Sending text messages costs too much. Compared to what, you ask? Well, a scientist at the University of Leicester points out that texting costs four times as much per megabyte as downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
In 2061: Odyssey Three, Arthur C. Clarke wrote:
The coming of the jet age had triggered an explosion of global tourism. At almost the same time -- it was not, of course, a coincidence -- satellites and fiber optics had revolutionized communications. With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.Clarke made that prediction in 1987. While it hasn't come true in a literal sense, I think he's not far off the mark. It's been years since the last time I paid for a long-distance (LD) phone call. My family's mobile phone plan provides us with an ample pool of minutes. And it doesn't cost us anything extra to use them for LD calls. So we make all of our LD calls on our mobile phones, and we've come to think of LD telephony as free.
Do we even need an LD carrier? Well, not under normal circumstances. But the cellular phone networks can become unavailable as a result of either excessive demand or power failure. The most likely scenario for either of those events is a disaster of some sort; New York City experienced cellular network collapse on 11 September 2001, and again during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Unfortunately, it's in exactly that sort of situation that you most want to place LD phone calls.
So it's prudent to have a backup plan for doing so. But it's silly to pay a monthly fee for an LD plan that you hope never to use. A few years ago, I called MCI (our LD carrier) to find out what could be done about that. The customer service representative offered to switch us to a plan that had no minimum fee, and I agreed.
Yesterday, I received a card from MCI informing me of a new monthly minimum. Beginning March 1, we would have to pay a $5.99 per month even if we made no LD calls at all. It was time to cancel. At first I had difficulty reaching a live human at MCI, but after ten or fifteen minutes of listening to elevator music, I remembered the gethuman 500 database that I wrote about a few months ago. Following the instructions on that site, I reached a customer service representative in a couple of minutes. After verifying that it was no longer possible to avoid the monthly minumum fees, I canceled our account.
I assumed that our LD backup plan would now be to use a 10-10 dial-around service if the need arose. But when I started to research the available dial-around services, I learned that there are still some LD carriers that have little or no monthly minimum. The best of these seems to be ECG, which offers an interstate rate of 2.5 cents per minute (much better than the 7 cents per minute I didn't pay MCI for the calls I wasn't making). I signed up.
ECG does charge a "regulatory recovery fee" of 59 cents per month. That's not quite the free LD that Clarke predicted, but I think I can live with it.
Ben points out that it's been a long time since my last entry. Fortunately, I had an experience yesterday that is relevant to his recent article about the supply and demand of the Nintendo Wii.
I was in a Wal-Mart when an associate came on the public address system and said, "We now have the Nintendo Wii in stock." I wasn't interested in buying a Wii myself, but I headed for Electronics anyway because I was curious. I hadn't actually seen Wiis for sale before, and I wondered if a mob would form and start fighting over them.
What I actually saw was rather anticlimactic. There were indeed some Wii packages visible behind the glass of the game-console display case, and a woman in that aisle had one in her cart. No other customers were there. I shrugged and went back to my shopping. When I was ready to check out, I swung by Electronics again just to see if anything had changed. The Wiis were gone, but when I asked an associate how many the store had received that day, she said "Four". So it's not surprising that they sold out quickly.
So that's my firsthand experience with Wii demand: enough to make them disappear in short order, but not enough to draw a crowd.
We've all had the experience of being trapped in an automated telephone menu system, cursing and pressing buttons at random in a desperate attempt to get a human representative to talk to you. But what if you knew exactly what buttons to press? The gethuman 500 database gives you that information for hundreds of companies and government agencies: the number to dial and which buttons to press in order to reach an actual live human being. Once you've done that, you're on your own.
Source: American Digest
From 1941 to 1949, Isaac Asimov wrote a series of science fiction stories about the decline and fall of a Galactic Empire. These stories were published in the magazine Astounding Stories, and in 1950 were reprinted in three volumes titled Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Collectively, the three volumes became known as the Foundation Trilogy.
When the first four stories were assembled into the book Foundation, the editor complained that the story began too abruptly, and asked Asimov to write a fifth story to precede the other four. Asimov complied, producing an account of how mathematician Hari Seldon establishes two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy to preserve the knowledge of the human race and serve as nuclei for the formation of a Second Empire. At one point in the story, Seldon is shown using the tool of his trade:
Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon's nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the hard plastic that rimmed it. Red symbols glowed out from the gray.In 1950, the standard calculation tool used by mathematicians and engineers was the slide rule, but Asimov described a future in which the slide rule was replaced by something new: a handheld electronic device.
