Blathr Wayne Lorentz

Has any time- and effort-saving tool every wasted as much time and effort as git?

Microsoft is currently the worldʼs largest company. Too bad it doesn't know what a semicolon is.

Those are two names displayed in Outlook. But they might as well be four.

Show me a Greek-Italian chanteuse with Brooklyn backup singers, and I'll show you Feta Chini and the Alfredos.

Goodwill today is not Goodwill of the past.

Itʼs not a good thing, or a bad thing. Itʼs just changed. Or, more accurately, its customer base has changed, and from altitude you can see how the thrift shop of first resort reflects the evolution of society.

Iʼve been to dozens of Goodwill second-hand-a-terias across the country, and contrary to suppositions, there are no good Goodwills, or bad Goodwills. Theyʼre all pretty much the same. The only way they differ is in the frequency at which they are picked over.

People are mobile. Motivated people doubly so. It goes triple for motivated people who have the time to continually scour the thrift shops of a given region in search of lightly used treasures. They donʼt shop close to home, they go where the good stuff is, and they will invariably get there before you. So even a Goodwill in what is ostensibly a “good” neighborhood will have pretty much the same dross as one in a bad neighborhood.

In decades past, you could score some pretty good loot at Goodwill, if you recognized something that other people didnʼt grok. In a dusty pile of dead VCRs in Las Vegas, I found an AM radio transmitter. Itʼs a rectangle of black plastic with an electrical cord, so naturally it would be misunderstood. What drew me to it was that it had no slot in which to shove a video tape, so I knew it was not like its shelf-mates. Five dollars, five hours, and a surplus iPhone 5 later, KDRC “Darcie Radio” went on the air in Summerlin.

Today in Houston, peeking out from under a pile of half-chewed Fisher Price toys, Food Network cookbooks, and distended bras I saw a Boos cutting board. I looked it up online, and itʼs still a current product. About $220 at your favorite online food service supply outlet. I paid $1.19 for the honey-colored slab of perfect maple.

But the days of scoring big are mostly gone. Not only do you have to compete with the other scroungers, you have to compete with Goodwill, itself. Anything that plugs in, turns on, or looks like it might be worth more than a fiver gets plucked out of the blue rolling bins by the employees before it ever hits the showroom floor. They go on the Goodwill auction web site, where an entirely different group of professional trash pickers operate from the comfort of their bargain basement pajamas.

More than the products, itʼs the shoppers who really reflect the changes at Goodwill.

Previously, diving into Goodwill was feeding time at the aquarium, with schools of Central American ladies placidly grazing through the sargassum, nibbling here and there. Occasionally a college student poverty tourist would flit through, eyeing everything, but maintaining a fear-tinged hygienic distance from everyone. Then, suddenly appears the Elderly Asian Lady Shark. Quick of eye, and singular of purpose, she darts up and down of the aisles, focused on her prey. And if you get between her and a choice morsel, youʼre chum, chum.

Lately, itʼs different. To over-use an over-used word, itʼs more diverse.

Into the fish fry have come the suburban brosephs, with luxury pick-up trucks or rented U-Haul trailers they hoover up furniture to resell exurban yoga moms who fall hard for anything labeled vintage or antique.

Thereʼs older women who used to be one of the “ladies who lunch,” now staring the reality of an impoverished retirement in the face and defending their imagined territory among the plastic barges of castoffs. “This is mine! And this is mine! This is all mine from here to over here! Itʼs mine!” I hope she enjoys her nylon CD wallet and assorted remote controls.

If youʼve ever wondered what happened to hipsters, check Goodwill. Theyʼre the baleen whales sieving the coworker-desperation-gift books, scanning barcodes with their iPhones to see if the unwanted reading material is worth anything on fleaBay. Theyʼve lost their dignity, but kept their beards.

And then thereʼs the downwardly mobile. People who used to be middle, or upper-middle class who now find themselves at Goodwill not for curiosity, but as a matter of course. A 30-something dad in what used to be a $500 cardigan -- now somewhat threadbare -- telling his six-year-old daughter that they can only take one book home today. Iʼd happily buy her every book in the bin. Theyʼre 69¢ each, or two for a dollar.

As the social strata of America have become increasingly compressed under the weight of the new class of hyper-rich, where the common civic thread of aspiration has turned into fantasy, and where what we used to call the middle classes become an endangered species, we see an increased mixing of people who wouldnʼt have entered each otherʼs vision in the past. Weekend warrior dads forsaking Whole Foods for neighborhood ethnic meat markets. Women clad in Tori Burch learning enough broken Chinese to fill their prescriptions at no-name pharmacies on the other side of the tracks. Dinner at a food truck serving as a special treat for an elementary school teacher living out of her Subaru. And everyone elbow-to-elbow, leaning over the bins of Goodwill, searching for hope.

Goodwill today is not the Goodwill of the past.

Old people romanticize the past.

Young people romanticize the future.

What still works on an iPhone 3G in 2024? Not much. But more should.

Like many technology enthusiasts, I have several boxes of gadgets that I keep around “just in case” I find a use for them later. One of the items in my boxes is an iPhone 3G, which I recently pulled out of storage because I found a use for it. Yes, in 2024.

The iPhone 3G came out in June of 2008, and I bought one for my wife on launch day. This is not that phone. My launch day iPhone 3G was stolen by a street urchin in a McDonaldʼs in Rome. At the time of the theft, Appleʼs Find My iPhone app was in its infancy, so for the rest of the day we were able to use my iPhone to watch my wifeʼs iPhone make the trip from Rome down to Naples, and eventually cross the Mediterranean Sea to Tunisia where the tracking stopped working.

To us, the tragedy wasnʼt that weʼd lost a telephone. Phones can be replaced. But iCloud photo syncing didnʼt exist yet, so my wife lost all of the photos she took in Rome, Naples, Ischia, Procida, and elsewhere. Understandably, she still grouses about it to this day.

A short time after we returned to the United States, the thiefʼs accomplices sold the phone to a woman in Tunisia, and for some reason instead of setting up her own e-mail account, she tried simply using the one already on the phone — my wifeʼs. Maybe the buyer thought that phones just came with e-mail already on them. I exchanged a few unpleasant messages with her in my tourist-grade French, and for what turned out not to be the last time in my life, I was told that because Iʼm an American, I am fat and I am rich and itʼs O.K. to steal from me. I just wanted her to e-mail me my wifeʼs photos, but seeing that our moral compasses were pointing in different directions, I changed the password on the e-mail, iTunes, and App Store accounts. Remote-wiping the phone was not yet a feature.

It should be noted that this is the somewhat unusual iPhone 3G, not the iPhone 3G🅂 which was released a year later and sold much better.

I wasnʼt a fan of the iPhone 3G, even when it was new. To me, the original iPhone, and the iPhone 4 still feel the best in my hand. They have a reassuring heft to them, and even though I know in my mind that the newer phones are more durable, the older ones feel more solid. The 3G, with its rounded plastic shell feels like a 1970ʼs Remington ladies electric leg shaver.

This iPhone is one of several in my collection, and itʼs not any physical flaws that keep my old iPhones from continuing to perform their original functions. Itʼs all in the software.

This iPhone 3G could probably do much of what it was intended to do, except for one big problem: connectivity.

The iPhone 3G cannot connect to any of my wifi access points. At first I thought it was because the 3G cannot handle modern encryption methods. But then I remembered reading somewhere that an accurate clock is required by some encryption schemes, and my 3Gʼs clock is not accurate. Thatʼs because there is no 3G cellular service for it to connect to where I live. This place is all 4G and 5G now, and the metaphorical plugs have been pulled on the 3G signals.

The phone does have some limited connectivity via USB. It shows up in Finder on a modern Mac just fine, and itʼs possible to sync music and other data with it. But any photos taken with the 3G canʼt be downloaded into a current Mac with either the Photos or Image Capture program. When connected, the phone promisingly shows up in the sidebar. When clicked, a message pops up (again, promisingly) asking you to unlock the phone. But that message vaporizes just a couple of seconds after it appears, along with the iPhoneʼs sidebar icon. No amount of plugging and unplugging or booting and rebooting either device returns the phone icon to Photos.

Fortunately, the same plastic bucket of tricks that held the iPhone 3G also yields a Mac computer from the same era. That machine is happy to slurp down the 3Gʼs photographic secrets like my Uncle Jerry through a bucket of oysters at a Poconos clam bake. Except that the Mac uses the standard Image Capture program to supply its needs, and not my Aunt Eileen.

Sadly, the iPhone 3G cannot use a tethered connection to access the internet. So this is what weʼre left with:

This is a screenshot of the iPhone 3Gʼs home screen in all of its… wait for it… 320x480 pixel glory. The current top-of-the-line iPhone is the 15 Pro, which sports a screen that has 23 times more pixels.

Letʼs start with the Settings app.

Thereʼs not too much to note in here. Though the visuals have been tweaked, thereʼs not much difference between a modern version of Settings, and the 3Gʼs. The modern version has many many more options, but the 3G does something the modern one doesnʼt. When the 3G is updating, the cogs inside the Settings icon rotate. Itʼs the sort of nice little touch that youʼd expect from an iPhone of its era, and exactly the sort of nice little touch that is shunned in todayʼs world.

The fact that there is no software update option in Settings confused me briefly. Iʼd forgotten that over-the-air software updates werenʼt a thing yet, and that to use an iPhone in any meaningful way, you had to plug it into a computer to update your apps, music, contacts, and everything else.

The App Store is a no-go. Without an internet connection, thereʼs no way to access it. Even if there were some apps in the current App Store that would run an on iPhone 3G, thereʼs no way to download them onto a Mac and sync them via USB. App syncing on the Mac does not exist anymore now that syncing has been moved from iTunes to the Finder.

Ah, the iTunes Store. This was peak iPhone. Millions of people spent billions of hours and dollars scouring Steve Jobsʼ bottomless stew pot of audible morsels. But, like with the App Store app, without an internet connection, it doesnʼt do anything anymore.

Itʼs the same story for the YouTube app. Which make sense, since itʼs an internet streaming app. But dig that YouTube icon!

Itʼs an actual tube. In the 3Gʼs era, tube televisions were still very common. We had hundreds of them at work. I didnʼt dump my Trinitron and go flat screen until 2006ish. I suspect weʼre only a few years away from children wondering why the word “tube” is in “YouTube.”

Like the others, the Stocks app requires an internet connection. The default indices are revealing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ are default for the United States. The Standard and Poors is de rigueur for tech companies. Then thereʼs Apple, for obvious reasons. Google, for less obvious reasons. Perhaps because Google was already on the iPhone in the form of the built-in YouTube app, Google Maps app, and Safariʼs search feature. (Alternate search engines? You mean like Altavista Hotbot, Dogpile, and Ask Jeeves? Bing was still a year away, my friend.) The last one is Yahoo!, the formerly mighty internet company that now seems to have the same relevancy, business plan, and smell as Gold Bond Powder. But back then, Yahoo! was where all the information came for the Stocks app. So on the default list it went.

