Jun 23

The cursive menace

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Three years ago, I joined Bob in criticizing the practice of teaching cursive writing in schools. At the time, I condemned cursive for being illegible, but it didn’t occur to me that it can actually kill people. However, in one particular context — the handwriting of doctors — sloppy handwriting can cause prescriptions to be filled incorrectly. The result could be harmful or even fatal. Recently, the state of Washington addressed this issue by passing a law that forbids physicians from using cursive writing in prescriptions. On prescription slips in the state of Washington, cursive is now illegal.
Some people are already making fun of the new law. On the blog of the libertarian Cato Institute, Michael Cannon calls it “really, really dumb.” Blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh asks, “Doesn’t government have more important things to worry about than this?” But despite my normally libertarian leanings, I approve of this law. In fact, I say it doesn’t go far enough.
Medical mistakes can kill people. If doctors’ sloppy handwriting leads to such mistakes, it’s inexcusable for them to continue writing that way. The medical profession should have solved this problem on its own, but if doctors are not willing to do so, it’s reasonable for governments to step in. In an ideal free-market economy, this would not be necessary, but health care is heavily regulated in our society and thus largely insulated from market forces. If our governments are going to regulate doctors, requiring them to write clearly is a valid part of that. Besides, governments created this problem in the first place by teaching cursive writing in public schools. It’s only fitting that they should have to solve it.
So Washington’s new law is a good idea. But why does it only apply to prescriptions? The harm caused by doctors’ sloppy handwriting is not limited to prescription slips. It also occurs when their treatment instructions are illegible, leading to medical mistakes that can be a deadly as an incorrect prescription. This law should have prohibited doctors from using cursive for any written instructions, not just prescriptions.
Medical schools should be teaching a handwriting class — one that concentrates on clear, legible printing. If doctors write illegible instructions that lead to harmful treatment mistakes, that should be grounds for a malpractice suit.
Now, can we get the public schools to drop cursive writing from their curriculum and use the class time to teach something useful?

Jun 19

Trigger thumb

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Several weeks ago, I started noticing that my right thumb was behaving oddly. When I first woke up in the morning, I found it difficult to straighten or bend the thumb. It would flex normally for part of its range of motion, but at about the midpoint I would encounter resistance. If I made a greater effort, the thumb would flex past the point of resistance with an unpleasant (and occasionally audible) pop. Sometimes this would actually hurt. The problem would clear up after I had been awake for an hour or so, but it always came back the next morning.
Eventually, I noticed a couple of additional things. First, the problem did not disappear until after my morning shower. It was responding to heat, as an experiment with a heating pad quickly confirmed. Second, the problem was a little worse each day — flexing my thumb was more difficult and painful until it was heat-treated. I made an appointment with my primary physician for Monday, June 12. I also did a Web search on the terms “thumb”, “bend”, “straighten”, and “pop”, and found numerous pages documenting a disorder called “trigger finger” (or, if a thumb is involved, “trigger thumb”) that sounded exactly like what I was experiencing.
My doctor’s diagnosis was, indeed, that I have trigger thumb. He referred me to the Raleigh Hand Center. The earliest appointment I could obtain was for Friday, June 16. The early-morning impairment continued to get a little worse each day, and — more ominously — the problem started to flare up during the afternoon. I don’t have a heating pad at work, so I would have to get a cup of hot water from the break room, put it on my desk, and dunk my thumb in it for a few minutes.
On Friday, I went to Raleigh Hand Center and was examined by Dr. Post. He confirmed the diagnosis of trigger thumb, and explained that the first thing we should try was a corticosteroid injection into the joint at the base of the thumb, which often cures the problem. (If that didn’t work, an outpatient surgical procedure would be the next step.) I agreed, and he gave me the injection after administering a local anaesthetic. Dr. Post said that improvement might take as long as four weeks to appear, but that most patients noticed the benefits of the injection after one or two weeks.
The thumb was sore for a couple of days after the injection, but now feels fine. I phoned my father yesterday to wish him a happy Father’s Day, and in the course of the conversation we traded stories about our recent medical developments. Dad astonished me by revealing that he has trigger finger in the middle fingers of both hands. His doctor gave him steroid injections, which cured them problem for a while. But it gradually returned. The doctor decided to repeat the injections, and Dad is symptom-free again. If the cure isn’t permanent this time, Dad will undergo the surgery.
It’s interesting that we both developed the same problem at about the same time. I suppose there might be an inherited predisposition, but the causes of trigger finger are poorly understood and may be environmental. Dad and I both use computers a lot. (Dr. Post speculated that my thumb seizes up during the night because I’m not moving it. If that’s how it works, the afternoon flareups at work probably happened because my right hand was holding a mouse, which involves very little thumb motion.) In any case, we now have something new to talk about. The next time our extended family gathers around a dinner table, Dad and I can bore everyone else by comparing notes on our trigger finger experiences. And of course I can bore the readers of this blog (if any still exist) by writing about my thumb here.

