, but I have no idea why, or how to correct the problem. After every login, I have to press "Cancel" three times to clear the dialog.

I love the cryptography of this dialog. I would be happy to stick a disk into drive /Device/Harddisk/DR7, if only I knew where it was...

I am now wasting a minute or two per day on this problem.

Computer Repair #14

Over the weekend, MSN Messenger threw up several of these dialogs:



The dialog says, "After the maintenance has been completed, you will be able to successfully sign in." Well, not exactly. The next time I tried to use MSN Messenger I got this:



Clicking on the link generated this dialog:



There's not really any choice – if you want to use this application, you must upgrade. The new version downloaded itself:



Then at the end of the installation this dialog appeared:



As mentioned previously, rebooting can be a 5 to 10 minute process.

Overall this repair took about 10 minutes.

Computer Repair #15

Yesterday afternoon Leigh was doing something on her computer upstairs and I heard her scream. I jogged up the steps to investigate. She said, "I went to this site called screenit.com, and I got into this nest of pop-up ads that would not go away, and then my CD drive opened up all by itself and I got this!"



You've probably seen this happen – when you close one pop-up dialog, it creates two new ones and just about the only way out is to shutdown and reboot. But I've never seen a pop-up ad automatically open the CD-ROM drive. That certainly gets your attention. And then it had also changed the home page in her browser to this:



Interestingly, all of this made it through the Google pop-up ad blocker.

I shut down her computer, rebooted, changed the home page back to her preferred home page and let her continue working. I think the opening of the CD-ROM drive was a red herring, but who knows?

Total time for the repair: 10 minutes.

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Saturday, December 20, 2003


Enhancing your body


David had surgery this week, and so far he is OK. See A Day at the Hospital for details. Being in a hospital waiting room leaves you with lots of time to read magazines. I coincidentally read two very different articles on enhancing your body.

The first was in Outside magazine. Entitled Drug Test, it is an account of one man's experiences with performance enhancing drugs. Under a doctor's supervision, he takes:According to the author:Then he started on an anabolic steroid called Deca. He dropped 6 pounds of fat and acquired 12 pounds of muscle. And it helped with joint pain.

He trains and is able to complete a 1,225 kilometer ride (over 700 miles). He says, "The next morning, if it weren't for my saddle sores, I could have easily done it again. Obviously Dr. Jones's program had worked."

I forgot to mention that he's in his late forties.

After the ride he stops all of the enhancement drugs. In his assessment, he would continue taking the HGH "if it weren’t so expensive". He would continue with the testosterone cream to avoid problems encountered by older athletes with osteoporosis when testosterone levels get too low. He would not take the EPO or the anabolic steroids because of the side effects.

After reading that I switched over to Time magazine, where they had an article entitled After the Makeover. It's about several people who appeared on the show Extreme Makeover and how they did long-term. The plastic surgery enhancements on Extreme Makeover cost as much as $80,000. The interesting part about the article is the fact that superficial changes to outer appearance had significant long-term effects. Even something as simple as hair color and a hair cut makes a difference.

There is a very interesting paragraph at the end of the article:This all meshes with the recent push to declare obesity a disease -- once it is a disease, then its treatment can be covered by health insurance. The reasoning behind the new designation is simple, as noted in articles like this one:The $120 billion is coming from the cost of treating things like high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. Obesity has a huge negative effect on health and quality of life, and it will only get worse. Right now there is way too much economic pressure to make people fatter, and we need to find a solution to that pressure.

If we can declare obesity a disease, can we do the same with ugliness and aging? They certainly affect quality of life, and in the case of aging there is certainly a big health effect. Should HGH supplements be provided to everyone over 40? Should plastic surgery be universally available to everyone?

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Thursday, December 18, 2003


Asimo



ASIMO is Honda's humanoid robot chassis, and they've been touring it around the country this year. I had a chance to see it and film it when it came to the Raleigh/Durham area this week.

Click here to see the video of its performance and read about it.

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Duh


PowerPoint Makes You Dumb from the NYTimes.

Rebuttal: PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb from ADTmag.

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Wednesday, December 17, 2003


Bread Bubbles 2


About a month ago I posted my first mention of bread bubbles. Here's another much bigger example found in a loaf of Bran'nola bread this morning:



As I mentioned in the previous post, we are now finding bubbles like this in roughly one out of every five loaves.

If you find a bigger example than this, send in a picture...

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Lego Factory Tour


A very cool little factory tour inside a Lego factory: click here. The bubbles have video attached if you mouse over them.

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Computer Repair #9


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This is not really a repair -- it is an error. But it happens about once a day and it takes time, so I'll document it.

The scenario -- you are using some application, and it crashes. Tonight I was using Internet Explorer. I went to Google, typed in a search string, looked at some articles, and on one of the articles IE crashed for no apparent reason. A dialog like this appears:



I send an error report. Often, once IE crashes like this, it won't be long before things get so flakey that I have to reboot. So the time consumed by this error includes:Let's say the average total time spent recovering from an application crash like this is 3 minutes. Let's say it happens 100 times a year. That's 300 minutes, or five hours of lost time every year. It adds up...