As luck would have it, I read the Foundation Trilogy for the first time in the early 1970s, just as the first pocket calculators were appearing in stores. They looked exactly like what Asimov described, right down to the belt pouches and glowing red symbols (the earliest calculators had displays that used red LEDs). Two decades before its invention, he had predicted the calculator with virtually perfect accuracy. And it did completely replace the slide rule.
A few years later, Asimov wrote a short story ("The Feeling of Power") in which pocket calculators are so ubiquitous that people have forgotten how to perform calculations without them. This idea seemed farfetched in 1958, but today . . .
A breathless Gizmodo post announces that CDs are dead, thanks to a Blaupunkt car receiver that has a Secure Digital memory card slot, but doesn't play CDs. The "sweet little player" sells for $180.
Apparently I'm supposed to be impressed by this, but my reaction is "Big deal." My car has had a receiver with an SD slot for the better part of a year. It's a VR3 unit (from Virtual Reality Sound Labs) that I bought at Wal-Mart for $80, and it has a USB port and a CD player in addition to the memory card slot. (Gizmodo's claim that the Blaupunkt receiver "accepts USB devices" appears to be just plain wrong; there's no USB port in the picture, and the Technical Details on the Blaupunkt site do not even mention USB. It's SD or nothing, unless you want to plug an external player into the AUX jack on the front panel.)
I don't see what's so "sweet" about a car receiver that costs more than twice what I paid for mine, but has fewer features. Perhaps the "hipness" of this unit is worth an extra $100 to some people, but I didn't buy my car receiver to impress people. I bought it so I could listen to audio recordings in my car. As for Gizmodo's suggestion that I take a shovel and bury my CD collection: sure thing, guys. Just as soon as you provide, at your own expense, MP3 replacements for every CD track I own. My CDs are DRM-free, so of course I'll only accept DRM-free digital files to replace them. Good luck finding those.
Source: Instapundit
This video from the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference demonstrates some amazing new image-editing tools. I would try to describe what this software can do, but there's no point in trying to convey it verbally. Just watch the video.
Scientists are continually finding new evidence that everything is trying to kill you, and I do my best to point out new findings of this sort. In the past, I've warned you to be afraid of church air and flip-flops. Today I'm also warning you that laser printers and microwave popcorn are deadly. As a precaution, you should wear a hazmat suit at all times while in your office -- and at home, too, if you have any laser printers or microwave popcorn there. No need to thank me; I'm just posting this information as a public service.
UPDATE: In order to better highlight this sort of news, I have created a new category of blog posts called "Things that will kill you."
The temperature hit 104 degrees today, so my initial reaction to the USB-powered necktie cooler was "What a great idea!" Then I remembered that I haven't worn a necktie to work since 1992. That was at IBM, where people now wear shorts and T-shirts to the office. And now that I have a job that lets me work from home some of the time, I don't even have to wear pants to work. Mind you, I'm not saying that I don't -- just that it's entirely a matter of my own discretion.
Source: buzz.mn
Today is Robert A. Heinlein's centennial; he was born exactly 100 years ago, on 7 July 1907. I am tempted to write a tribute to him and his influence on science fiction and popular culture, but there's really no need. Many other people have already done a better job of this than I possibly could. My favorite example is Spider Robinson's essay "Rah Rah R.A.H.", which you can read online courtesy of the Heinlein Society. (That piece and a number of others are collected in Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, if you want to read more.)
Instead, I'm going to commemorate Heinlein's centennial by kicking off a series of posts I've been planning to write for some time. It's called Prophecies, and each post will talk about a technological or social development that was predicted (often with uncanny accuracy) in written science fiction. My knowledge of SF is heavily weighted toward the Golden Age classics, so a lot of the predictions are from fiction that's at least 40 years old, and sometimes much older.
My first example, of course, is from a Heinlein novel: Space Cadet, one of Heinlein's earliest juvenile novels. The title is probably enough to make today's audiences dismiss it, but the book is remarkably sophisticated for something written in 1948 and intended for preteen and teenage readers. Most of the story is about the training and education required for all officer candidates for the Interplanetary Patrol, a spacefaring force responsible for peacekeeping, exploration, and diplomatic contact with extraterrestrials. (Sound familiar?) One of the themes of this novel is that Patrol officers must understand the cultures and customs of alien races, so that they can present themselves as sentient and civilized by the standards of those aliens. In effect, Heinlein invented Starfleet and Starfleet Academy decades before the original Star Trek series.