May 29

In memoriam

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It’s Memorial Day, the day set aside in the United States to honor members of the armed forces who died in the line of duty. In observance of the day, I recommend that you read Gerard Van der Leun’s excellent essay “The Name in the Stone“.
If you wish, you can also read “Remember”, an article I wrote two years ago. (The occasion was actually Veterans Day, but it has considerable relevance to Memorial Day as well.)

May 25

Voltaire’s footman

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A year ago, I wrote about a strange coincidence that happened to me. It was connected with the Raleigh Little Theatre play that I was rehearsing for, which was a week away from its premiere.
The same thing seems to be happening again. I am in the cast of Candide, which opens next week. A few days ago, I was reading James Lileks’s daily Web column The Bleat, in which he wrote about watching a Charlie Chaplin film with his preschool-age daughter. Describing her response to a particular scene, Lileks wrote: “She had the exact same reaction I had – gasps and laughter in equal amount. You could show this movie to Voltaire or his footman and they’d have the same reaction.”
As it happens, in Candide I am Voltaire’s footman. What are the odds that Lileks would pick that particular example of a random historical spear-carrier during the brief moment in my life when I happen to be playing him on stage?
This isn’t the only odd coincidence I’ve experienced recently in connection with my theatrical avocation. A couple of days ago, I decided on a whim to see what Wikipedia had to say about NECCO Wafers. (It’s an obscure candy that I vaguely remember from my childhood, but haven’t seen for a long time, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know who made them, what they were made of, or even if they still existed.) Wikipedia does, in fact, have an article about the Wafers, and another article about NECCO, the company that makes them. I learned that NECCO has three factories, one of which is in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
As I wrote here a few months ago, I was born in Thibodaux.
Out of curiosity, I followed the link to Wikipedia’s article about Thibodaux and skimmed through it. At the bottom were links to the Web sites for Thibodaux’s city government and its Chamber of Commerce. Reading the Discover Thibodaux page on the city’s site, I learned that my birthplace has a community theatre called the Thibodaux Playhouse, which seemed remarkable for a town of less than 15,000 people. I figured the Playhouse probably had a Web site of its own, and one Google search later, I was looking at it.
Actually, I was staring at it in astonishment. The Thibodaux Playhouse is now rehearsing a play called The Spitfire Grill (a stage adaptation of the 1996 movie). Auditions were held a few weeks ago, and the show will open at the end of July. I am quite familiar with The Spitfire Grill, because we produced it at Raleigh Little Theatre earlier this season, and I worked on it as assistant stage manager.
Again, I have to ask: what are the odds of this kind of thing happening?
UPDATE (5 June 2006): There’s definitely some kind of cosmic conspiracy going on. I was just reading the five-minute parody version of “Logopolis”, the classic Doctor Who episode that this blog was named after, and it contains a NECCO Wafers reference!