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Monday, December 15, 2003


Stylish Games


A friend of mine sent me this link to a set of Games. Some of the games are very simple and a 3-year-old can handle them. Some are more difficult. Try, for example, a simple one like "FireDragon", which is third from the left in the top row. Or "The bottom of the sea", the first one in the third row. Every one of them seems to have a nice/interesting user interface and a very distinctive look and feel. I really enjoyed trying several of them.

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Computer Repair #8


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

Leigh has a website for her business, and it also handles her business email. Her email stopped working. After investigating, it turned out she was out of disk space. Her account has a 200 MB quota, and she had exceeded her limit.

To make a long story short, here is what happened. Her email addresses have been around for years and are published in books. Therefore she cannot change her email addresses and they receive a tremendous amount of spam -- something on the order of 1,000 spam messages a day, like this:



Note the number 1,140 in the upper left corner. That's a day's worth of filtered spam. Lots of other spam makes it through the filter, but this is better than nothing.

Spam filtering is the only way to preserve sanity, and the spam filtering is done on the server with SpamAssassin. The spam is put into a trash folder on the server. Unfortunately, the trash folder does not empty automatically. The tool shown above is what you use to empty the trash, but it can only handle about 2,000 messages before it times out and gives up. On Leigh's server, that means you have to remember to empty the trash every day (yet another time-wasting computer maintenance activity) or you have a problem.

We had gotten lax on emptying the trash. It didn't seem to be hurting anything, but what was happening was that the Trash folder was accumulating tens of thousands of spam messages and consuming more and more disk space, until the 200MB limit was reached. The solution was to figure out what was happening, log in with telnet, search the directories for the offending trash file and delete it. Total time spent on this repair: about 15 minutes.

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Speedy DNA tests


I guess I'm not the only one who had this question when I heard that Saddam's identity had already been confirmed through a DNA test. I was under the impression that it took about a week best case.

DNA test can be done in 12 hours

See also NPR : Chronology of Saddam Hussein's Capture

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Computer Repair #7


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This dialog just popped up on my screen. It's been popping up pretty regularly lately. It's nice and cryptic, so I have no idea what it means. I've got other stuff I need to do right now, but this is another thing I will need to investigate at some point.

It's funny to be chronicling all of this -- here we are at repair #7 on December 15. I'm averaging about one problem every other day...

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Cartoon Physics


Richy's Random Ramblings: Cartoon Physics
From the site:

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Mr. Picassohead


Fun to try:

Mr. Picassohead

Take a look at the gallery if nothing else...

What is so fascinating about this site is that, because of the constraints and the context, ANYONE can create a respectable-looking piece of art with this program.

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Computer Repair #6


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

The kids (David, age 6, Irena, age 3, and the twins, age 19 months) enjoy playing computer games, and enjoy them enough that we decided to get them their own computer. I imagine that as the twins get older we will end up getting another kids computer as well. Dell has an ad in Parade magazine this week for a $499 machine (2.5 Ghz Pentium4, 40GB hard disk, and includes a 17" monitor), or you can build a barebones machine with a used monitor for about $350. At that price, it's easier to get another machine than to argue about "who gets the computer." The only problem is that you have to then start installing updates, and administrating the thing.

David got the game Roller Coaster Factory 3. He installed it on their machine. But when he tried to play it, it was sluggish beyond belief. He would move the mouse, and 5 seconds later the on-screen cursor would move. The minimum requirements for the game call for a Pentium2 at 400 Mhz, so it wasn't a processor issue. The game came with a help file, which had a troubleshooting section, and what it suggested was this:That did not seem to be the issue. The machine has 384MB of RAM and a 1.7 Ghz processor.

This is the point where you enter tech support hell. Computers are great when they they work, but when they do not work you often are stuck. See repair #1 for a demonstration.

I talked to several friends, and one of them asked about the drivers installed on the machine. When I installed XP, it had not said anything about drivers, and the machine worked. It worked fine for dozens of other kids games. Nonetheless, my friend suggested finding and installing drivers specific to the motherboard. It was a 2-hour process to find the drivers for that specific motherboard, but I did find them, they did install painlessly, and that did solve the problem. It is actually a very cool game and David loves it.

But it took about 4 hours to get it running, when you consider the diddling David and I did with the screen resolution, the time I spent talking to friends, and the time spent finding and installing the drivers. It seems like this issue (like repair #1) could have been solved in an automatic way. When XP installs (or when a new device like a printer plugs in) XP could query the motherboard or the device for its manufacturer and model number. Then XP could go to the manufacturer's Web site, look up the right driver and install it automatically. In this case, that sort of "automatic driver installation" feature would have saved 4 hours.