By this time, youʼre not at all surprised to see that Messages doesnʼt work without connectivity. But note that it requires a very specific type of connectivity: A cellular connection. There was no sending of text messages over an internet link yet. It all went via SMS. This historical fact is a bit inconvenient for people who like to indulge in conspiracy theories surrounding the current Messages appʼs use of green bubbles for SMS messages and blue bubbles for internet-delivered Apple Messages messages. People like to imagine that Apple moved SMS text messages into a “green ghetto” in order to make them hard to read and thus promote its own messaging platform. But the truth is that SMS text messages were green from day one. It was part of the design language of the iPhone: Things that a regular cell phone did had a green icon. Thus the Messages and Phone icons are green. When Apple added its messaging technology to the Messages app, it had more features than SMS could handle, so it got a different color bubble (blue) so people would know if they were on the old-fashioned text messaging platform invented in 1982 (SMS), or the modern one invented in 2011 (Messages).

The name of the app Messages is also interesting, because it later changed to iMessage when internet messaging became possible, and then back to simply Messages in more recent years.

This phone is contactless. Not in a NFC way. In the fact that there are no contacts loaded into it. Since the Contacts app works with standard iCal formats, I could probably sync my contacts to it with the Finder and a USB cable.

Now thatʼs how you skeuomorph! For a while, people liked to complain on the internet about Appleʼs design language which translated real-world objects into screen representations of their functions. This is a feature that aids with discovery and usability, not a bug, but as is so often the case, the loudest voices carry the day in the tech world, and weʼre left with the boring flat slabs and bland shades of corporate blue that have overwhelmed our computing day. Today, more and more people are realizing that boring is bad, and skeuomorphism is coming back.

Because it looks like a real-world object, the very simple user interface of the Voice Memos app needs no explanation. No help bubbles popping-up. No onboarding mechanism. This app should inspire apps of the future.

The Phone app of yesteryear looks very much like the phone app of today. The only notable difference is that the old one has buttons that look like actual buttons, instead of disembodied numerals floating around in the inky void of deep space.

Mail only goes this far without an internet connection. But like the Stocks app, itʼs interesting to see the defaults. All of the choices are viable options today, except for Appleʼs service. Mobile Me went bye-bye just four years after this phone came out. For long-time Apple users, itʼs been an annoying adventure as our e-mail addresses were migrated and duplicated from iTools to .mac to Mobile Me to iCloud. To this day, when Iʼm asked to sign into some Apple services, it will seemingly choose randomly between my @mac.com, @me.com, @icloud.com, or my other non-Apple Apple Accounts e-mail addresses. This is not ideal when youʼre on an input-limited device like an AppleTV.

Safari was one of the killer apps for the iPhone. A real internet browser on a phone! I shared Steve Jobsʼ glee when he publicly demonstrated viewing the New York Times on a device that fit in the palm of either of our hands. It felt like the future had fully arrived.

Again, thereʼs no internet connection, so blah blah fishcakes.

Another killer app for the iPhone was the fact that you no longer needed to carry both a mobile phone and an iPod with you. One tool to rule them all! Sure, mobile phones had music players in them before the iPhone. My Sony Ericsson M600i (as used by James Bond) had one. And guess what — it sucked. It crashed more often than Mobile Microsoft Word on that thing. The only way I could get it to reliably play music from the time I left work at WGN-TV to getting back home in the Loop was to wait for a full moon, swing a dead cat over my head three times, and hold my breath on the entire Brown Line ride home. If I made it to Clark and Lake without the phone rebooting itself, Iʼd stop by the bodega on the corner and buy a lottery ticket, because it was my lucky day.

Because the iPhone 3G cannot be updated beyond iPhone OS 4.2.1, the iPod app still has CoverFlow. This was the beeʼs knees to music enthusiasts. It was like flipping through your record albums anywhere on Earth. Sadly, Apple got sued over CoverFlow. And even though it won on appeal, for some reason Cupertino decided to yank the feature once Mr. Jobs was safely dead and notions of delighting audiophiles were swept out the door.

Hereʼs something completely unexpected. Google Maps works. Thereʼs no reason it should, since thereʼs no internet connection and the phone has been completely wiped so thereʼs no map cache. I can only guess that the app comes pre-loaded with a base set of common maps so that it doesnʼt have to rely on the eraʼs slow cellular data connections so much. When I get some time, Iʼll have to explore the limits of this. I expect it will be interesting.

The calendar app works, once you manually set the date and time in the Settings app. As with most calendar apps on a phone, thereʼs really no way to go right. Phones make for terrible calendars. An iPad is suitable. But thereʼs just not enough digital real estate on a phone screen to avoid making sacrifices.

The Photos app works. This appears to be the last photograph I ever took with this phone. Itʼs of Louis, in our apartment in Aqua. There was only a narrow window of time when we lived at Aqua, and Louis was still alive, so the photo must be from early 2011. On my end table in the background, you can see my original launch day iPhone playing music through a Sony radio. Itʼs the same radio that I plan to mate with this iPhone 3G to play music, and the reason I dug this phone out of my bucket oʼ gadgets.

The camera works, but man is it slow. The focus is awful. The exposure is terrible. There are only two buttons: One to take a picture, and one to show you the picture you just took. The images are 1,600x1,200 pixels. Thatʼs not quite two megapixels. The current iPhones take photos 6,048x8,064 pixels. Thatʼs 48 megapixels, or 24 times bigger than an iPhone 3G.

Itʼs hard to say if Weather might work if I was able to give this thing an internet connection. APIs change so often, itʼs possible that the iPhone 3G might be left out in the cold. Still, you could always access the weather onli… oh, wait.

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Notes works fine. But even if you had an internet connection, donʼt expect it to work with any of the notes that you have on your current iPhone or iPad or Mac. Note syncing is strictly between the phone and the computer. Though, itʼs possible that if you were to sync your modern iPhoneʼs notes with the same computer that they might migrate. At one time the Notes app stored its contents as simple IMAP data. Thatʼs why you used to be able to sync notes between devices with any old e-mail account acting as an intermediary. I believe that is still true today.

The clock works, but the time isnʼt perfect because I had to set it manually. And the time zones are probably not right anymore, since those things seem to change all the time. There hasnʼt been a change to the Daylight Saving rules in the United States since this phoneʼs last operating system update, so it should be fine as an alarm clock.

One plus one remains two.

To sum up, the iPhone 3G is a good phone, when it isnʼt neutered. And without an internet connection, its utility is significantly stunted. Iʼm going to try to remember to bring it with me when I go out some day to see if itʼs possible to find a public wifi access point thatʼs less persnickety about its security. Maybe at a cafe, or a hotel. Or perhaps in a library, or a community center, or a Metro bus, or some other cash-strapped municipal outpost that likely doesnʼt have the money to upgrade access points all the time. Or maybe Iʼll bring it with me to the parts of Mexico or Honduras or Nevada where Iʼve been recently where 3G networks are all thatʼs available. Perhaps then Iʼll be able to re-write this article with much more positive results.

For reasons of anal-retentiveness, I keep a record of the number of Christmas cards we send and receive each year. This year felt particularly bleak, so I put the numbers into a spreadsheet to see if that was true. It was not.

While this was a record year for the number of Christmas cards we sent, and the fewest weʼve ever received, the number received isnʼt all that far off the yearly average. Considering how many of our regular Christmas card penpals have died in recent years, thatʼs not too bad.

However, the numbers also show that weʼre putting more effort into Christmas cards than ever. These days we have to send eight Christmas cards for every one card received. It used to be closer to four; and some years less than three. But maybe the mailman will deliver some stragglers this week, and things will balance out.

For the last few decades, when I read a book I use the stub from my most recent airline boarding pass as a bookmark. Since itʼs dated, and yellows with age, it encourages me to keep traveling, if for nothing else to get a fresh bookmark.

Because we now live in an age of print-you-own, and digital boarding passes the one Iʼm currently using isnʼt my most recent. But if I have a few extra minutes when checking in, I try to print a fresh boarding pass at the kiosk for whatever book Iʼve brought with me. The new ones arenʼt nice and thick and glossy — at least for domestic travel. But international passes on a quality airline are still thick, durable, and evocative of a time when it was de rigueur to fly to another continent, and then figure out hotel and transportation arrangements after you arrived. The conveniences of the internet allow us to move around more easily, but have leached much of the adventure out of travel.

I went to public school in my early childhood. And you know what sucked? Public school.

You know why public school sucked? Cookies and orange juice.

What kind of sick bait-and-switch bullshit is that to pull on a six-year-old?

Oh, boy, itʼs snack time! Here comes the nice lady with the tray of cookies!

Om nom nom nom. Boy are these dry. I sure hope thereʼs an appropriately-paired beverage to go with them. Oh good, here comes the drink lady!

Iʼm only in first grade, so I canʼt see whatʼs on the red plastic cafeteria tray sheʼs holding…

Sheʼs handing me a paperboard box…

This is going to be so good…

Itʼs…

Fucking orange juice!

Are they serious‽

Attention primary school teachers! Itʼs “cookies and milk,” not “cookies and throat-scratching sauce!” Everyone knows this. Ernie and Bert know this. Romper Room knows this. The Magic Garden knows this. Shit, even that spinning vortex of terrifying LSD fever dreams The Electric Company knows this.

It wasnʼt until I transferred to private school that snack time became a civilized coupling of cookies and milk. Crunchy cookies with delightful morsels of sweet delight, washed down with cold, smooth, soothing cow squeezinʼs.

Say what you want about Sister Maria and her Yardstick of Doom, at least nuns know enough to serve milk with their cookies.

I got a new record in the mail today. Well, not a “new” record, as itʼs the Bob and Doug McKenzie Great White North album. Itʼs not actually “new to me,” either, since I had it when it came out in 1981. I donʼt know what happened to my records, but lately Iʼve been re-buying my old collection off of fleaBay, when something is available for under $5.00.

I listened to it, and itʼs very… of its time. I looked it up in Wikipedia, and was surprised to see that it was actually a big hit when it was released. Listening to Great White North both then, and now, I thought it was just an obscure novelty record. Nope. Triple-platinum in Canada, and #8 on the U.S. Billboard chart.

Hearing it with modern ears makes me think that Beavis and Butthead may not have been a complete rip-off of Bob and Doug, but it was at least 90% of the way there. Just replace gratuitous references to beer with oblique references to drugs, and both programs are a couple of blotto under-achievers sitting on a couch repeating catch-phrases and giggling to themselves. Except Bob and Doug have Geddy Lee from Rush, so they win.

Like millions of Americans, I watch A Christmas Story once a year. But it wasnʼt until today that I realized that when Ralph fantasizes about being Red Ryder, heʼs defending his home from a gang of mimes.