Apr 11

The case of the missing sweatshirt

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I’m going to tell you a story. It’s long and meandering, goes into unnecessary detail to an absurd degree, and ultimately turns out to be pointless. You should skip it if you could spend the time doing something useful. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
A blog is born
When I first started this blog in October 2001, I used Blogger because it was simple, user-friendly, and free. At the time, Blogger was a financially-strapped one-man operation, and I wanted to contribute some money to help keep it operating. But, as I wrote in January 2002, there was no simple way to do so. Shortly after I posted those remarks, Blogger introduced a paid version of its service called Blogger Pro, which provided several extra features. (The ordinary version of Blogger didn’t change, and remained free). I signed up at once and paid the annual subscription fee.
Enter Google
In February 2003, Google acquired Blogger. The resulting infusion of funding and support staff not only ended my concerns about Blogger’s survival, but also produced numerous improvements in the service. Blogger’s servers were upgraded and a new and improved user interface was unveiled. Finally, in September 2003, Blogger announced that the Blogger Pro service was being discontinued — all of the extra Pro features were being rolled into the free version of Blogger! Every Blogger user was now effectively a Blogger Pro user whether they had paid or not.
To compensate them for having paid for features that were now free, Blogger offered to send each Pro subscriber a free hooded sweatshirt. You just had to go to a particular page on the Blogger site, log in with your Pro username and password, and fill out a form with your shirt size and mailing address. But when I tried to do this, I found that my login was not recognized. On September 11, 2003, I went to the Blogger customer support page, where you can report problems by filling out a form and clicking a Submit button. I used the form to describe what had happened when I tried to log in and claim my free shirt.
Dude, where’s my shirt?
The next day, I received an e-mail response from a support tech named Steve, who informed me that Blogger had no record of my Blogger Pro upgrade purchase. He asked me for the purchase date and the last four digits of the credit card I had used. I replied with that information on the 13th. I received no further response. A month went by.
On October 16, I went to the support page again and used the form to complain about the lack of response, attaching a copy of my correspondence with Steve up to that point. Steve replied that same day, saying that he never received my 9/13 note. I responded immediately, sending him another copy of the information he had asked for. I received no response. Another month went by.
At this point, I started to see a pattern. When I used the Web form to contact Blogger customer service, my messages were received. But when I tried to e-mail Steve directly, my messages did not reach him.
On November 13, I decided to try again. Thinking that perhaps the e-mails I had sent Steve from my home e-mail address were not reaching him, I tried sending a note from my work address. I received no response. Having run out of ideas, I gave up.
The free shirt wasn’t really all that important to me. (I don’t even like hooded sweatshirts.) What I wanted was to understand — and perhaps to solve — the strange problems I had encountered. Why was there no record of my Blogger Pro purchase? What was preventing my e-mail messages from reaching Steve? It didn’t make sense. But I had exhausted the available methods of pursuing the matter.
Cold case
Sixteen months passed. During this time, I converted my blog from Blogger to Movable Type, so I wasn’t even a Blogger user anymore. I completely forgot about the Blogger sweatshirt business.
On March 31, 2005, while filing and deleting old e-mail messages, I stumbled across my log of the correspondence with Steve. I decided to have another go at the problem. I sent a note to Steve’s address at Blogger, recapping everything that had happened in the fall of 2003, and asking for an update. My message was returned as undeliverable; Steve was no longer working for Blogger. I went to the Blogger customer support page and used the problem reporting form to describe the whole bizarre story, attaching a copy of my correspondence with Steve, and submitted it. I received no response.
On April 11, 2005, I went to the Blogger site and saw an announcement that the problem-report form was broken. Specifically, there was a field on the form where you were supposed to specify which of your blogs (you can have more than one) was affected by the problem you were reporting. My problem had nothing to do with any of my blogs, so I had been selecting “No blog in particular”. Blogger had now discovered that if you did that, your problem report didn’t go anywhere; it just disappeared. This explained why I had received no response to my March 31 report.
One last try
At this point it occurred to me that in the months since my last attempt to report the problem by e-mail, I had switched e-mail addresses. Instead of using my old Road Runner address, I was now using Gmail. Gmail is Google’s Web-based e-mail system, and Google owns Blogger. Surely, if I sent an e-mail query from my Gmail address, it would get through to Blogger customer support! I would be sending the message from one part of Google to another.
It seemed worth trying, so I composed an e-mail note that began with the words “Hi — I’m following up on a technical support issue that’s a couple of years old. No, really! I promise I’m not insane.” I went on to relate the entire story from September 2003 to the present. I included a copy of all of the previous correspondence. My message ended with the following summary:

At this point, we seem to have several unanswered questions:

  1. Were my e-mails to Steve from [my home address] and [my work address] blocked for some reason?
  2. If not, why didn’t they reach him?
  3. Why doesn’t the Blogger Pro database contain any record that I paid for a subscription?
  4. Am I still eligible for a free sweatshirt, or have I missed that particular boat? 🙂

If you get this note, please drop me a line and let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks!