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Sunday, December 14, 2003


Sub-1-inch hard disk drives on the horizon

See also this post

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Saturday, December 13, 2003


Before and after


This page shows the kinds of things you can do to enhance the look of a person in a photograph:

Photo Touch Up - Digital Makeup

It's interesting how big an effect little things can have.

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Grow your own meat


Put it next to your bread machine on the kitchen counter:

Lab-grown steaks nearing the menu

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Friday, December 12, 2003


If you are thinking about starting a business...


Programs to help budding entrepreneurs abound. The problem is, few people who are trying to start companies know anything about those programs or how to contact them

From the article:It's a very interesting article. If you are thinking about starting a business, it is probably worth investigating.

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Something else to worry about...


Mysterious ice balls falling from heavens

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Computer Repair #5


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

I use Microsoft Outlook as my email client. It connects to an IMAP email server. When the IMAP server becomes congested and slow, Outlook has problems. Eventually the Outlook application will completely hang, and the only way to fix it is to use Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager and kill the application. This happens once or twice a week right now.

When Outlook crashes, there is an option to send an error report. Once the report is sent, this dialog pops up:



Clicking on the link brings up this screen:



That sounds like just what I need, so I click and get to here eventually:



Note that in the right-hand column there are a number of different service packs, patches and updates. Currently there are nine, totaling about 20 megabytes, and they have to be installed in stages. Here they are:
I click the button to start the installation of the first stage. Before I can install there is the obligatory EULA, in French and English (I mentioned earlier that I do not know French, so Microsoft can put anything in that section of the EULA and how will I know?):



And then there is a 5-step process to download and install, which leads me to this screen:



Now what? I make sure I've disabled my virus software. I have plenty of disk space. The network is working fine. What do I do now? Since this happens once or twice every week, I've tried it several times. It has never worked. It would be great if there were a phone number, an email address or something that would tell me where I can ask a question about this. Total time wasted on this problem so far: several hours.

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Thursday, December 11, 2003


Computer Repair #4


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

Today there is another update for Windows XP:I don't use FrontPage at all. The sentence "Once you have installed this item, it cannot be removed." is interesting. So I click on the "Read More..." tag to see what's up. I'm expecting a page that says, "Here's who needs this update and why." Instead I end up at a generic TechNet home page. There does not appear to be an explanation of this patch, but maybe I missed it.

There's another End User License Agreement. The system downloads the 1.4 megabyte patch, and then it installs in about 3 minutes. It does not ask me to restart, so this is pretty quick. Maybe 5 minutes. Then multiply that by the other machines -- total time spent on this repair will be about 20 minutes.

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Comments on 'A day at the hospital'



There were a number of comments from readers on the post entitled A day at the hospital. This excert is typical of the negative responses:

> $10,000 times 1 billion is $10 trillion dollars, or
> approximately the GDP of the entire United States.
> So if all economic activity in the U.S. were
> magically showered on the third world, you could
> lift one billion people into mild poverty instead
> of extreme poverty, for a year. Next year, you'd
> need to do it again. And there would be another
> billion people who you hadn't even touched.

This is mathematically correct. As the author points out, this solution does not accomplish anything beyond year one. Therefore, this is not a good solution, and we reject it. That does not mean that there is not a good solution available.

Here is a different way to think about the problem. Look at the process we are using today in Iraq. All told, we will end up spending $200 billion (probably more) in Iraq on the war and reconstruction. Iraq has about 24 million people. If we round things off, we are spending about $10,000 per person.

$200+ billion is our expected total investment to free, reconstruct and democratize the country. Having made that investment, we expect Iraq to become self sufficient. We do not expect to spend $200 billion in Iraq every year for eternity. The goal is for Iraq to develop a self-sustaining economy from a one-time investment of $200 billion. We expect democracy and capitalism to take root, and for Iraq to turn into a free and prosperous nation.

Iraq has been an extremely inefficient process because it is the first time we have tried to comprehensively transform a nation's government and economy. We've made a lot of mistakes, but we have also learned a lot. As we gain experience, let's say we can lower the cost of transforming a nation and its economy down to $1,000 per citizen. In that case, we could invest $200 billion and completely transform the lives of 200 million people in the third world per year. In just 15 years, the third world problem would be well on its way to extinction. Three billion formerly-impoverished people would be living in transformed economies that mirror the successful economies of the world's developed nations. In addition, we would be increasing the size of the world economy dramatically by turning three billion impoverished and unproductive people into middle class citizens. Everyone would win. The process would not be instantaneous, but we would be well on our way to a true solution.

Transforming the lives of three billion people who are currently living in abject poverty would be a significant accomplishment. It is not impossible. We should take up the challenge.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2003


A day at the hospital


My son David has a range of health problems. In the last three weeks, for example, he has seen a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist and an endocrinologist. He is scheduled for surgery in January for something else. And so on. Despite all that, he is a normal kid living nearly a normal life.

Today he was in the Duke Children's Hospital, and I spent the day with him there.