Todayʼs coffee is Peppermint Mocha Latte from Bayou and Bean in downtown Houston.

Bayou and Bean is the Brigadoon of coffee shops. It appears out of the mists of the Four Seasons Hotel lobby in the morning, and evaporates into the ether by tea time. The atmosphere is mid-2000ʼs conventioneer-on-an-expense-account with shadowy nooks, plump leather, and highly-curated shelves of books that no one will ever read, but everyone will claim to have read.

The coffee, fortunately, doesnʼt match the pastiche of the décor. Itʼs authentically good stuff. Flavorful, but not overpowering. The peppermint is pronounced, but restrained. And the texture is entirely correct. This isnʼt watery Dunkinʼ Dishwater. And itʼs not the gelatinous sludge that passes for coffee-inspired drinks at Starbucks these days. The texture is smooth, but still useful to clear oneʼs throat on a froggy morning. Itʼs the Platonic ideal that Dunkinʼ and ʼBucks swing for, but miss.

The peppermint, itself, is worthy of a paragraph here. Itʼs unlike peppermint coffee flavoring Iʼve had anywhere else. Minty, but not sharp. Itʼs a well-rounded mellow kind of mint. Iʼve read that 90% of the “peppermint” flavoring on the market is actually not peppermint, but lesser ingredients tarted up with chemicals and alcohol to simulate peppermint. If thatʼs true, then this Bayou and Bean coffee must be the real thing.

At least, I hope it is, since this coffee is priced even above Starbucksʼ tariff. But thatʼs to be expected. After all, you do get to sip it on the button-plush leather of a Four Seasons hotel lobby.

Like most good hotels, discretion is prized at the Four Seasons, and the coffee follows. It is presented in an anonymous white cup with an anonymous white sleeve topped with an anonymous black lid. Itʼs not a red-on-brown-and-beige gas station coffee presentation pretending to be an artisanal western Oregon roasting co-op. This is a paper cup for people who are bigger than the brands on the cup. But for those who know — they know.

Apparently Jesus hired Santa to enforce the strip mall no skateboarding rule.

One of these cheese snacks is “It.” But the other one is “Better.”

Why is it that half of the videographers who post on Adobe Stock think pharmacists use stethoscopes, and the other half think pharmacists work by candlelight with mortars and pestles?

It looks like this year we should be giving gifts to Santa.

Iʼve walked past this dirty window for at least six months, and somehow the rain has never managed to erase the words “Downtown homeless antisocial club.”

I canʼt help but wonder whose fingers traced that notion. Was it an actual homeless person? An art student? A suburban tourist?

I think Starbucksʼ server needs more coffee.

Today a guy walked up to me at the train station and asked if I knew how much the fine was for not paying to ride the train. I told him I thought it was $75.00.

“Two hundred dollars!” he proudly corrected me. He then explained how thrilled he was to hear that if you donʼt pay to ride the train, there are fare inspectors on patrol to hand out $200 tickets.

I tried to explain to him that if someone canʼt afford $1.50 to ride the train, they probably canʼt afford to pay a $200 fine, but he couldnʼt hear me over the sound of his own vindictive superiority.

When I lived in Washington, I once asked an Orca bus driver on a smoke break why he let vagrants board the bus without paying. He very briefly explained to me that the purpose of a transit system is to move people around, not to make money.

Thinking about it later, I started to understand that while a transit systemʼs recovery rate is an interesting measure of something, itʼs perhaps not a useful measurement of anything. Moving people around is good for a cityʼs economy. The economic impact of free movement to a society is of the reasons why various levels of government subsidize car and truck travel to the tune of trillions of dollars each year in the United States.

It would be interesting to see the same fervor that is used to prop up the auto and road construction industries applied to railroads and public transit.

iPad, coffee, hot fresh baguettes. I shall work here today.

I took this picture while in the Gulf of Mexico last month. I find it special because of its beauty. In my world, it was a unique moment in time.

To anyone else, itʼs just another sunset. One theyʼve seen thousands of times in hundreds of magazines, TV shows, paintings, web sites, and more.

Our ability to capture and reproduce the magnificence of nature has also desensitized us to nature. I am fortunate that I can look at this photograph and not think “Great, itʼs a sunset.” But instead, I can remember a moment in time when the sun and the clouds and the sea and the breeze orchestrated a feeling of giddy awe inside of me. A web page has never been able to do that.

Takayesu may be big, but Annie is quick. Sheʼll run between your legs, and next thing you know — okuridashi.

In spite of what Amazon.com suggests, Iʼm not sure that these optical disc sleeves are compatible with my iPhone.

Astrologers say that when the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars align, itʼs a sign of good things ahead.

I say the same is true when water, coffee, bagel, and tangy sauce align.

Houstonʼs Main Street Christmas lights look great at night. The problem is that during the day, they look like the city just survived a bomb blast.

I got a new video game today. Itʼs the Sears Tele-Games version of Atariʼs Codebreaker. Like most Atari and Tele-Games cartridges, its box featured fantastically imaginative art that had virtually nothing to do with the game.

Released in 1978, this was one of the early Atari 2600 games. It was also very unpopular. Codebreaker can be hard. It is visually unappealing. And it requires a weird controller. Half a century later, these factors combine to make it one of the more difficult games to find for sale at a price under $10, my maximum budget for buying Atari games.

While video games today — and todayʼs entertainment in general — are all about thrills and special effects, games of the 1970ʼs were more about thinking. Dopamine release came from exercising oneʼs brain and figuring out a problem, rather than killing things.

Think about the sorts of things that people did for entertainment in the past: Solitaire, cribbage, crossword puzzles, home chemistry sets, playing music, even needlepoint were all mental stimulation involving math and science. You donʼt think playing music is mathematical? Think fractions, baby.

When computers started to be used for recreation, they were perfectly suited for adapting the entertainment of the day into an electronic form. Codebreaker even includes the game Nim, a traditional two-player mathematical game that has been around for over a century. With an Atari in front of the Magnavox you no longer needed the extra player, as you could pit your gray matter against a computer.

The first games for computers involved numeric deduction, and Atariʼs Codebreaker brought that from multi-ton mainframes right into peopleʼs family rooms. It felt like The Jetsons was ready to happen any minute now.

Today, I suspect the number of people in the world playing Codebreaker for entertainment is close to zero. But in spite of all the so-called advances in video games, which mostly seem to involve explosions and killing things, people still love thinking games.

There are still cities like Chicago and New Orleans where you can jump into a game of chess with a stranger on the sidewalk. Or Tampa and Seattle, where itʼs not unusual to see an energetic round of dominos in a coffee shop. Or even recently when I was at sea, I was pestered to be the fourth in a rubber of bridge.

Mental stimulation games donʼt get a lot of attention, but they are alive and well. If they werenʼt, the New York Times wouldnʼt have paid millions to buy Wordle. Itʼs not a very long trip from Codebreaker to Wordle.

According to the Cornell University bird app, the bird Iʼve been following through this stand of piney woods is a wild turkey.

Itʼs smart of the turkey to hang out in a nature preserve a few days before Thanksgiving.

But itʼs also a bit surprising, as Iʼm just on the very southern edge of wild turkey range, and according to the newspaper, wild turkey populations in this part of the world have been plummeting for the last decade or so.

Each year in America, a couple of dozen people are killed by cows. I didnʼt have a reason to look up that fact until today, shortly after a cow tried to kill me.

It sounds silly, but replace “cow” with “bull” and it makes more sense.

I was at the Turtle Bayou Nature Preserve, where a herd of cattle are occasionally allowed to roam in order to stir up the soil, fertilize the ground, and make meals of the invasive plants. Bird watchers, such as myself, are welcome to wander around the preserve, and there are viewing stands and informational signs and other amenities to make a birding visit more pleasurable.

There are, however, no signs warning you that the cows might try to kill you.

I was walking along one of the birding tracks outlined on the big signs at the entrance when I heard a low rumbling behind me. I didnʼt think too much of it because I was engrossed in listening for birds. But then the low rumbling came again, and it sounded angry.

Turning around, I saw a big black bull and his harem staring at me through the brush.

Iʼve seen enough Discovery Channel to know that running from an animal is an invitation for it to chase you. And Iʼve read enough 1930ʼs cowboy books to know that cattle will stampede at the drop of a hat. So, what to do?

While trying to figure that out, Angus McAngryface put his ears back, lowered his head and let out a bellow so loud and long and low I could feel it vibrating in my lungs. Not a good sign. I started to panic.

Shaking, I took out my phone and took a quick video. If I was going to die, I wanted my wife to know which critter killed me so she could avenge me at the dinner plate. Then another blast: "Moooooooooooo!" accompanied by the pawing of a hoof at the ground, and a snot-flinging snort to drive the point home.

Time to think logically. In cowboy books, the cowboy always has a horse. What do I have to work with? A sack lunch and a pair of binoculars, neither of which are enough to fell an animal that weighs more than my car. I know I canʼt outrun him through the woods because Iʼve seen cattle paths through the trees. They know their way better than I do.

There is a single tree on its own amid the brambles to my right. It seems stout enough to withstand the impact of a bullʼs cranium. If I can keep it between me and the creature, maybe I can stay safe along enough for it to get bored and move on.

Slowly I side-step to my right. The brambles tear into my pants which start to leak blood, but Iʼm grateful for it because I usually wear shorts when Iʼm out looking for birds. Another report: "Moooooooooo!" And another angry snort.

I eventually manage to position myself in a defensive line: me, then pine, then bovine. Heʼs still staring at me. He still looks pissed at me for whatever transgression I have committed against cowkind.

Then — he starts. It begins with a trot and he heads down the track toward where I was standing, repeating his angry warning: "Mooooo! Mooooo! Mooooo!" In seconds that felt like minutes, he has passed me and is threading his way through the trees. The ladies follow in his wake, and spread out through the pine as do the tentacles of a great river in flood.

My panic starts to subside, but is rekindled every quarter minute by his continued taunts through the blackness of the stand: "Moooooo! Moooooo! Mooooo!" The volume fades, but I can still hear the anger as I once again pull out my telephone to film the remnants of my brush with trampling death.

Finally, the last few cows in his harem amble into view, and before they dive into the obscurity, one turns around and looks over her shoulder as if to say to me, “Dumbass.”

I am never going to Turtle Bayou again.

If you see a train honk at a horse on Main Street, you might be in Houston.

Shopping with the Western National Parks Association involves making careful decisions. For example, should I go with the standard shipping which is free, or the free shipping, which is standard?

And then there are days when you unlock your phone, and your phone locks up.

Except for the screenshot function, which for some reason still works.

Many Americans of a certain age range remember Halloween Eve, 1978 when we all watched a WKRP staffer huck turkeys out of a helicopter over the Cincinnati skyline — a radio stunt that proved fatal for the flock of flightless fowl.

Except that it didnʼt happen.