But that's not the prediction I want to talk about today. In the very first scene of Space Cadet, as protagonist Matt Dodson is arriving at Patrol headquarters to begin his training, he meets fellow cadet Tex Jarman and strikes up a conversation. A moment later, Jarman remarks, "Say, your telephone is sounding."
"Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?"A perfectly normal, everyday scene, right? But when I first read it in the 1970s, I was astonished at the notion of a telephone that you could carry in your pocket. A telephone was a stationary appliance, connected to a wall socket by wires. It was also bulky and heavy -- an object that sat on a tabletop or was bolted to a wall. The notion that it could weigh mere ounces, be carried in a pouch or bag, and work almost anywhere was . . . well, it was science fiction.
"That you, son?" came his father's voice.
"Yes, Dad."
"Did you get there all right?"
"Sure, I'm about to report in."
"How's your leg?"
"Leg's all right, Dad." His answer was not frank; his right leg, fresh from corrective operation for a short Achilles' tendon, was aching as he spoke.
"That's good. Now see here, Matt -- if it should work out that you aren't selected, don't let it get you down. You call me at once and --"
"Sure, sure, Dad," Matt broke in. "I'll have to sign off - I'm in a crowd. Good-by. Thanks for calling."
"Good-by, son. Good luck."
Tex Jarman looked at him understandingly. "Your folks always worry, don't they? I fooled mine -- packed my phone in my bag."
Now we all have these phones, and we take them completely for granted. But let it be noted that six decades ago, Robert A. Heinlein described, with perfect accuracy, the mobile phone as we know it today. Rah rah R.A.H.!
UPDATE: Taylor Dinerman, in a column on Heinlein's legacy, points out that he also described a mobile phone in the 1951 novel Between Planets -- again, in the very first scene. Protagonist Don Harvey is riding a pony named Lazy in New Mexico when a snake startles the pony. After Harvey dispatches the snake (with a ray gun!), the two of them resume traveling:
He clucked and they started off. A few hundred yards further on Lazy shied again, not from a snake this time but from an unexpected noise. Don pulled him in and spoke severely. "You bird-brained butterball! When are you going to learn not to jump when the telephone rings?" Lazy twitched his shoulder muscles and snorted. Don reached for the pommel, removed the phone, and answered. "Mobile 6-J-233309, Don Harvey speaking."I had forgotten that scene. Dinerman is right; that's definitely a mobile phone.
Like a lot of big cities, Liverpool has a pigeon problem. The city council has decided to try a new solution: bring in a bunch of robotic predator birds to scare the pigeons away. Ten mechanical Peregrine Falcons will be installed in the city center by next year. These birds (called Robops) don't actually fly or attack pigeons, but they do squawk and flap their wings.
This is a good start, but I have some suggestions for additional steps to be taken after the Robops are installed.
Source: Daily Illuminator
Did you know that American and British troops use Silly String to detect the tripwires of booby traps? Neither did I, until I read the Wikipedia article about it.
UPDATE: Here's a video about an effort to keep the troops supplied with this stuff.
Fujitsu has unveiled two new solid-state notebook/tablet computers. By "solid-state", I mean that they have no moving parts at all, unless you count the keys on the keyboard. The hard drive has been replaced by flash memory. This is the wave of the future, folks. The days of the hard drive are numbered.
Source: CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast
Almost everyone has multiple phone numbers now. And some of these numbers change over time, as you move from one employer or mobile phone company to another. Notifying everyone you know of the new numbers is chore, and callers still have to guess which number is the best one for reaching you at any particular moment. But what can be done about all this?
The folks at GrandCentral.com believe they have a solution. If you sign up with them, they'll give you a single phone number that you can give out to everyone, replacing all of your previous numbers. When someone calls you, all of your phones will ring, and you can pick up the one that's most convenient for you. You also have a single voicemail inbox for all these phones. And if you change jobs or mobile phone providers, your unified phone number will remain the same.
I can think of some disadvantages to this approach, but it certainly is innovative. David Pogue's New York Times article explains it in detail, and lists a bunch of extra features that I haven't even mentioned here.