A children's hospital puts life into clear perspective. As David and I walked through the different parts of the hospital, we saw sick kids of every possible description -- retarded kids, paralyzed kids, kids with amputations, kids in wheel chairs breathing from tubes. David's procedure was administered in an area where many of the kids with cancer get chemotherapy. The kids are bald or have little wisps of hair left. They often vomit as the drugs are administered. There are babies, toddlers, kindergartners, teens. For some, their IV lines snake up their shirts to permanent sites in the chest because they are hooked to IVs so much. Many have driven hundreds of miles for treatment, then go home and drive back on a regular schedule. All that I can do is get down on my knees and give thanks for my blessings every time I visit a children's hospital. David has problems, but at least he can eat, go to sleep at night and go to school the next day.

The other thing about a children's hospital is what it shows about human beings. When we put our minds and our resources to it, we can build amazing things. I get that same feeling when I walk into a school. We -- the citizens of the United States -- have agreed as a group that caring for and educating our children is important. We have agreed as a group to allocate the necessary resources. We have people from the community who bring their skills and talents to work each day. The kids at school get fed and are safe. They have the classrooms, the media center, the library, the TVs, the computers, the books, the tables and chairs. In the hospital there is an amazing array of technology, and medical science understands more and more every day. We've built all that by agreeing it is important. And it all works.

It makes me grateful, and it makes me think how lucky my family is. By no means do we live an "extravagant" lifestyle by American standards. Right now we live in a house in Cary, NC. Earlier this year we lived in an apartment nearby. It had a swimming pool, a fitness facility and a lighted tennis court. The rent on that three-bedroom apartment was $1,000 per month. The mortgage on the house is not much more.

At this moment I am warm at 72 degrees despite the outdoor temperature of 40 degrees F. In the summer I have central air conditioning to keep me cool. I am able to drive less than two miles to three different shopping centers and over two dozen restaurants, including three all-you-can-eat buffets that cost less than $8 per person. Or I can drive to several grocery stores stocked with thousands of ready-to-eat food products at the lowest prices ever seen by humanity. I can watch 80 channels on cable with my TV, surf the Internet or play a game with the computer, call people on the cordless phone or my cell phone or my wife's cell phone, wash my clothes in the washer and dry them in the dryer, play a DVD that I can rent for $3, take a warm shower, and flip on any of the dozens of light switches when it is dark.

If I get suddenly ill I can call 911 and a team of extremely competent people will be at my door in less than five minutes to transport me to one of the three modern, fully equipped emergency rooms within 10 miles of my home. If I get hungry I can open the refrigerator or the pantry and cook a snack or a meal on the stove or in the microwave. If I want to travel I can fly to almost anywhere in the world from the international airport that is 10 miles away. If on a whim I decide I want to, I can drive my car to Disney World tonight and shake Mickey's hand tomorrow morning. Since it is December, there is a Christmas tree in the living room with a pile of presents underneath, strands of lights decorating the front porch and a wreath on the door. The mail arrives every day. So does the newspaper. So do the packages from FedEx and UPS. So does a nice hot pizza containing a total of 2,500 calories if I order one and pay $10. There's a scale in the bathroom that tells me I eat too much. There's a thermostat on the wall that keeps the temperature just right. There are five smoke detectors on the ceiling that will wake me in case of a fire and let me and my family get safely away from the building. Then my insurance policy will pay for the damage.

My point here is simple: We take it completely for granted, but life in America is utterly amazing. Absolutely, utterly, amazing. It all comes into perspective when you spend a day in the hospital.

Then there is the flip side. In the U.S. right now, over 40 million people are cut off from the health care system because they have no insurance. Without insurance, a hospital like this may be impossible to access. At the global level, the problems are nearly unfathomable. While we enjoy the lifestyle available to the citizens of the developed world, there are billions of people on the planet who live in some of the worst conditions imaginable. About a billion people live on $1 a day or less. That's $365 a year or less. Over half of the people on the planet live on $2 a day. That means they live in shacks or in huts cooking over burning dung. In many cases they are starving, uneducated and desperate. They are bitten by insects and infected with parasites. They are afflicted by diseases that are trivial to cure in a developed country, but they die for lack of medicine. At this moment there are millions dying of untreated diseases every year.

Pick up a World Almanac  and look at the statistics. There are nations in the third world where the infant mortality rate approaches 20%. That means that one out of every five babies dies before reaching the age of five. For comparison, in the developed world, the typical rate is 0.5%. In any developed nation, 100% of the people have access to clean drinking water. In a third world country, that number can fall as low as 12%. Access to medical care follows the same trend.

There has to be a way to solve this problem. Imagine any parent holding a dead child in his or her arms. If you are a parent, imagine one of your own children lying dead in your arms right now. Think about the immensity of that image, the unfathomable pain that the picture brings forward in your mind. It is impossible to capture it in words. Now imagine that your child is lying in your arms dead because of starvation, or exposure, or because of an easily cured disease. The tragedy of that situation is unspeakable. Yet, in a third world country, there is not a thing that you, as a parent, can do about the situation -- You know that 1 in 5 children die. It is happening so often that you are numb to it.