In the decades since, Iʼve spoken with dozens of people who swear they saw video of the turkeys falling to the ground. Some remember seeing video of the flailing birds being thrown from the helicopter, feathers scattering in the wind. Some remember seeing them cratering parked cars “like sacks of wet cement” from the sky. But again, none of those things happened. Even if they had happened, it wouldnʼt have been possible to film them. Youʼd have to have a camera hovering in the air just below the helicopter, and another on the ground in exactly the right place to capture the Sakrete impacts.

What we all saw was the power of radio.

The episode of WKRP in Cincinnati that depicted the turkey toss only showed Les Nessman standing in front of a store, excitedly craning his neck toward the sky, one hand clenching a microphone, the other trying to keep his headphones on; and the WKRP air studio, with Dr. Johnny Fever, Bailey Quarters, Venus Flytrap, and Andy Travis listening in anticipation and eventual dismay as the episode unfolds.

In spite of what seemingly millions of otherwise rational people think they saw, at no time was a single turkey shown. Not in the original airing on CBS, nor on the countless annual reruns since. Spoken word sowed the seeds, and each of our imaginations did the rest. The result is a common social memory of an event that never actually happened.

Thatʼs the power of radio. Even on television, it was the power of radio.

On the left: 16 ounces of Wonderful® pistachios, purchased at Whole Foods for $10.79.

On the right: 16 ounces of Wonderful® pistachios, purchased at H.E.B. for $8.49.

Same amount of nuts. The only differences are the price and the size of the bag.

Hereʼs something you donʼt see every day. Among the big technology overlords, Amazon isnʼt perfect, but EC2 outages aside, its flaws are rarely technical. This is one of those blue moon cases of a styling error on amazon.com.

This must be my lucky day. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket, or something.

According to the 2023 Christmas gift guide from the New York Times, I should buy either the buttery robe or the buttery wallet. Or both.

It turns out, neither of them contain any butter, so Iʼll stick to my go-to gift: butter cookies.

If your computer is not able to run the latest version of macOS, and a program you bought through the App Store has a new version, the App Store program will helpfully allow you to download the latest version of that program in question that will run on your version of macOS.

Except that it doesnʼt work.

In the video above, you can see that I would like to update Microsoft Outlook on my Early 2015 MacBook. When I click Update, the App Store offers the sentence fragment “Download an older version of Microsoft Outlook?” But clicking Download does nothing.

Appleʼs support web site could use a little support.

I know I pick on Apple a bit because of all of the technical flaws in its products. But thatʼs partly because Apple products are the ones I use most often, so Iʼm apt to run across problems with them most often. Itʼs also because Apple has enough money to make sure the sorts of things I run across donʼt happen.

But I also give credit where credit is due, and Apple should be given a laurel and hardy handshake for putting out a new version of iOS for one of my work phones: An iPhone 5🅂.

This is a phone that came out in September of 2013. Thatʼs more than ten years ago. When this phone was purchased, Pope Francis was still figuring out where the bathrooms were in the Vatican. I wonder if he brought one with him to pass the time.

Itʼs not great that after making a purchase on Libertyʼs web site that instead of sending me to a thank you page, or an order status page, or even the home page, it throws an error.

Strange that the error code is 200, which in HTTP means everything is okie dokie. “200” decodes to “OK.”

But at least itʼs better than Harrods web site. Over there, I probably wouldnʼt be able to even see the error message, as it would be mostly obscured — drowning in a sea of jQuery-era slide-fade nonsense.

Sad to see the New York Times web site stumble. But itʼs probably the nicest server error message Iʼve seen.

But… itʼs the cloud! There can be no errors, because itʼs in the cloud so itʼs all made of magic unicorn fairy dust. Thereʼs even a picture of the cloud right there. Nothing ever goes wrong in the cloud!

Fie, rain, fie! I shall work here today!

I spent most of today planning a method to prevent my companyʼs web sites from going down in certain circumstances.

I feel ya, H.E.B.

More and more, it seems that the promises of technology have fallen flat.

When we started building all of this, we really thought we were changing the world for the better. We had these visions that the work we were doing would usher in the Age of the Expanding Man — when people would be free to explore their humanity in new ways, while machines handled the grubby details invisibly behind the scenes. Steely Dan summed it up in the song International Geophysical Year:

On that train of graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
More leisure for artists everywhere

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
Weʼll be clean when their work is done
Weʼll be eternally free, and eternally young

Clearly, that didnʼt happen.

We wired all the worldʼs computers together thinking that access to infinite knowledge would lift people out of poverty. Mostly, it made the already rich people even richer. Social media was supposed to unite people in peace and understanding. All it did was divide us into angry tribes. We transitioned our movies and music to digital versions thinking that would bring the best the world had to offer to the masses. Instead, most of it was lost; and what remains is controlled by a few giant corporations to be doled out in dribs and drabs, sanitized, censored, and selected by a computer to ensure maximum profit.

Technology canʼt make us eternally free, because technology isnʼt eternal.

People who enjoy old technology continually struggle with degrading discs, leaking capacitors, and the inability to find parts to fix their machines. And while their hassles are readily dismissed as problems of their own choosing — like someone who chooses to drive an antique car — everyone has family photos.

Which, at long last, gets to the point of this screed: The illustration below.

The first image is a photograph of my grandfather. Itʼs over 120 years old, and looks nearly as good today as it did when it was taken.

The second image is what happens when I try to view a photograph I took with a digital camera 25 years ago. The bits have degraded to the point where itʼs not viewable, even on period-appropriate hardware. Few of the files on the disk show up anymore, and those that do are so full of errors, they canʼt be displayed.

The third image is what happens when I try to view a photograph I took with a digital camera just 10 years ago.

The printed photograph is still viewable 110 years longer than the photos from my Sony digital camera. And while there is a never-ending list of ways that the metadata can get stripped out of a digital photograph, the metadata for the printed photo is written on the back, and will be there for as long as the photo exists.

The folly is that we, as a society, have rushed to build a digital world without thinking about what weʼre doing. There is a persistent mantra of "technology is good" and "digital is better." But thatʼs not always true, in ways great and small.

What Iʼm trying to do in my life is to pick and choose which new technologies are worth integrating into my human world. Thereʼs no reason we canʼt live our lives with a reasonable amount of technology, but mixed with what we already have to enhance our lives, not to overpower our lives.

A light switch works every time. Asking Siri to turn on the lights does not. Therefore, Siri is a novelty, not an enhancement. So Iʼll turn on my lamp with my fingers, and look at my photographs on paper, while other people are free to stay locked in endless software updates and Googling solutions to the tech problems they have chosen for themselves.

My wife has read almost everything ever written by Truman Capote, Agatha Christie, and Patricia Highsmith. She consumes Shakespeare like a zoo hippopotamus on the loose at a high prairie watermelon festival.

She also giggles uncontrollably at Abbot and Costello movies.

The whole “unknown error” thing is really getting old. Older than the iPod Shuffle Iʼm trying to sync.

A trillion dollar company that lacks the Q.A. to let you know what went wrong.

MacOS Sonoma has a new feature that groups items in grocery lists by aisle, to make navigating the supermarket more efficient. Itʼs an interesting idea that needs a bit of help.

Based on what it put under “Beverages,” I think my computer is trying to kill me.

One thing I really like about the DuckDuckGo browser is its consistency. For example, the way it consistently screws up drawing its own user interface. Almost every day I get an interface element that is black-on-black, or white-on-white.

I look forward to the day I see pomegranate-on-pomegranate.

In order to continue, Apple says I have to update all of my Apple devices. Apple also says that a bunch of my devices cannot be updated.

Why not just tell me that I cannot continue because some of my devices are outdated? Why the passive aggression?

I still use my 2013 iPhone 5🅂 today, as we begin to round the corner into 2024. Right now it's playing music in the library. It still syncs fine with iTunes Apple Music Music Finder.

In March of 2002, I bought a copy of The Prague Post and told myself, “Iʼll read this later.”

Twenty-one years later, I finally got around to it.

The Prague Post stopped publishing when COVID-19 started marching east to west around the globe. Whatʼs left of its web site appears to have been commandeered by search engine spammers. But the February 27–March 5, 2002 print issue is a window into a different era. This was a time of tremendous optimism in certain parts of the world, and especially among certain classes within the Czech Republic.

2002 was a dozenish years after the Velvet Revolution. People who were in their 20ʼs and 30ʼs at that time were by 2002 experiencing the prime of their lives. And a cadre of people who were too young to feel or understand the oppression of life behind the Iron Curtain were coming of age at the start of a new millennium. For the first time in modern history, the Czech Republic had a generation of people who never knew life in the shadow of the hammer and sickle.

What these people saw, what they experienced, and what they desired was to evolve the Czech Republic from a backwater museum piece of a century-dead empire into a modern state, fully European. A peer with Paris or London or even New York; not its grizzled, awkward grand-uncle shuffling nervously in the corner of the world stage.

There are certain times and places in history that become important and transformative. London in the 1850ʼs. New York in the 1920ʼs. San Francisco in the 1960ʼs. Eastern Europe — and especially Prague — in the early 2000ʼs was one of those places. “You had to be there” sounds pithy and dismissive, but as expressions go, it is also oftentimes accurate. No amount of playing dress-up with bad cigarettes, vile absinthe, or frilly gyration can make someone fully understand La Belle Époque. Prague was on the cusp of its own Belle Époque.

The Prague Post documented that era in a newspaper that was a little International Herald Tribune, a little Le Figaro, and a little Village Voice. It simultaneously chronicled the current lives of former despots, vetted the latest pop culture offerings, and published classified ads for cheap sex. The contents are an awkward goulash of past, present and future. Communist, capitalist, and futurist.

In this particular issue, the big stories are:

• Hand-wringing over rising political star and maybe-not-quite-a-Nazi-but-his-parents-sure-were Jörg Haider across the border in Austria. A few years later, heʼd go off a cliff and end that particular concern.
• One of the Czech Republicʼs former communist oppressors being let off the hook by a court for lack of evidence. Opponents howled that the previous 50 years of life in the Czech Republic were evidence enough.
• Funeral home operators going to extraordinary, and perhaps a bit corrupt, lengths to beat the competition. If it was the New York Post there would be a “body snatchers” headline in there somewhere.

Whatʼs interesting is that looking back from a couple of decades later, a lot of the pressing issues are just the same today:

• Olympic hockey
• Gypsies
• Not-quite-celibate Catholic priests
• Basque separatists
• The opera
• The symphony
• Restaurant reviews
• Russia
• Israel
• China

While a lot is the same, a lot has changed. There are advertisements for airlines that no longer exist offering flights to nations that no longer exist. Also, in 2002, Dilbert is still published in the mainstream press.

And it is reassuring that a brand new Dell computer feauring a Pentium Ⅲ processor can be had for just 150,000Kč. Thatʼs about $15,000 U.S. dollars in 2023 money.