The ThinkGeek Annoy-A-Tron is an electronic device with a single purpose: to drive someone crazy. It's a tiny circuit board (smaller than a business card) that generates short beeps at random intervals. The idea is to hide it somewhere near where your victim works (a built-in magnet helps you do this) and watch him or her go nuts trying to figure out where the sound is coming from. The Annoy-A-Tron can run for up to a month on the (included) watch battery -- and of course you can sneak in and install a new battery if you want the torture to continue.
It goes without saying that this gadget is evil. But you have to admire the ingenuity of the diabolical genius who designed it. And it only costs $9.99, so it's an infernal device that even the most cash-strapped villain can afford.
Here's an interesting gadget that I learned about from the Daily Giz Wiz podcast. It's the CommuteMate Flameless Flare, a roadside safety device. This has several advantages over traditional safety flares. It uses LEDs and runs on two AAA batteries, so you can't burn yourself or set your car on fire. There's a powerful magnet in the base that lets you stick it right on your car if you need to. The Flameless Flare is reusable, and it's remarkably inexpensive -- Amazon.com currently lists it for $4.79.
Following a link from Instapundit, I read a Popular Mechanics article on Extreme Plumbing by Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters fame. Jamie makes the following point about pressure tanks:
The forces at play with high-pressure tanks can be huge. If the energy stored in a workshop air-compressor tank is released all at once, it can hurt or kill a person. I once complained to our insurers, “Why are you so fussy about the explosives we use on the show? Every day we make rigs using pressure tanks that are just as dangerous.” Big mistake. Now they fuss about pressure tanks, too.
As it happens, I was reading this shortly after I got home from Raleigh Little Theatre, where I spent all day working on the first technical rehearsal of House of Blue Leaves. I am assistant stage manager for this play, and one of my responsibilities is to handle the special effects that are used when, halfway through Act 2, a bomb explodes just offstage. One of those special effects is a compressed-air cannon that fires a load of fuller's earth through a doorway onto the stage, simulating the cloud of dust and smoke produced by the explosion. The cannon fires when I open a valve that releases air from a pressure tank.
In fact, one of the last things I did at RLT before coming home was to repressurize that tank to 80 psi so that it's ready for tomorrow's dress rehearsal. Then I came home and read Jamie's explanation that pressure tanks are dangerous and can kill you.
Actually, I'm not worried. If you read his entire article, you'll see that that paragraph is scary only when taken out of context. Sure, pressure tanks can be dangerous if you use them in a reckless or irresponsible way, but the MythBusters don't do that, and neither do theatre techies like me. Jamie's article is really about how many of the challenges on MythBusters have been solved with plumbing and pressure tanks, and what that tells us about how useful and powerful that technology is. And fun, of course. I'm certainly going to be careful operating my cannon over the next several weeks, but I'd be lying if I said it won't be a big thrill to set it off.
This is clever: a rechargeable AA battery that can plug into a USB port, turning any computer into a battery charger.
RealPlayer has made a lot of enemies. It's a free media player, which is nice. But RealPlayer likes to display pop-up advertisements, and it has a history of collecting information about the media files you play with it, leading some critics to classify it as both adware and spyware. When PC World compiled a list of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" last year, RealPlayer was number 2. (The top offender was AOL.)
But occasionally, you may need to play a file that uses one of the proprietary RealMedia formats, such as .rm or .ra. In that situation, are you forced to use RealPlayer? Not necessarily. On a Windows system, you can use Real Alternative instead. Real Alternative is a codec pack that enables you to play RealMedia formats with Media Player Classic. You can download both Real Alternative and Media Player Classic from the Real Alternative page of freecodecs.com.
If you use a Palm smartphone or PDA, it will need to be updated in order to correctly handle the new start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005). The updates for recent Palm and Treo models can be obtained from the DST page of the Palm website.
A couple of months ago, the hard disk on our primary home computer became corrupted, and I had to reformat and reinstall Windows. I was able to do this without losing any data by installing a second hard disk, putting Windows on that, and then using a recovery tool (Active@ UNDELETE) to retrieve our data files from the corrupted drive. After I was sure that I had recovered everything of value from the corrupted drive, I reformatted it and started using it as a backup medium (with Norton Ghost as the backup tool).
That should have been the end of our Windows problems, at least for a while. Formatting the new C: drive and installing Windows from scratch ought to have resulted in a clean, stable system. But something went wrong, because we started seeing odd behavior over the last several weeks. The first warning sign was a folder on my desktop that I could not get rid of -- I could drag it to the Recycle Bin and empty the bin, but the folder would reappear on my desktop later. That was annoying, but not really problematic. Then Windows started refusing to shut down, restart, or log out. You could select those actions from the Start menu, but nothing would happen; the only way out was to use the button on the front of the computer. It was clear that our system was unstable, so after making sure that everything was backed up to the other hard drive, I reinstalled Windows again.