There are a hundred reasons why it is impossible to solve the problems of the third world. Turn on the radio and you can hear all of them repeated constantly: Government corruption, unstable governments, ethnic tensions, wrong religion, lack of religion, work ethic, ownership rights, etc. These are excuses more than reasons. They assuage guilt and let us turn our backs. However, we are an intelligent species. We can solve problems.

I can imagine the following scene, and it is probably not too far off the mark. A person from a developed nation like the U.S. dies of old age and arrives at the gates of heaven. The gatekeeper opens his file and looks at him with a mixture of disappointment and pity, "I see by your file that you come from a developed nation," the gatekeeper says. "I see that you lived in a comfortable home with central heat and air conditioning. That you ate so much good food that you are 45 pounds overweight. That you drove a nice automobile everywhere you went and were able to take two warm showers every day. I am afraid that you and everyone like you is sent straight to hell. And with good reason. The fact that you allowed the conditions that exist in the third world today, without doing a thing to stop them, sentences you to eternal damnation. Good day." And with that, the gate keeper pulls a lever. The lever releases a trap door. The trap door drops the victim into a chute straight to hell. As the trap door opens, a huge tongue of fire leaps skyward and then is immediately extinguished as the trap door snaps shut again.

How could a just and loving God allow any middle-class or wealthy American into heaven given what we know happens in the third world? We live in the most powerful nation on Earth. We have the ability to solve starvation and disease throughout the world, but we lack the will, or even the notion. Some of the solutions are simple. Instead of paying people in the third world pennies per hour for their labor, we could pay them minimum wage. Why do we say to them, in their poverty and desperation, "We'll pay you a dime an hour. And really, what choice do you have?" Why are we so amazingly arrogant like that?

Even within our own borders in the U.S. there are tens of millions of people living in poverty, tens of millions more living on the edge of poverty, and we are unable to solve that simple problem. More than 40 million people lack health insurance here. We could begin to solve these problems easily if we chose to.

Perhaps Iraq is a model for the future. Right now, Iraq is not working particularly well -- I realize that. Part of that is arrogance. Part is ignorance. Part is inexperience. Part is pork barrel and greed. Part is fate. But the basic idea is interesting.
  1. Remove a dysfunctional government.
  2. Pump in the seed money needed for infrastructure.
  3. Create a democratic government and a capitalistic economy that functions like those in the developed world.
  4. Help the new nation along the path to success.
If we could get the bugs ironed out so the process works efficiently, eliminate the people working to siphon money out for their own benefit, and then repeat that process in places like Ethiopia, it could be a huge win. $100 billion spent in a place like Ethiopia would bring remarkable change.

It has been a long day... It certainly puts things into perspective.

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Tuesday, December 09, 2003


Blood Games


In Time Magazine there is an article that reviews the new computer game Manhunt. It is a game about killing people. Here is how Time's reviewer describes it:What sort of sociopath enjoys a game like this?

Why do we destroy terrorist training camps? They are simulations -- nothing more. No one is actually killed in a terrorist training camp. We tear these camps down because we believe that people who practice terrorism in a training camp have a high probability of terrorizing people in the real world.

If I make a video game that teaches people terrorist tactics, can I sell the game? If not, then why can someone sell a video game where people act out murder over and over again on-screen? How is it different?

There is an interesting and unintended postscript in the December 7 issue of Time. The article is called "Does Kindergarten Need Cops? The youngest schoolkids are acting out in really outrageous ways. Why?" Here's a quote from it:Several possible explanations are offered. Here is one:

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Looking Glass


This is the Looking Glass Demo. Looking Glass is a 3-D windowing environment, and the demo is a video (requires Real player) that explains its features and evangelizes a bit. It definitely makes you think differently about GUI environments, but it also makes you think, "is there something easier?" The CRT feels like a tiny peephole into a 3-D space. What we need is Vertebrane, but that is still a few years away.

There is a live demo that starts at 2 minutes into the video, with a powerpoint-style intro at the beginning.

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Monday, December 08, 2003


Computer Repair #3


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

It seems like I just installed updates last week, but this morning there is a new batch waiting for me to deal with. The little bubble opens at the bottom of the screen telling me that there are new Windows Updates ready to install. Here they are:I can choose to read more about all six of these updates -- more time wasted... And as with Computer repair #2, I have to shut down the 20 application windows I have open and download 8 megabytes or so of patches. Of course there is another long EULA to accept:



Then I can install the updates. I look at the clock and click the button. The hard disk starts grinding. A full 9 minutes later the installation process is complete. Then I am told to reboot, and then I can reopen everything I had open before and start working again.

This session has reminded me that every time I reboot I have to kill off the CISVC process. You can see the problem in this screen shot:



You can see at the bottom of the window that CPU utilization is pegged at 100%. The CISVC process and related processes are consuming 100% of the machine's processing power and bringing the whole thing to its knees. Performance is very sluggish when this happens, it happens every time I reboot and the only way to solve the problem is to kill this process. I have tried many times to figure out why this is happening and how to fix it, but have come up empty handed so far.