I take a personal interest in the televison and radio listings because of my history in radio and television. Here are the radio stations available to the average Prague dweller in 2002:

Frequency	Station	Format
87.8	Rádio Blaník	Top 40
88.2	Evropa 2	Top 40
89.5	Country Radio	Country
91.3	Čzeský rozhlas 2	Variety
91.9	Rádio 1	Alternative rock, techno and jazz
92.6	Čzeský rozhlas Regina	News and music
93.7	City 93.7 FM	Top 40
94.6	Čzeský rozhlas 1 Radiożurnál	Current affairs
95.3	Radio Vox	Top 40
96.6	Radio Impuls	Top 40
97.2	Rádio Zlatá Praha	Top 40
98.1	Radio Kiss 98 FM	Top 40 through the ʼ90s
98.8	Classic FM	Classical
99.3	Radio France International	French
99.7	Radio Bonton	Top 40
101.1	BBC	BBC news in English, plus local news from Radio Prague
102.5	Rádio Frekvence 1	Talk
103.7	Radio Melody	Country
105.0	Čzeský rozhlas 3 Vltava	Classical

In the interest of posterity, here is a list of whatʼs in this issue of The Prague Post. It shows the variety and quantity of news that came out of such a small paper. Iʼve listed the headlines and subheads. In the case of briefing lists, Iʼve included only the first sentence of each brief.

Main Section

• Mouthing Off
  Zemanʼs political fitness questioned again after Arafat-Hitler remarks
• Štrougal acquittal provokes protests
  “Horrified” dissidents denounce former communist leader
• Haider: Headed back to the roots
  Analysts doubt that Austrian rightist will abandon politics

• Seven Days

  • A Czech chemical unit will send most of its 250 troops to Kuwait by the end of March
  • A key American Republican Party activist has hinted that the return of former Prime Minister Vladimir Mečiar to power could hinder Slovakiaʼs NATO entry bid
  • A man was killed Feb. 23 when a rally car slide off a muddy track
  • The controversial Temeln nuclear power plant in south Bohemia was shut down
  • Hungary called off a March 1 summit of central European nations
  • A number of the armyʼs elite rapid-deployment brigade brutally beat a 17-year-old boy and shouted Nazi slogans at him Feb. 21 in the north Bohemian town of Hlinsko
• € - $ - Kč exchange rates
• A list of transit disruptions
• Svátky
• Limits on cigarette ads proposed
  Move would ban signs search schools, but critics say that is not enough
• ODS makes flat-tax campaign promise
  Conservative party suggests 15 percent rate for all taxpayers
• More police officers charged with crimes
  Improved investigation techniques cited as reason for increase in charges

• Briefly Noted

  • Russian authorities are denying Czech reports that two Russian nationals extradited from Prague to St. Petersburg Feb. 18 are connected to the 1998 assassination of liberal politician Galina Starovoitova.
  • Foreign minister Jan Kavan says the Czech Republic will back NATO expansion
  • An Athens court has sentenced two Czech citizens to life imprisonment for smuggling heroin
  • The ruling Social Democrats (ČSSD) are supported by 23 percent of the Czech public
  • The German Supreme Court confirmed a lower court ruling that sentenced Anton Malloth, a former SS guard at the Nazi prison in Terezin (Theresienstadt), north Bohemia, for the murder and attempted murder of two Jewish inmates.
  • The daily Lidové noviny reports that five former Interior Ministry employees issued more than 100 false lustration certificates between 1991 and 1993.
  • The last of 400 Czech troops in the joint Czech-Slovak KFOR battalion have left for Kosovo.
  • Prague auhorities will prosecue seven Serbs accused of breaking into more than 100 luxury villas in the Czech Republic.
  • The Social Democrats (ČSSD) and opposition Civic Democrats (ODS) will scrap their power-sharing pact before June elections, according to a report in the daily Mladá fronta Dnes that quotes ČSSD deputy chairman Zdenẽk Škromach.

Opinion

• Confessions of an Interpreter
• Death in the line of duty
• Sunday Music Spotlight, or the day the music died
• Letters

World

• World Digest

  • Europe

    • A Milan court convicted four Tunisian men of various terrorist-related charges.
    • Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski appealed to his countyʼs powerful trade unions to support a liberalization of labor laws aimed at reducing Polandʼs 18 percent unemployment rate.
    • Italian police believe terrorists were preparing to plant a chemical bomb in an underground passage next to the U.S. embassy in Rome.
    • French President Jacques Chirac called U.S. President George Bush Feb. 23 to urge him to renew pressure for political dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.

  • Africa

    • The government of Angola displayed the body of 67-year-old rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, slain in battle with soldiers, on television and urged his followers to surrender and end the countyʼs civil war.
    • A 70-year-old Swiss woman working for a humanitarian agency in Somalia was killed by unidentified gunmen Feb. 22.
    • One hundred of the worldʼs top photojournalists have arrived in Africa for a Feb. 28 photo shoot called ”A Day in the Life of Africa.”

  • Asia-Pacific

    • U.S. military investigators are looking into the cause of a Feb.22 MH-47E Chinook helicopter crash that killed all 10 U.S. soldiers on board.
    • Indiaʼs governing Bharatiya Janata Party was rejected by a majority of voters in crucial state elections Feb. 24.

  • Central America

    • Marxist guerrillas kidnapped a Colombian presidential candidate who defied warnings not to travel a dangerous road in disputed rebel-held territory.

  • Middle East

    • A Pakistani judge ordered that the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping of murdered American reporter Daniel Pearl be held in custody for two more weeks.

  • North America

    • The last day of the Salt Lake City Olympics began on a violent note as riot police fired rubber bullets to disperse a rampaging crowd that broke sup windows, trashed a police car and attacked the courthouse.
    • The air around the World Trade Center disaster site may not be as safe as the Environmental Protection Agency has suggested.
• Guinness, no Waiting
• Church Scandal
• Hunting War Criminals
• ETA Protest
• Incriminating Discovery

Business

• Dead End
  Funeral homes use loopholes to snatch the body business from smaller competitors
• Uphill battle: Roma who made it
• Crown prompts call for ingenuity
  CzechTrade urges exporters to increase productivity, efficiency

• Bizweek

  • Gas utility Transgas made preliminary pretax profits of 5.033 billion Kč ($139.8 million) from May to December 2003, during its first eight months of existence as a joint-stock company.
  • The daily Hospodářské noviny expects the value of the Czech automobile industry to reach 450 billion Kč by 2005, with subcontractor supplies to automobile plants likely to use from 110 billion Kč in 2000 to about 200 billion Kč.
  • The Czech Republicʼs six building societies granted more than 151,000 loans and bridging loans in 2001, a 15 percent year-on-year increase on 2000, when 132,000 loans were provided.
  • Czech steel companies produced 6.3 million ons of cruise steel in 2001, up 1.6 percent against 2000, according to the Czech Steel Federation (Hutnictví železa).
  • The U.S. company SDC International, new owner of Tatra Kopřivnive, plans to lay off 600 of the truck makerʼs 3,100 employees, according to officials at the district employment office.
• Market summary
• Můj dům names best
• Shaken or stirred, drink orders up
  Cocktails become more popular as selection improves, incomes rise
• Drug makers plan alliance
  Going east is the goal for Slovakofarma and Léčiva as they merge
• Dilbert cartoon
• Ernst & Young shuffles leadership
• Five Questions
• Wrecks provide ad vantages
  But promotions on four wheels irritate drivers in search of parking spaces
• Labor Ministryʼs plans called inadequate

Tempo

• Stravinsky in Red, White and Blue

• The Town Read

  • Second Hand will no longer appear on these pages.
  • The National Theater has begun pre-sales for all operas, ballets and theater productions in the 2002-03 season.
  • Professor Michael P. Sneg will conduct a seminar on human rights at the International Baptist Theological Seminary March 1 at 4 p.m.
  • The Egon Schiele Art Cetner in Český Krumlov, south Bohemia, has received an Austrian Award for cross-border cultural expression.
  • Pope John Paul Ⅱ has appointed Karel Herbst auxiliary bishop of Prague.
  • The Time4Shareing endowment fund will throw a charity ball to assist the Deštná orphanage March 22.
  • Beef Stew is dead.
  • The annual Days of European Film festival kicks off March 7.
  • The German Protestant congregation at Markus Kirche in Frankfurt am Main has presented the Czech Jewish Liberal Union with silver cup for kiddush — the festival blessing of wine — as a token of friendship.
  • The Czech Audiovisual Producersʼ Association has become a member of the European Film Promosions network.
• Best selling books list
• Freedom in Bohemia — or exile?
  Kliment novel poses some tough 1968-era choices
• The modern press, thugs and rock ʼnʼ roll
  Carl Hiassen cleans the floor with corporate journalism

Sports

• Valentaʼs jump is highlight of Czech Salt Lake City showing
• Ups and Downs
  Hockey team trips over Russia, but Valentaʼs unprecedented acrobatics bring Olympic solace

• Roundup

  • Olympic hockey captain Jaromir Jágr says he may play at the April world championships in Sweden.
  • The Slovak hockey federation managment is considering filing a suit against the National Hockey League (NHL) for failing to allow its best players to perform in the Olympics.
  • Sparta Praha dropped a 2-0 Champions Legaue decision to Panathinaikos Athens in Prague Feb. 19.
  • Slovan Librerec, the only Czech team left in the UEFA Cup, played Franceʼs Olympique Lyon to 1-1 tie Feb. 21 in Lyon.
  • UEFA will rule on the schedule for the Euro 2004 qualifying group that includes the Czech Republic after talks among the five teams broke down in Prague Feb. 18.
  • Two Czech national team players have been fined by UEFA for their conduct during World Cup playoff games against Belgium last November.
  • Pittsburgh Penguins center Martin Straka, whose broken right leg cost him a spot on the Olympic team, has been declared fit to play and is expected to see NHL action soon.

Night and Day

• The engineer of mighty music
  Roman Bělor takes command of Prague Spring festival
• The (mis)Marriage of Figaro
  Mozart opera at Stavovské plays for laughs — badly

• Concert calendar

  • Classical
  • Opera
  • Theater
  • Jazz, Rock, Etc.
• Playing the fool
  Comedy troupe runs the gamut
• Boulevard of dreams
  Lynchʼs latest effort is also his weirdest
• A pure simulacrum
  Old Townʼs new Mexican restaurant has far to go
• Where the East meets the West
  Grilled king salmon with wasabi whipped potatoes, tomato-ginger coulis and watercress
• Janetʼs Joint
• Boxes and blooms
  Apartment window-box gardening
• Sites to see
  Monasteries and convents
• The Austrian approach
  A melancholy, self-reflective avant-garde
• Shedding crocodile tears
  Jiří Davidʼs computer-generated compassion lacks reality
• Tilt
• Washington Post crossword puzzle

Classified ads

I can mostly understand a date picker that opens up beyond the boundaries of its containing window, if itʼs on a web page. But Reminders is a native macOS program that Apple includes with the operating system. It shouldnʼt open a date picker off the edge of the screen.