If you've ever gone through this process (and if you've had your computer more than a year or two, you've probably had to), you know that the time-consuming part is not installing Windows from the CD, but installing four years' worth of updates and patches. It takes several hours to get it all done. This time around, it occurred to me that I wasn't actually doing anything except clicking buttons to tell Windows Update to proceed to the next step. The problem is that after installing each set of updates, Windows needs to restart, but it won't do so without confirmation from you. And after Windows restarts, you have to manually run Windows Update again to start downloading and installing the next set of updates. In other words, what's so burdensome is that Windows Update keeps stopping and waiting for manual intervention.
Why can't the whole process be automated? What's needed is a Windows Cumulative Update option, which would do the following:
To win a contest at DefCon 13, a team of geeks established an unamplified Wi-Fi connection over a distance of 125 miles, beating their previous record of 55 miles. Team PAD did it by connecting their 300mw Wi-Fi cards to satellite dishes: one computer (outside Las Vegas) used a 12-foot dish, and the other (on a mountaintop in Utah) used a 10-foot dish. (I first heard of this amazing feat on the This Week in Tech podcast.)
It is probably not a coincidence that all four members of Team PAD are ham radio operators.
If you have iTunes installed on your Windows machine, you are running the Windows iPod service. But if you don't use an iPod, you don't need this service. Here's how to turn it off and save 4MB of memory:
A Japanese research team has developed a fuel cell that can be powered by human blood. This is good news in the short term, because it means that pacemakers and other implants can be designed without batteries that have to be replaced periodically. But in the long term, it means that we'll have to watch out for vampire robots. Will future Slayers have to carry a lightsaber as well as a stake?
Gizmodo is a blog devoted to interesting gadgets like contact lenses that monitor your blood glucose level, or a bottle opener that counts the beverages you consume. A recurring feature on Gizmodo is "What's In Your Gadget Bag?", which asks a (presumably geeky) celebrity what bits of technology he or she carries around all the time. Recently, they asked humor writer Dave Barry this question. I was aware that he had used a Palm PDA (because he mentioned it in his column a few years ago), but it seems that he has upgraded to a Treo. "In accordance with federal law, I also have an iPod," he writes.
In Internat Use of Pancakes, Greg describes how his brain tried to interpret an IHOP sign with burned-out letters. I've experienced that kind of thing myself. When we see abbreviations (and a sign with burned-out letters is an abbreviation, albeit an accidental one), we fill in the missing information according to what we expect. And if we're Internet geeks, that dictates the kind of information we fill in.
When I was working on Wake Forest Road, my daily commute took me past a sign that indicated the direction of Raleigh Community Hospital. But the sign didn't have room for the entire name, so it said RALEIGH COM HOSPITAL. Inevitably, my brain parsed this as "Raleigh.com Hospital", which makes no sense -- but that's how my brain insisted on interpreting it. I guess a lot of people had this problem, because the hospital eventually gave up and changed its name.
I can't say that an IHOP sign has ever made me think of the Internet, but there was a time when I reacted that way to every Waffle House sign I saw. This was a decade and a half ago, when even dial-up Internet service was not widely available, and the World Wide Web didn't exist. But things like e-mail and Usenet newsgroups did, and if you knew what you were doing, you could access them from your home computer. I learned how to accomplish this using a shareware application that was designed for running a BBS, but could also be used as a single-user newsreader and e-mail client. For reasons known only to him, the creator of this application had named it Waffle.
Waffle included a UUCP program, which enabled computers running Waffle to exchange data with each other over dial-up connections. This meant several Waffle users could share the cost of a single dial-up connection, with one computer serving as a local hub that downloaded the e-mail and Usenet traffic for all of them. The other computers would then call the hub machine to download their data (and upload any outgoing traffic). It was slow, but it worked and didn't cost very much.
For several years, I was part of a small community (about half a dozen) of Waffle users in the Triangle area of North Carolina that used this system to access the Net. I was using Waffle every day to check my e-mail, so you can imagine what kind of conclusion my brain would draw every time I saw a Waffle House sign. And that's not the worst of it. There is a restaurant in Dunn called Triangle Waffle that made me do a double-take every time I drove by. (My local UUCP network of Waffle users didn't hold meetings, but that would have been a good place to do it.)