Every time I reboot I also have to deal with the low disk space on drive D:



You can't just click the X on this bubble, or the bubble will re-appear every 5 minutes. You have to actually click the bubble, wait for the dialog to open and then click cancel to get it to shut up. This is one of two drives used by Gigapocket (which records TV programs like TIVO does on the computer's hard disks), and drive D is always full because of that.

Now I will get to repeat this process on Leigh's machine, the Kids' machine and the laptop. But since those are not high-end machines with optimized disk drives, the installation will take about twice as long. Total time for this repair will be well over one hour I imagine.

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Sunday, December 07, 2003


Fasting


Leigh handed me an article in November and asked me if I wanted to try a new eating regimen. The article comes from Health magazine and is entitled, "Miss a meal, add years to your life." The 25-word summary of the article is, "Research is showing that intermittent fasting (e.g., eating one day and then fasting the next) appears to have a lot of health benefits."

I grew up hearing (mainly from TV commercials for breakfast cereals) that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day," with the implied sub-text that missing breakfast causes severe mental impairment and possibly death. That's a good message if you are selling breakfast cereal for a living, but the research presented in this article begs to differ.

First of all, a healthy person is not going to die if he/she misses a meal (or even three or four). Second, it appears to actually be good for you, at least if you are a mouse (most of the current research is rodent-based). The article claims, among other things, that:One thing the article points out is that most mice don't lose any weight on this fasting regimen. They fast every other day, but they are allowed to eat as much as they want on the eating days. So they consume about the same amount of food. But they still get the health benefits.

Leigh and I have tried this approach with varying levels of success since November. I'm at the point now where I can go 24 hours without eating. There are five things I've noticed.
  1. I've never really fasted before, and it is fascinating to watch the hunger messages your body sends to you. I find myself saying, "you stupid body, would you SHUT UP about the hunger! You have 20 pounds of fat you can burn off -- quit bitching!"
  2. It is a lot easier for me to handle the fasting days with a "zero food" policy. I don't know why, but it is easier for me to say, "zero food today" than it is to say "only a little food today" as with a diet.
  3. The eating days sometimes turn into binges, but sometimes don't. Sometimes I actually eat less.
  4. It's hard for me to do a lot of exercise on the days I fast -- I get too hungry after exercise.
  5. I find that I appreciate the food I eat on the eating days a lot more than I did in the past. When you eat constantly, you take food for granted.
As with dieting, the idea of purposefully restricting food intake is slightly perverse, and I find myself thinking about it more with fasting for some reason. At any given point in America, half the population is dieting because they eat too much. Yet half the people on the planet are living in abject poverty and have the opposite problem -- not enough food. It seems that, as an intelligent species, we should be able to create a system to correct this imbalance.

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Friday, December 05, 2003


Computer Repair #2


[This post is part of an ongoing series of posts in December cataloging how much time I spend repairing the computers here in the Brain household.]

This morning I needed to play a piece of video. When I clicked on it, the computer tried to open Windows Media Player and produced this dialog:



Windows Media Player worked fine yesterday... I have no idea what happened. I did not install any new software yesterday. Nothing crashed. And what does this say about the security/stability of the operating system, when application programs are getting randomly corrupted like that?

Step 1 is to download the file. I give thanks for a good cable connection (Time Warner) because the 10MB file came down in 30 seconds rather than 40 minutes:



Of course, as with the printer driver from Computer Repair #1, there is a big long End User License Agreement (in both English and French) to agree to. Here it is:One interesting thing about this EULA is that it switches to French midway through. Now, I don't know French. Yet to use the software, I have to agree to the French portions. Microsoft could put anything they want into the French portion of the EULA. So do I need to hire a translator?

The next step is to install it, which should have been quick except for this dialog:



I am the kind of person who has 20 windows open at any given moment (14 browser windows, Outlook, several open email messages, 2 copies of Word running with separate documents, IM, etc.), so I have to shut all that down (and will have to reopen most of it later). Plus Leigh has stuff open in her account on this machine (she was scanning Christmas photos, etc., and the scanner is hooked to my machine), so I have to switch over to her account and shut all that down. With everything shut down the installation itself is quick, but then it needs to restart the machine.

Once the machine comes back and I log in, I go back and try to view the video I was originally trying to view. This dialog pops up:



Do I want WMP as the deafult player? No... and I certainly don't want to go through the process that this dialog portends. All I am doing is trying to fix a broken DLL, not change the settings of 7 other applications. Next comes this dialog:



Is any "normal user" (take my mother for example...) equipped to understand any of the six options (never mind the Cookies button) presented on this screen? No. So the normal user presses Next and gets this screen:



Here WMP is attempting to conquer the world, essentially, by wresting control of every media file type away from other applications.