You cannot be in a hurry to reset an iTunes password. Itʼs simply not an option.

Two-factor authentication is so last Thursday. The new hotness in account security is leveraging temporal annoyance.

When you try to reset an iTunes password, not only do you have to wait an unknown amount of time to complete the process, you have to wait an entire extra day first to find out how long the process will take.

In my case, 24 hours after I got this message, I received an e-mail stating that it would take seven days before I would be allowed to reset my password. So eight days in total in order to regain access to all of my music from iTunes Japan.

It makes sense that scammers arenʼt going to be that patient. Their business model relies on the ability to flip and abuse an account nearly instantly, before the owner even knows something is happening. Eight days isnʼt going to fly on the dark web.

And to be fair, thereʼs no song in my iTunes Japan account that is so urgently needed that I have to listen to it right at this very moment, so I find all of this slow-motion hoop-jumping to be a curiosity. I expect there are other people who consider it an outrage.

But, true to its word, exactly seven days after I received the e-mail from Apple telling me Iʼd have to wait a week to change my password, another e-mail arrived with a link allowing me to do so. It took 192 hours, but at least the process just worked.™

One Finder window says I have 54GB available. Another Finder window says I have 168GB available.

Itʼs no wonder that Finder has been reviled by Macintosh users since the 1980ʼs.

Appleʼs iTunes software has a habit of upgrading the music in a person's computer every once in a while, without telling them.

But if you're the sort of person who occasionally looks through one's file system, you see it in action, because anomalies arise when automation is allowed to make changes to something as arbitrary as music.

In the screenshot above, you can see the directory that stores a copy of the Tori Amos album American Doll Posse.

Of note is the song “Fat Slut,” which has been upgraded to “Fat S__t.”

The music isn't different. Mrs. Amos still shrieks, “Fat Slut!” into the microphone. But Apple has thoughtfully sanitized the song's file name to protect the sensitive circuits in its modern computers that might become offended by the term.

Nobody tell Fat Agnus.

I donʼt know that Iʼve ever allowed a bit of placeholder text leak into production, but we all make mistakes.

Still, youʼd think that Apple Pay would have a regex or something somewhere to prevent this sort of thing.

I only clicked on the link to Wrikeʼs silly onboarding video because it promised it would only be one minute long. It was even in bold, so it must be true.

But like campaign promises and frequent flyer miles, this turned out to be a lie. The video is actually almost four minutes long.

I guess I should have expected this from the same company that only recently stopped sending out alerts with text randomly changing from Pacific Daylight to Pacific Standard time, and bogarts the web browserʼs ⇧⌘N shortcut for its own purposes.

Going to the deli makes me sad. It reminds me that I used to always bring home a slab of turkey as a special treat for Henri. He knew when I came through the door with grocery bags that it was special treat time, and heʼd hop up on the kitchen counter and dig through the bags looking for it. He was never a patient creature.

Rest in peace, little friend.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to buy each of the original cartridges released with the Atari 2600 in 1977.

The sticking point was Star Ship. It took almost a year for one to show up on fleaBay for under $50.00. My budget was $5.00. So when one finally appeared, I was all over that Buy It Now button.

To mark the occasion, I put them in a stack on the dining room table, and took photos which I then turned into i-device wallpapers. They look pretty good on my iPhone. I haven't tried them on an iPad yet, but I made them with plenty of space around so that they'll work in both portrait and landscape on an iPad.

You may notice that the screenshot with the cartridges arranged in a helix has squiggles where the time should be. This is because on weekends, I don't want to know what time it is, and iOS doesn't allow one to remove the clock, so changing it to a language I can't read is almost as good.

It's also not possible to remove the date bar, but I can replace it with the weather, which is less awful than seeing the cold, bony hand of time scratching across the top of the screen.

The original wallpaper files I created are here:

• Regular
• Helix

So, if I set up an iCloud e-mail address, all of the e-mail that everyone around the world sends without an address will come to me? That doesnʼt sound like fun at all.

I have one of the Imitation of Life CDs that was sent to radio stations in early 2001 just before R.E.M. released the album. Today I noticed that the leaflet inside states:

Published by Temporary Music, administered in this and all worlds, inclusive, by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.

I'm so glad that music industry lawyers are getting addressing the problem of Martian music bootleggers.

I shall work here today. But first, lunch.

It turns out, it is not possible to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune without an e-mail address.

Youʼd think a publication with the Tribʼs circulation numbers would make it easier for people to subscribe; not harder.

I always feel bad when a new company tries to make a big splash on the internet, and then has a hard time of it. I know how it is trying to do ambitious things with a small team and little funding.

In this case, it's a scrappy little startup called “Google,” and its product is called “Google Analytics.” As you can see, the web site is a disaster. Hopefully it gets some money and people to work things out.

It looks like my meth dealer now does electronic billing.

Also, heʼs going to send me a bill tomorrow morning.

Iʼm starting to think that my doctor is completely untrained in what to do when someone puts the lime in the coconut and drinks it all up.

Looks like some web developer at State Farm is having a bad day. Maybe I should call him a tow truck.

Today at Home Depot, I was surprised to find that you can buy french fry seeds.

One of my local nurseries is selling cotton. Next year, Iʼm totally growing to grow my own pants.

The phrase “Itʼs five oʼclock somewhere!” is very useful for convincing oneself to consume alcohol. Itʼs less useful for convincing your boss to let you go home early.

All of the “in” devices are slowly blinking this season.

Remember when police cars had just one, single rotating red light on their roofs?

This Harris County constable truck has over 50 flashing lights on it. Is a truck with 50 flashing lights more safe than one with 49 flashing lights? If more flashing lights is better, why not a hundred flashing lights?

Considering the state of the Randallʼs (Albertsonʼs) and Kroger stores in my neighborhood, Iʼm not surprised that H.E.B. canʼt keep up with demand.

Seriously, how is it possible that every time I go into Randallʼs, itʼs out of milk?

I shall work here today. And also redact my screen.

Adobe canʼt decide if Acrobat is up to date, or not. I finally had to uninstall the whole suite in order to get it to start making sense of itself.

Somehow, I donʼt think this is right.

The tech industry would benefit from ditching “Move fast and break things” and segueing into “Attention to detail is a sign of quality.”

This store has a wide selection of books.

The menʼs room at the Yale Street Diner features a set of homey curtains. If you part the curtains, you will find… more cinder blocks.

The entire wall is just cinder blocks. The curtain is a facade. The promise of a window is a lie.

I think this diner raided Pizza Hutʼs garage sale.

I tried a new coffee joint today. Itʼs called La La Land.

The person who told me to try it said that itʼs a chain out of Los Angeles that hires mentally challenged people to give them a better life. None of that is true.

La La Landʼs web site doesnʼt say where itʼs from, but most of its outposts are in the Dallas area, with a sprinkling in the Houston area, and one in Santa Monica. So, Iʼm going with “It's from the Metroplex.”

Also, the workers are just normal cafe workers. The La La Land web site contains a lot of puffery about “giving back” and “being seen” and a lot of other trendy yet meaningless buzzphrases, but never says exactly how it achieves any of that, and certainly never goes anywhere near stating that it hires disabled people. So, no, itʼs all just a bunch of hooey.

The coffee, though, is pretty good.

I had a Cookies ʼn Dream Latte. Even though it has Oreo cookies and honey, it doesnʼt overpower with sweetness. It also contains “la la cloud,” which is think is Dumbass for “steamed milk.”

The decor is unusual, but fun. It reminds me a bit of the Woody Allen film Sleeper, but with a lot more yellow. Itʼs kind of retro-futuristic, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-meets-Benjamin Moore Golden Orchards #329 way.

I thought it was bright, and lively, and cute. To my slight surprise and complete dismay, the people at the next table couldnʼt grok it. The aging Millennials with the tired vocal fries complained, “Whatʼs with all the… yell-o?” Sorry youʼre too cool for school. Maybe youʼd be more comfortable at Starbucks, or perhaps suckling at your Keurig.

The companyʼs InfoSec^† team insists that itʼs super important that I update my computerʼs operating system as soon as possible.

So, I guess this is what Iʼm doing at work for the next few hours.

† “Information Security”

Do you want to get people to disable emergency alerts on their cell phones? Because this is how you get people to disable emergency alerts on their cell phones.

But at least the police destroyed some innocent guyʼs entire house with a tank making the arrest.

This Microsoft Azure web page promoting Redmondʼs acumen tells me two things:

1. Microsoft spends more than $1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development.
2. All those rumors about Microsoft disbanding its Quality Assurance department in favor of “AI” and “telemetry” were true.

Have you ever wondered what it looks like when a hotelʼs 100-year-old cast iron laundry wastewater pipe breaks, raining suds down on the street below?

Todayʼs your lucky day.

Hereʼs another example of how Microsoft no longer understand Macs.

When trying to attach a file to a message in Microsoft Outlook, it gives the option to Browse this Mac. Thereʼs a reason that real Mac-native apps donʼt use that language. They just use “Browse.”

This is because the resulting file dialog allows me to browse not only “this” Mac, but also other Macs, as well as file servers, other locations on the internet, or even a P.A.N.

Microsoft used to have a very thorough and competent group called the Mac Business Unit. The Mac was where Microsoft tested new Office features before rolling them out on Windows. I guess all of that has been value-engineered into oblivion.

I am very glad to see an ice cream truck prowling downtown Houston.

I will be very sad when a Metro train turns him into soft serve for parking on the train tracks.

In 2006 I donated a Sony CDP-435 five-disc CD player to Goodwill.

I wonder if this is it.

When I purchased Kate Nashʼs album Made of Bricks from iTunes, it helpfully sanitized the filename of the song Dickhead so that my computer wouldnʼt be offended.

Then, sometime later, Appleʼs Music program — the successor to iTunes — upgraded the quality of the song, and at the same time kept the filename “Dickhead.” Iʼm sure my computer is clutching its digital pearls.

If Abraham Lincoln asks you to hold his hat, donʼt.

The sixteenth president was notorious for storing things in his famously capacious hat. But you never know what might be in there.

It makes sense that heʼd stuff it with a Lincoln logbook, or a few pencils, or even a draft of a speech to Congress. But if you were to rummage through his stovepipe chapeau you might not only encounter legal briefs, but Mr. Lincolnʼs actual briefs. Thatʼs because the hat was something of a catch-all for him. Half filing cabinet, half trash can.

Apple cores were a particularly common hazard, though why he should save apple cores is unknown to me.

Also unknown to me is why I know this. When I lived in Illinois, I never visited any Lincoln musea. When I lived in the South, I did visit the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky. So perhaps I picked it up there. Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing.