I sent the note to support@blogger.com.
A response, but not an answer
To my utter astonishment, I received a reply on April 15. It read:

Hello Patrick,
Based on our records, all of your previous emails as noted in your email attachment (besides your most recent ones) had been received via your [home] email address. I also do notice that there was never any email correspondence received on our end from you back to Steve’s questions. Unfortunately, I would not know why emails you sent to us in reply were not received.
In addition, we’re unfortunately not sending hoodies out to our previously upgraded Pro folks anymore.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Christine
Blogger Support

And that’s how the story ended. It wasn’t a very satisfactory resolution; it didn’t answer any of the questions except the last one (no, I wasn’t going to get my free sweatshirt). But at least I could finally let the matter drop.
What have we learned?
If there are any lessons to be learned from this, I suppose they are:

  • Sometimes computers just don’t work, and nobody knows why.
  • If I really want a Blogger sweatshirt, I should just go to the Google Store and buy it.
  • I told you this story was long and pointless.
Mar 21

A series of unfortunate events

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This has to be the the most wonderful headline I’ve ever seen: Flying Cow Leaves Two Police Cars in Flames.
Key quote from the article: “I mean the best way to characterize this is, it’s bizarre. It’s really really strange.” Having read the entire account, I have to say that “bizarre” is probably the best term for what happened. In addition to the police cars and the cow, it involved two trucks, a trailer, and a pair of illegal immigrants.
I think this story has the potential to become a major motion picture.

Mar 16

Seasons

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A penpal of mine in upstate New York once told me that that region has just two seasons: “winter” and “July”. Years later, after I moved to North Carolina, I learned that there were four seasons in that state, but they weren’t the usual four. The North Carolina seasons are “almost summer”, “summer”, “still summer”, and “Christmas”.
I’ve heard other variations of the Seasons Joke, and I’ve come to believe that every region of the U.S. (if not the world) has its own version. Gerard Van der Leun, who used to live there, wrote that New York City has two seasons: “winter” and “road work”. Southern California reportedly has four: “wildfire”, “mudslide”, “earthquake”, and “riots”. What are the seasons in other parts of the country? If you know another version of this joke, post it in a comment.

Mar 07

Mistaken identity

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There are a lot of other Pat Berrys in the world, and occasionally I hear from somebody who’s looking for one of them. But not often. So I thought it was remarkable when, earlier this year, I had three such experiences in the space of a month.

January 24: I received an e-mail from a woman named Lisa. She wrote:

I’m wondering if you are the same Pat Berry that was associated with the Marco Island Film Fest in Marco Island, FL? My friends and I attended the events held for the Guiding Light actors for several years. We have been trying to contact you through the film fest organization but telephones are out of service and I can no longer find your website.

I could have just written back saying, “I’m afraid you have the wrong Pat Berry. I’ve never even been to Marco Island.” But I thought it would be interesting to see if I could track down the film festival. I did some searches and determined that Lisa was correct. The festival’s website was gone, although it was still in Google’s cache. The phone numbers in the cached version were disconnected. So I called the Marco Island Chamber of Commerce, and the woman who answered the phone said that this year’s film festival had been canceled. All of this seemed to suggest that the film festival was defunct. I wrote back to Lisa, informing her of what I had found out. (She thanked me for my detective work.)

January 27: I received an e-mail from a lawyer named Tom, who wrote:

Pat: Pursuant to our telephone conversation yesterday, attached are a basic will form and an estate planning questionnaire. For now, you and Julie may choose to delete the answers to the questions about net worth (assets and liabilities). It is not necessary to have that information in order to prepare drafts of wills for the two of you.