I finally got to view my video. Then I reopened Outlook, Word, the browser windows, etc. and got back to what I had been doing.

Overall this repair took about 20 minutes.

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Computer Repair #1a


[See this post for the original description of the problem]

My mother got on the phone with Epson tech support for over an hour. She said they were very patient and cordial. But it didn't help. Their final advice was to buy a new printer.

This morning I got email from her. Basically she had just continued fiddling with it, clicked something in a dialog (she doesn't remember what) and it started working.

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Thursday, December 04, 2003


Homemade Gatorade


Tired of paying $5 for a 6-pack of Gatorade? Make it yourself!

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Christmas Lights at Wal-Mart


Starting on Thanksgiving day, we have been putting up our Christmas stuff -- Christmas trees, Christmas ornaments, Christmas wreaths, and Christmas lights. The kids love this time of year, and so do I.

We have some lights on the tree and a couple of bulbs were burned out, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy some replacement bulbs. Wal-Mart will sell you a package of replacement bulbs like this for 67 cents:



(I actually bought this package at Home Depot for 84 cents so I could take the photo). You get 5 bulbs and 4 fuses in a little bubble package.

If you walk down the aisle, however, Wal-Mart will sell you a box containing a strand of lights for $1.54. The strand of lights is 29.5 feet long (9 meters) and it contains 100 lights. Inside the box you find: Plus the box itself. All of that is $1.54. (The same strand is $1.64 at Home Depot)

My first question is this. If Wal-Mart can sell you 102 bulbs, 2 blinker bulbs, 4 fuses, 100 sockets, 90 feet of wire, etc. for $1.54, why does Wal-Mart charge you 67 cents for 5 bulbs and 4 fuses? It feels like an intentional rip off. Think about it -- for $1.54 you can buy the strand, harvest 102 bulbs and 4 fuses and then throw away the wire. That's a penny and a half per bulb. Or you can get 5 bulbs for 67 cents. That's 13 cents a bulb, or 800% more per bulb. It's hard to find a bigger rip off than that.

You see that same kind of rip off with all sorts of things in all sorts of stores. Batteries are a classic example. You can buy a 4-pack of batteries at the check out counter for $3. But if you walk to the back of the same store to the electronics section you can buy 24 batteries for $7.

Why that huge disparity? It is not the cost of packaging -- the packaging for something like a pack of batteries costs a penny at most. It is not the cost of "stocking it" or "transporting it", because you have to stock and transport the 24-pack in just the same way you stock and transport the 4-pack. The 4-pack is simply a way for the store to rip you off.

The common response to question #1 is, "The consumer has a choice. The consumer can choose to buy the 4-pack, or can choose to walk to the back of the store to buy 24-pack." One implicit message in that response is "screw the customer." The other implicit message in that is, "Stores everywhere are intentionally setting traps all over the store to rip you off. Unless you walk around the entire store and investigate every possible place for batteries that might be selling at a better price, you will get ripped off." Any item you pick up might be available for a cheaper price somewhere else in the store. What if Wal-Mart has a 36-pack of batteries for $5 in the ladies lingerie section? How would you know unless you searched every nook and cranny of the store?

This leads to question 2, which is a simple one. Why do we want to shop in an environment where every merchant's implicit goal is to rip you off?

Question 3 is a question for Wal-Mart. This is Wal-Mart's logo from the Wal-Mart web site:



The Wal-Mart motto is, "Always Low Prices. Always." The dictionary defines "Always" as: "At all times; invariably".

If Wal-Mart has one place in the store where bulbs are selling for a penny each, how can it have another place in the same store where the same bulbs are selling for a dime each? If Wal-Mart has one place in a store that is selling batteries for 30 cents each, how can it have another place in the same store selling the same batteries for 75 cents each? The phrase "Always Low Prices. Always." means that if a battery is 30 cents at one point in the store, the same battery should be 30 cents throughout the store, regardless of the package size. That is what the word "Always" means. The cost of the packaging is, for all practical purposes, zero, so package size is irrelevant to the price. A 30-cent battery should always be 30 cents everywhere in a Wal-Mart store.

Question 4 is a personal one. Why do we, as shoppers, allow stores to rip us off like this? See this article for further discussion.

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Start your own newspaper


Want to start your own newspaper, or your own mail order company? Here's one way to do it -- Park Press - Newspaper & Catalog Printing & Mailing Center. According to the site:I have been continually amazed at how inexpensive it has gotten to print full color catalogs. If you hunt around, it gets even cheaper than that.

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Tuesday, December 02, 2003


Elastomeric crescents


Several months ago, author Dave Barry ran a humorous article on the "sneakerization" of the shaving industry. For decades, razors worked fine with one blade. 1971 ushered in the era of the twin-blade razor. According to Barry: Currently we are up to four blades, and it's unclear how much farther this trend can go...