One of the buildings near me that has a WeWork co-working space in it proudly bears the companyʼs slogan on the front door: “Do what you love.”

I wonder if that sort of thinking is the reason the world is filled with puppy sitters, yoga instructors, and food trucks; but has a shortage of doctors, garbage men, and homeless advocates.

Ever have one of those days when the I.T. department asks you for the password to one of its own machines?

And you have to tell the I.T. department that the super-duper high security password it assigned to a production machine is Password123?

This weekendʼs project: Teaching myself FORTH on a Udamonic Scamp3 single-board computer.

My first introduction to FORTH was around 1984 with H.E.S.ʼ 64 FORTH, which everyone just called “Sixty-Forth” because itʼs easier to say and made us feel clever. I didnʼt get very far with it because the H.E.S. FORTH came on a cartridge, and I had no means of storing my completed programs. Not even a datasette. By the time I got my first 1541 disk drive, I had moved on to other things.

But I have an affinity for old programming languages, so when I ran across the Scamp on the internet, I ordered one right away. I didnʼt receive it right away, though. It was shipped from Australia via a start-up called Sendle, so the computer I ordered in March arrived at the end of June. Iʼm amazed that it works, considering it was packed in little more than a thin layer of bubble wrap, and mailed in a basic envelope, which had been torn open along the way.

By design, both 64 Forth and FlashForth on the Scamp are FORTH supersets. Programs being only semi-portable between platforms is considered a feature, not a bug, in FORTH. Still, all FORTHs conform to the same programming paradigms and seem to have 95% compatibility with one another. Much like computers in the 1970ʼs, when youʼd buy a generic book of BASIC programs at Brentanoʼs and then it was up to you to customize the code to fit your machine.

Interestingly, the H.E.S. variation of FORTH seems more capable than the FlashForth that the Scamp runs. 64 Forth has over 500 words in its vocabulary, and comes with a split-screen I.D.E. method of interaction. The Scamp superset of FlashForth has just 425 words, and is designed for very bare-bones TTY output. No fancy ANSI windows here.

On the other hand, the Scamp can be powered off and when it's plugged in again you can pick up right where you left off. With any Commodore 64 FORTH, once you restart, you have to rebuild or reload all of the words you have previously defined. So while FlashForth isn't flashy, it's certainly more useful to use for a long-term project.

So what will I do with a 55-year-old programming language in 2023? Iʼm going to learn. Iʼm going to explore. Iʼm going to expand my ways of thinking and understand how things were done in the past so that I can do things better in the future.

Whenever I get a new piece of kit, Iʼm automatically challenged with ”What good is it?” I shouldnʼt have to answer that. Intellectual curiosity should be rewarded and saluted. Not everything is a start-up. Not everything is a business. Not everything has to make money. 50 years ago, nobody would have asked someone who does woodworking in his spare time, “How are you going to monetize that?” The notion would have been ludicrous. And, not surprisingly, the sort of people who donʼt understand intellectual curiosity are also the same group of people who spend their free time laying on a couch binge watching the latest zombiethon on the trendy streaming service of the day.

Hereʼs my latest million-dollar idea.

Combine the power of audio deepfakes with the radio distribution capabilities of the internet to allow radio listeners to pick their own disc jockeys.

It came to me when I was pondering Appleʼs new assistive technology to allow people to respond to messages by typing the response, but delivering it in their own voice. Apple calls it “Personal Voice,” and itʼs coming to iPhones better than the one I have.

By combining Appleʼs Personal voice with the voice-tracking software already in use by radio stations, listeners could get not only the music they want, but also the presenters they prefer.

So instead of having to suffer through the affectations and vocal fry of the latest too-cool-for-school D.J. on Sirius XMU, with the push of a button, you could have Sluggo from First Wave telling you about Björkʼs new tour. Or, instead of the inaudible never-thee-care mumbling of a KCNV/Las Vegas classical announcer, you could have the clarity and diction of David Attenborough explaining the historical significance of Tchaikovskyʼs Dances of the Hay Maidens.

Iʼll leave it up to the radio companies and the announcers unions to decide how semi-synthetic D.J.ʼs get compensated.

Todayʼs coffee is “Uh… I dunno… just gimme a mocha,” which is what I uttered upon interrogation from the surprisingly helpful baristas at Three Keys Coffee.

Three Keys is a local roasting company that has just opened its first retail location. And that location is one block away from me.

From what I can tell, the beans it sells have won a bunch of awards. Iʼm not a connoisseur of anything, so awards donʼt resonate with me. But the coffee is good.

Smooth, not too sweet, and very gulpable. Because sometimes in the morning you need a gulpable coffee to blow out the lung butter that has accumulated in your esophagus overnight.

Since Three Keys is used to getting accolades, Iʼll give it four out of five stirry sticks. High marks for flavor, texture, and location. But the menu is a bit limited, with only a handful of options: americano, flat white, cortado — all of the usual pedestrian offerings available in any generic Houston coffee shop. When it gets a signature drink or two of its own, then weʼll really have something going on here.

Thereʼs a new woman helping people find their seats at the co-cathedral these days.

She seems nice enough, but I feel bad for her. It appears that her parents named her after a rap star.

Her name tag reads “Usher.”

This morningʼs promenade in the garden revealed a sleeping bee and a baby pepper.

I am both impressed and disappointed with macOS.

I set up a new user account so that I could telnet in to a macOS box to perform certain tasks that can only be done via telnet, and with a CLI.

Not surprisingly, in 2023, macOS doesn't come with terminal definitions for a TRS-80 Model 100. It's a 40-year-old machine, so it makes sense that I would have to build my own. Which I did.

But as I was doing so, I noticed that macOS still comes with terminal definitions for far older, and more obscure computers than the one I'm connecting to it with.

• Altos machines
• Amigas
• Apple Lisas (natch)
• 85 types of AT&T terminals
• C. Itoh (I didn't even know C. Itoh made computers)
• Commodore B-128s
• HeathKits
• I.B.M. computers running Aixterm in Japanese
• Microbees
• Minitels
• Dozens of NCR terminals
• Several types of Kaypros
• Four types of Zenith machines

Granted, these terminal definitions are just part of the stock set that is packed in with many Unixes. But I still find it surprising that after a half-century, these files continue to proliferate, and still exist, even though the number of people who would use them is basically zero.

Weekend project: Coming up with a harder, slower, less-reliable way to read the New York Times. Mission accomplished.

Show me an armored aquarium, and Iʼll show you a fish tank.

The Houston Botanic Garden isnʼt the worldʼs greatest botanic garden. Itʼs probably not even in the top 100. But itʼs less crowded than Hermann Park, and after a long series of misguided “improvements,” it's added a coffee cart, so I keep going.

Can you figure out how to close this error message dialog box? No, itʼs not by clicking on the red circled × that looks exactly like a close window control. You do it by clicking on the ellipses.

Good job, Microsoft.

“Budget Waste?” I didnʼt even know the legislature was in town this week.

Guys, I gotta go. The cat just barfed on my computer plug.

The magic of work-from-home.

I donʼt think I could ever date a movie starlet. Movie stars are people who make their living pretending to be things they are not. How could you ever really trust someone who is a professional liar?

Not that I was ever in danger of being wooed by an actress. Still, lying seems endemic to the entire social, moral, and monetary economy of Hollywood. Take, for instance, this movie poster for the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon.

It features a pair of disembodied Bogart hands, each paw with a pistol, furiously filling imaginary bad guys with lead. The testosterone-tantalizing tag line reads, “A story as explosive as his blazing automatics!”

Except, that at no time in the movie does Bogart shoot any bad guys. The closest he gets to violence is backhanding a dandy half his size. His character even makes a point of it in the movie:

Cop: What kind of a gun do you carry?

Bogart: None. I donʼt like ʼem. Of course, there are some at the office.

Cop: You donʼt happen to have one here?

Bogart: Shakes head “no”

So why did the movie studio so conspicuously add non-existent gun battles to this movie? After viewing many dozens of 1940ʼs and 1950ʼs movies and their associated posters, my inexpert opinion is that it was to get men to agree to take their female companions to see the pictures.

Bogartʼs lady fans were more than ready to consume whatever tale he told on celluloid, no matter what the actual story. But getting the men to go along required a little extra push. You can also see this in the titles and artwork of other films of the era that use cheesecake imagery and vaguely-naughty titles that have little to do with the actual content of the films.

Itʼs for this reason that when presented with an old movie, itʼs important not to judge the film by its poster. The two may be only distantly related.

How many parking tickets does the Methodist Hospital courtesy buggy have to rack up before it gets booted by Methodist Hospital?

Among tech companies, Apple has a reputation for being the tightest with protecting peopleʼs privacy. Apparently, that extends to stick people on road signs.

Todayʼs coffee is Nutty Chocolate from Ampersand Coffee Roasters in Colorado.

Bull shit is good for fertilizing coffee crops. And bullshit is apparently a key ingredient in this coffeeʼs marketing. The package is so crammed full of sanctimonious later-day hipster buzzwords that thereʼs barely room for the trophy case of “look how extra I am!” stickers. The only thing missing is a gold participation star from Mrs. Keaneʼs kindergarten class.

Howʼs the coffee? Itʼs slightly below average. The flavors arenʼt as pronounced as the packaging would have you believe, and thereʼs a bit of a chemical-style aftertaste. It is unkind to say that the coffee doesnʼt live up to the hype, because no coffee could possibly accede to the level of boastful globalist hype cosplay in which this company engages.

Still, those poor coffee beans. The weight of the global order is on their shoulders. The only way to put them under more pressure is to actually put them in an espresso machine.

The package promises they will “[provide] the ultimate holistic coffee experience through quality coffee, womenʼs empowerment, environmental regeneration, and upward spirals.”

Itʼs a bag of coffee beans, not a United Nations resolution.

I find it curious that a company so aggressively engaged in forthrightness as performance art should describe its product as “An insane blend of our nuttiest and most chocolaty-tasting coffees.” I guess Ampersand didnʼt get the Slack message that youʼre not supposed to use the word “insane” anymore, as it offends those who choose to be offended on behalf of imaginary mentally unstable people they donʼt even know.

Three things I learned from watching the 1944 film The Conspirators:

1. Nazis thugs have really good penmanship.

   

2. The mirrors in Portugal are defective; they project an image, instead of reflect the image.

   

3. Lisbon has the same johnny pumps as New York.

   

As a society, have we reached the point yet where web developers can finally stop putting “Results” at the top of search results?

Please?

What? Doesnʼt every record store have an “Albums with Marlon Brando on the cover” section?

I guess Chinese spammers have gotten so lazy that theyʼre not even bothering to hide their caller ID anymore.

Today, Apple released a software update for my iPhone 6, which came out in September of 2014. That means this latest software update is for a phone that came out 100 months ago.