All of this came to an end when the first ISPs began appearing in the Triangle. I dismantled my Waffle setup almost a decade ago. But when I saw that Greg was writing about Internet use of batter cakes cooked on a griddle, those memories came flooding back . . .
My family is still using the original clothes washer that we bought in 1986, but we're on our third clothes dryer. So I was delighted to stumble across this simple tip for extending (and perhaps doubling) the life of a dryer. Excerpt:
Just removing the lint from the filter isn't always enough — the fine mesh of most dryer filters can be clogged in ways that aren't obvious at a casual glance. As suggested by the piece quoted above, softener sheets can cause waxy build-ups on lint screens that require a little extra effort — usually no more than a quick scrub and rinse in warm, soapy water — to remove.
Thanks to Gerard Van Der Leun for pointing this one out.
Virgil isn't the only one trying to tame the e-mail beast. 43 Folders recently posted a list of five e-mail productivity tips. One of them is to stop trying to make e-mails into literary masterpieces, and instead just bang out something that gets the message across. That's definitely advice I need to hear. I know perfectionism is a debilitating disease, but I never expected to find it lurking in my in-box.
The PalmPilot and its descendants have been around for almost a decade, but some people still aren't convinced that they need one. Now there's a Palm that will overcome their objections. The PaperPalm costs only five dollars, doesn't require batteries, and can be dropped on a hard floor without breaking. There's no software to install, and no learning curve. You don't even need to use Graffiti -- it can process your natural handwriting without error. But you may have to sharpen the stylus first.
A LEGO enthusiast who calls himself the Goldfish has demonstrated that one can use the little plastic blocks to build mechanical logic gates. This means that it should be possible to build a working computer entirely out of LEGOs.
Tourists in Germany can now visit a tropical island only 50 kilometers from Berlin. Well, technically, it's not really an island, but it has a beach, a lagoon, a rain forest, and a tropical village (just look at the pictures). And the weather is always nice, because the whole thing is under a dome.
I like computers and electronic gadgets, so I'm usually pretty receptive to innovative new high-tech products. But occasionally I run across one that just makes me scratch my head and ask, "Why?" For example, it's not clear to me why I would want a talking first aid kit -- especially if it costs $150.
I see that the same company sells "Intelligent First Aid Kits" that don't talk (and are much cheaper). That makes sense, actually. Sometimes intelligence means knowing when to shut up.
Does your computer have a cigarette lighter? No? Well, for heaven's sake, get busy and install one. What do you mean, you don't smoke? Use it to plug in the car charger for your cellphone. Do I have to spell everything out for you?
Energizer has just unveiled an omnivorous flashlight: one that can use multiple types of batteries. An AP article reports that "the Quick Switch takes two C, D or AA batteries and works by merely adjusting a switch to the proper cell size, automatically locking the batteries into place." If you ask me, the ultimate flashlight is the NightStar, which requires no batteries at all -- but the NightStar is expensive ($39.95). The Quick Switch sells for $9.99 to $12.99, so it's much more affordable.
I think I will buy one just so that I can finally use up my C batteries, which are currently gathering dust. Almost nothing uses C batteries anymore. (I don't recall what device I originally bought my Cs for -- but it must have died shortly after that, leaving me with a stockpile of batteries that I can't use.) But the biggest advantage of the Quick Switch may be that, in a pinch, you can raid almost any gadget in your house for batteries to power your flashlight. That ability could be a godsend during a power outage.
In nearly three decades of playing and working with computers, I thought I had experienced just about every way in which they can malfunction, from hard disk failures and faulty power switches (my Gateway Essential 550 did both of those) to chronic operating system instability (Windows 98, I'm looking at you). I've even dropped a Palm on a hard floor and heard the sickening tinkle of glass as its screen shattered. But my office computer surprised me today with a new variety of disaster.
Remember what happens on Star Trek when a decloaking Romulan ship attacks, or an overlooked gravitic mine detonates nearby? Sparks fly from the consoles on the bridge, and the air fills with smoke. It was like that. Well, okay, not quite that spectacular -- but the computer gave off a bright flash and the snapping sound of an electric arc. As the air filled with the pungent smell of ozone, the computer went dead. Something had shorted out in the power supply, and now I had a rectangular beige doorstop. This computer is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker -- hang on, IBM is its maker. Well, anyway, it's definitely an ex-computer.