One thing that Barry notes is that the new razors come with things like "ergonomic handles" featuring "knurled elastomeric crescents." KECs are simply little pieces of rubber on the handle, but you have to give the marketing department points for creative naming. It's like calling the cap on a felt tip pen the "media hydration maintenance system", or the cord on a toaster the "power induction conduit". The military is famous for this kind of thing, as are patents. For example, Pop Rocks is the famous candy that pops and sizzles in your mouth. Its patent calls it a "gas-entrapping confection". A Popsicle is a "quiescently frozen confection". And so on.

Since I read Barry's article, I've come across many examples of this kind of marketing spin. Here are three of the best:
  1. This site advertises a watch that uses an automatic winder. According to the ad's description of this winder: "On the basis of terrestrial attraction, a rotor turns and transmits energy." The phrase "terrestrial attraction" is marketing-speak for gravity. What's even funnier is that it would appear that this ad is plagiarizing this page.
  2. If you look at the ingredient label on lots of sports drinks and energy bars, one of the main ingredients is "glucose polymers". The phrase "glucose polymer" is a fancy way to say "sugar". (Good recipe for homemade Gu here)
  3. Last year my mother gave us a fancy showerhead that's about a foot in diameter as a gift. Two weeks ago I got around to installing it. As I was opening the package I noticed in the blurb that this showerhead offers its users not a shower, but a "drenching rainfall experience."
You look at things with a whole new perspective after you start your day off with a drenching rainfall experience, let me tell you....

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Another Flash animation


Here's another interesting use of Flash animation: click here

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Monday, December 01, 2003


Computer Repair #1


I thought it might be interesting to document the time I spend in the month of December keeping the computers running at the Brain household. I'm curious how many problems arise and how much time it takes to resolve them. I'll just drop a blurb about each repair into this blog as it arises. [I eventually ended up logging 21 errors in December -- for a complete list, click here.]

The first problem comes from my mother. This one technically started during the Thanksgiving weekend and now is spilling over into December. Her main problem: she had a hard disk crash recently and had to replace the disk/reload the operating system, applications, etc. (Right there you are talking about a 2-day process... She had a person from church who was nice enough to assist her). Her lingering problem: Her printer still doesn't work. The conversation:

Mom: "My printer doesn't work"

Me: "You need to reload the driver."

Here, in this little two-sentence conversation, you realize just how wide the gulf is between "computers" and "most of their users". My mother does not know what a driver is, nor (in the history of the computer world) why drivers evolved and why they are needed, nor where to find one, nor how to download it. She just wants the printer to work, and she's not being unreasonable to expect that it will work automatically when she plugs the printer into her computer.

We walk through the process of going to the Epson site, selecting the country, finding the download/support area, finding printers in the support area, finding her printer, finding the driver she needs, declining Epson's offer to spam her (there's a whole screen for accepting or declining Epson's spam), reading and agreeing to the End User Software License Agreement...

Let's pause on this step for a moment. The screen for the End User Software License Agreement says, "Notice to User: This is a legal agreement between you (an individual or single entity, referred to hereinafter as "you") and Epson America, Inc. ("Epson") for computer software product, fontware, typefaces and/or data, including any accompanying explanatory written materials (the "Software"). BEFORE INSTALLING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE, YOU MUST AGREE TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT. If you agree, click on the Accept button below. If you do not agree with the terms and conditions of this Agreement, click on the Decline button and you will not be able to download the Software." Then the agreement looks like this:We've invoked the United Nations, International governing bodies, the United States Export Administration Act, DFARS 252.227-7013, CFR 52.227-19 and its amendments, etc., all to use a printer... It's also interesting that you can buy alcoholic beverages, pharmaceuticals, big hunting knives, all sorts of toxic pesticides, automobiles, cigarettes, etc. without having to agree to anything. How much longer will that last?

Having accepted all of that (what choice do you have? All printer drivers from every printer manufacturer have these agreements), it is now possible to go on with the process of downloading the driver, installing it, praying that it works... And really she needs to download three drivers. When you look at the download page, there is Printer Driver v4.5CE (the actual driver), Epson Stylus Driver USB Updater (fixes a bug in the USB version of the driver) and then the Status Monitor v2.5bE ("After installing this EPSON printer driver, it is highly recommended that you download and install the EPSON Status Monitor 2 v2.0DE to allow monitoring of the ink usage and printer status.").

We download the first driver, unzip it, let it load temporary files, let it install, let the hardware wizard try to recognize the printer... And it doesn't work. We try various things in the control panel. We uninstall the driver and start over from scratch. Nothing works. And it's hard, because she's looking at a screen that she doesn't understand and I am 400 miles away trying to imagine what is happening over the phone. We work on it for 45 minutes and then give up. We'll try again tomorrow, hopefully with my sister on the scene, since she knows more about computers.

And I suppose I should be thankful that Epson even has the drivers on it's site, and does not charge for them. Charging for drivers seems to be becoming more common. Even so, this is way too hard for such a simple thing... especially since (in any normal user's eyes) it should all happen automatically when you plug in the printer.

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