This message was obviously misdirected, and at first I was tempted to just delete it. But communications between attorneys and their clients are supposed to be confidential. The note I had received was harmless, but I thought I had better warn Tom before he sent me any messages containing significant private information.

I didn’t trust my ability to explain the situation in an e-mail, so I decided that I had to contact Tom by phone. But I didn’t have his phone number or even his location. However, the e-mail included the name of his law firm as well as Tom’s last name. After a little more detective work with Google, I was able to find the the law firm (it’s in Chicago). I phoned and left a message with the firm’s receptionist. The next day, one of the lawyers called back, and I told him about the mistake. He said he would make sure Tom was notified. I’m still not sure how Tom happened to send the note to my address instead of the right one for the Chicago Pat Berry. But apparently the error was corrected; I haven’t received any more notes about Pat and Julie’s wills.

February 14: Google Talk informed me that someone named Debra had requested permission to send me text messages. I didn’t recognize the name, but I told Google Talk that I would accept the messages. Then she didn’t send me any. I could have just shrugged this off, but my curiosity wouldn’t let me. So a couple of days later, I sent Debra a text message asking if she was someone I knew. She said, “Sorry – I was looking to chat with another Pat Berry.” I asked, “By any chance, is the Pat Berry you were looking for a female film festival organizer in Florida? Or a married man living in Chicago whose wife is named Julie?” Debra replied that her Pat Berry is female and works at an advertising agency in New York City.

Perhaps someone should organize a Pat Berry convention so that we can all meet each other. At most conventions, you wear a badge with your name on it. At this one, I don’t suppose that would be necessary.

Mar 04

Internet time

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In early 1997, it was announced that Wizards of the Coast (WotC), publisher of the Magic: The Gathering card game, had signed a letter of agreement with TSR Inc., the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. WotC was planning to acquire TSR. This seemed like wonderful news to me, because TSR was on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn’t shipped any products to its distributors for over six months.

But on rec.games.frp.dnd, the D&D newsgroup, some participants reacted with hysteria, predictions of doom, and conspiracy theories. People wailed that WotC was buying TSR to liquidate it and eliminate the competition, or that WotC was going to make all sorts of changes that would ruin D&D. The newsgroup was filled with speculation and rumors, almost none of it based on any shred of factual knowledge.

In an attempt to stem the tide of paranoid drivel, I compiled a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list and posted it to the newsgroup.

A week later, I wrote the following essay.

June 6, 1997
8:58 a.m.

From time to time, I’ve seen statements in computer magazines that one year of real time equals some larger number of Internet years. The implication, I suppose, is that things happen much faster on the Net than they do in real life. It was never clear to me why this should be the case, but I can tell you now that it’s absolutely true.

One week ago, I got fed up with all the rumors and confusion about the TSR-WotC buyout and decided to do something about it. I quickly threw together a FAQ List about it, using only statements posted to the Net by TSR or WotC employees. I got them all from rec.games.frp.dnd and the TSR Web site. After maybe an hour of editing and formatting, I posted the result to rec.games.frp.dnd. That was on Friday, May 30.

On Monday, June 2, I learned of an interview with the WotC president that provided some new information. I updated the FAQ and posted it again.

On Tuesday, WotC and TSR announced the completion of the buyout. This required major changes to the FAQ. I updated and posted it again.

On Wednesday, I started receiving e-mail comments about the FAQ, which provided some new information. I also decided that it would be fairly easy to put it on the Web, so I added minimal HTML coding and uploaded it to my server space. By the end of the day, it was already linked to by at least one other Web page (and maybe more that I don’t know about).

On Thursday, I received a one-line note from Adam Conus of WotC Customer Service that read: “I just wanted to say that your unofficial FAQ is fabulous.” E-mail about the FAQ began to arrive from places like Italy. As new information came in, I updated the Web FAQ several times.

Today is Friday, and the Unofficial Buyout FAQ is one week old. I woke up this morning to find a note from a gentleman in Moscow who has translated the FAQ into Russian, and would like for me to put the translation on my Web site. And the day is still young.

I think I understand the concept of Internet time now.