My coworker in the next office submitted a repair request on my behalf (that's normally done online, so I was certainly in no position to do it). The "doctor" will come to my office tomorrow morning, but we know the patient is dead and can't be resurrected. The best prospect is a brain transplant; he'll bring another computer with him (actually, I think his hunchbacked assistant will be carrying it) and will attempt to swap the hard disks, then channel a bolt of lightning through the lifeless body. (Isn't that what happens when you turn on the switch?) The result will be a kind of zombie version of my computer, which will shuffle around the office making incoherent noises until a mob of my coworkers gathers, brandishing pitchforks and torches, and . . .
Sorry. Anyhow, the deceased computer should be either repaired or replaced tomorrow.
Tonight I attended the June meeting of TAPIT, the Palm user group that I belong to. One of the people there thanked me for telling her about the Palm program I use to keep track of Weight Watchers points. She said that, thanks to me, she has lost thirty-six and a half pounds over the last year. Of course I don't deserve the credit for her achievement; I've told numerous people how I accomplished my own weight loss, but few of them have been inspired to follow my example. Still, I'm delighted to hear that I was able to help. It's nice to learn, once in a while, that you've made a difference in someone's life.
I was shopping in Wal-Mart recently (looking for a Mother's Day card and some cardstock for printing a board game), when I heard a baby crying. That's not unusual in a place like Wal-Mart, but it got my attention for two reasons. First, this baby was really howling -- not like it was in pain, but seriously cranky. And second, the crying sounded slightly odd, in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. After a few minutes, I decided to follow the sound and find out where it was coming from.
The source turned out to be a young woman -- a teenager, really -- in the handbags and accessories department. Sure enough, she had a baby, and she was briskly patting and rubbing its back, trying to get it to quiet down. Then I looked closer and saw that it wasn't a real baby. It was a life-size infant mannequin. The crying had sounded odd because it was artificial -- a digitized recording of some kind. This clearly wasn't any sort of doll; it was a robot baby. And the girl caring for it wasn't playing. She seemed quite serious about what she was doing.
I didn't want to stand there and stare, so I walked on. But as I continued shopping, I kept trying to figure out what I had seen. Where did that robot baby come from, and why was she carrying it around in Wal-Mart? As I left the store, I noticed that she was sitting on a bench just inside the front door, feeding her "child" from a bottle. I got half a dozen steps into the parking lot, and realized that I couldn't leave without finding out what was going on. Retracing my steps, I approached the young woman and said, "Excuse me, but I'm curious about your baby. Can you tell me what it is?"
She smiled and explained that she was participating in a Baby Think It Over class, designed to give teenagers a taste of what it's like to be a parent. The "infant" was a RealCare Baby infant simulator. The baby is programmed to need feeding, changing, and so forth at unpredictable intervals, and records how well you care for it, so you can't just leave it in the trunk of your car while you go shopping; you actually have to carry it around with you, just like a real baby. (That's why she had it in Wal-Mart.) The student has to wear an wristband with an identifying disc that fits into a recess on the baby's back. This is to ensure that the student actually cares for the baby personally, instead of palming it off on someone else. When I saw her patting the baby's back, she was also inserting her ID in the recess so the baby would recognize her.
I had no idea this technology existed, but it sure strikes me as a good idea. Any new parent can tell you that you can't really know what you're getting into before you're confronted with the reality of a baby that you are responsible for, twenty-four hours a day. I see that the RealCare Baby comes with an operating handbook for the instructor, but none for the "parent." Just like the real thing.
Well, the new computer did arrive. The new monitor, however, did not. It was shipped separately and may not get here for another week. So the new computer will have to wait. So will the copy of Window XP that I bought on the way home from work last night.
It's just as well, because I'm not going to have time to fool with it today. I'm off to Lexington, NC, to have lunch with my mom and pick up some items she's bringing up from Rock Hill. Specifically, two of my dad's extra satellite dishes (he has a closet full of them) and a dress Mom made for Laura. One of the satellite dishes is for Bob, and the other one is for me.
Ben called me at work to tell me that the new computer has, in fact arrived.
Most Windows installation programs do two things. They ask you to shut down every other application running on your computer. But first, they take over the entire screen, hiding the Taskbar and making it impossible for you to shut down anything. There must be a good reason for this, but I can't imagine what it is.