I also pulled out my Samsung Galaxy S7 to see if it had a software update. Nope. It stopped getting software updates in January of 2021. That means it only got software updates for 57 months — about half as long as the iPhone.

Sounds like a good reason to avoid Samsung phones.

What did one burrito say to the other burrito?

“Aaaaahh! Oh, holy shit! A talking burrito! Aaaaahh!”

Me: “Oh, cool, my new work computer has a battery that lasts all day!”

Adobe Creative Cloud: “Hold my beer…”

I received another check in the mail from Facebook for violating my privacy. I think this is the third check.

Itʼs been said that Facebook makes $20 per month (or is it year?) from each user. Based on the number of months I was a user, and the total amount of the checks I've gotten from Facebook, it lost a bundle on me.

I was in a little French bakery this afternoon having lunch, and a woman came in for coffee. For herself, and for her baby!

She ordered a flat white for herself, and a “baby-chino” for her kid. The girl behind the counter didnʼt know what it was, so she explained that itʼs half warm milk, and half espresso, with a dusting of chocolate on top, and that it should be put in the baby bottle that the woman brought with her.

I was done with my quiche and left before the drink was made, but I saw the kid in the pram, and it was totally a baby. Like diapers and bottle and teething ring and everything.

Iʼve changed a few hundred diapers and mixed up many gallons of formula in my time, but I must be completely out of touch when it comes to modern parenting.

One of Appleʼs edge servers is called “Croissant.”

If a supermarket comes out with a new flavor of ice cream named after the sportsball club that plays a few blocks away, Iʼm required to eat it, right?

It turns out this is a quality product. Very pronounced flavor. And in what may be a first for store-brand anything, I think it might actually have too much going on inside.

It turns out my eight-dollar fish sandwich is actually a $63.11 deluxe fruit tray.

Thatʼs what I get for buying lunch at a liquor store.

Real estate developers are always talking about how their properties should be put to their “highest and best” use. And yet, they keep ending up as strip malls and parking lots, instead of homeless shelters, community gardens, and elementary schools.

The Carnival Breeze appears to be taking a poo in Galveston Channel.

McDonaldʼs worker: “What kind of sauce?”

Me: “Honey mustard.”

McDonaldʼs worker: Hands me spicy buffalo.

Me: “No, honey mustard.”

McDonaldʼs worker: Hands me hot picante.

Me: Walks away with my nuggets.

I havenʼt seen Van Halenʼs Panama video, but I suspect itʼs more compelling than this.

Carnival Vista: “Hey, Breeze.”

Carnival Breeze: “Yeah, Vista.”

Carnival Vista: “What did one cruise ship say to the other cruise ship?”

Carnival Breeze: “Stop it, Vista. Just donʼt.”

You know how mid-tier cities desperate for attention create little signs or murals or plazas just so that people will take photographs of themselves and post them to social media and give the city free publicity? Carnival wins this game.

At Carnivalʼs cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico there is a small white sand beach. It is conveniently located right at the end of the pier that the tourists use to get off the ships.

It has a perfect little row of perfect little palm trees and perfect sand in front of perfect blue water, and the perfectly massive profiles of Carnivalʼs cruise ships in the background.

Thousands of people take pictures there each year and post them online without realizing that itʼs a marketing campaign. The stealth equivalent of those giant photo frame props that second-rate cities place around town to let the vanity-afflicted know exactly where to stand in order to get the perfect picture of themselves for social media.

Carnival deserves a big fat “good on you” for doing a great job with this guerrilla marketing technique, and pulling it off at industrial scale. It couldnʼt have been cheap to execute, and certainly demonstrates extensive vision and cooperation between departments within the company.

You can tell the Carnival Dream is a happy ship by the way itʼs always smiling.

There used to be a restaurant in downtown Houston that had a big sign in front reading “Mexican food so authentic, you shouldnʼt drink the water.”

In the 90ʼs that was considered humor. Today, it seems like a tacky and rude perpetuation of a stereotype.

And then I saw this at Cruise Port Cozumel.

Is it possible to run a beach resort with no electricity except car batteries, and credit card processing over a long-distance radio link with a yagi antenna?

Yep. It's called Lookout Beach, on the east coast of Cozumel.

Alcohol, sun, wind, and isolation. It would be paradise if the beach wasn't so terrible. There's a nice white strip of sand, but the part by the water is nothing but foot-shredding coral.

It also seems to get the worst of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt. But otherwise, once you convince the touts you don't want any trinkets, it can be relaxing.

Some people see a rock. Some people see the lizard.

We went to an ancient Mayan archaeological site called San Gervasio. Hereʼs the basics, as told by our tour guide:

• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• The Mayans used to have a vast city here.
• The city was so vast it needed roads that were in perfect alignment with the moon.
• Women were only allowed to come to the island and its city when they had their periods.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.
• something something mumble mumble
• A treasure hunter bought this site from the Mexican government when it was too busy fighting a civil war to care about treasure hunters buying historic sites.
• The treasure hunterʼs tool of choice was dynamite, and he blew all of the historic buildings to pieces looking for gold he never found.
• Some of the chips from the dynamite explosions ended up on the tour guideʼs shoulder.
• Everything was wonderful in Mexico until the Spanish arrived.

I think the daily towel-in-the-shape-of-an-animal is a cute gimmick. But Iʼm not sure that “sea monster” is the best choice on a cruise ship.

On a boat, off the coast of the Cayman Islands, there is a sign reading “Maximum passenger: 250.” Next to it is another sign reading “72 adultʼs life jackets.” I can go three ways with this:

1. Since “Adultʼs” is possessive, who are the 72 people who reserved a life jacket in advance?
2. In the event of an emergency, the shipping company is OK with losing 178 passengers to sharks.
3. Since there are no life jackets for children, in the event of an emergency, it appears weʼre supposed to use them to distract the sharks.

Buoy One: “I'm tired from all this waving.”

Buoy Two: “Yeah, it takes atoll.”

Iʼm not an expert fisherman, but I think when youʼre 40 miles out to sea, rule number one is donʼt stand up in the boat!

You can tell that the towns of Jamaica were built by Europeans, because they let people park right up against important buildings.

Itʼs something Iʼve noticed in European nations from Britain to Italy to Austria. In America, we like to surround our important buildings with ceremonial lawns and other buffers. Unless youʼre royalty, that doesnʼt seem to happen in the European cultures Iʼve seen so far.

Thatʼs not a modern apartment building looming over the faux Georgian village. Itʼs a cruise ship.

What do you do when you need to use both hands for something, but you really donʼt want to put down your drink? You put it on your head, and then go about your business like itʼs no big deal.

At one of the entrances to Cruise Port Falmouth there is a series of signs telling the history of Falmouth. I donʼt think anyone ever reads them. The small fraction of people who leave port on their own and find their way back through this gate are too tired, hungry, and sunburned to care much about history.

I took photographs of some of them, and I leave these here in the name of posterity so that maybe someday someone will read on the internet what they didnʼt read in real life.

Sadly, the URLs printed on the big signs donʼt work. This is a good example of why you never print web addresses on anything thatʼs expected to last longer than a leaflet.

Falmouth Cruise Port is a Disney-esque retail promenade of crisp Georgian-style mercantile buildings, fully licensed and insured street performers, and clean bathrooms.

As is often the case, the area just beyond the tourist zone is less like a theme park, and more like the real world.

This was just embarrassing to watch.

This is the pedestrian exit from Cruise Port Falmouth to the actual town of Falmouth. Thereʼs a security guard to keep the town touts out of the port, which is private property. There are also a couple of police officers milling about.

A big, fat Texan waddles up to the very young 85-pound Jamaican security guard asking whatʼs on the other side of the fence. She tells him itʼs the town of Falmouth, with shops, and bars and restaurants.

In his slow, southern drawl laden with Texas twang he loudly inquires, “Is it safe?” I didnʼt hear her response, but he turned around and flip-flopped back into the warm bosom Royal Caribbeanʼs simulated suburban sanctuary.

I guess Falmouth is safe enough for an 85-pound girl to live in, but not safe enough for a 300-pound Texan to visit.

I can imagine him back in the bar on the ship talking up a storm about what a tough guy he is, and how proud he is of his three-quarter ton truck and hunting dog, and how he won the high school football championship in West Farkwad back in ʼ89.

I liked Texas better back when I was the only one who was all hat and no cattle.

I like to take pictures of generic street scenes when I travel. When I look back at the pictures later, they very often help me remember a place more vividly than a photograph that's focused on a monument or a building or a bird.

However, it appears that I'm not all that interested in cleaning my lens before I take pictures. Most of my Falmouth photos were ruined by a smear of sunscreen on the lens.

Didn't anyone ever tell you to make sure your optics are clean?

Naming buildings after commercial products is nothing new. New York has the Chrysler Building. Chicago has the Wrigley Building. And Falmouth, Jamaica has… the Huggies Building.

Someone should open a spa there so customers can be pampered at Huggies.

Security doesnʼt have to be ugly.

I managed to find the Jamaica Post office in Falmouth, Jamaica. But by the time I got there, Iʼd already given all of my Jamaican dollars to touts hawking magnets and carved wooden figures. So much for reviving my stamp collection.

If your crappy taxi can only handle “two fat chicks,” then perhaps you should do a better job of maintaining it.

I donʼt know what building this is, but I like the way it looks. It feels like a slice of Caribbean history during a more interesting age.

I suspect the building is actually a historic landmark, because Falmouth puts up maps that look like theyʼre from pirate days next to its historic buildings. But this building has no sign telling you what it is.

This is the first bird Iʼve seen on this trip. According to my Birds of the West Indies book by James Bond, it is a Brown Booby.

I thought I might see seagulls out here, but not a booby. I guess he flew over from Cuba. Itʼs just 40 miles away.

The Caribbean Sea sure does know how to put on a sunrise. I donʼt think Iʼve seen a bad one since I got on this boat… er… ship.

I presume that it has to do with the vastness of the horizon. Sunrises are always better with clouds to add interest. And with so many miles between an observer and the horizon, there chances of there being weather between are increased.

Thatʼs part of the reason that great sunrises and sunsets in the desert arenʼt all that common. Less weather to add color and visual interest.

It also helps that my Hasselblad has a “Sunset mode” that works equally well on sunrises.

I woke up early enough today to catch the moon before it set. When I lived in Las Vegas, I used to look for the moon almost every night. Sometimes Iʼd stare at it in the driveway. Sometimes it would shine in my bedroom window so brightly, Iʼd wake up.

In cowboy books, the characters are always doing things outside by the light of the moon. I never understood that until I lived in the desert. Without the clouds and humidity, the moon shines so brightly that, yes, doing things by moonlight is perfectly reasonable. Especially when youʼre far enough removed from light pollution to adjust to the moonʼs luminance.

I havenʼt seen the moon since I moved to Houston because Iʼm surrounded by buildings at night. I think people lose something when they canʼt be connected to something as basic as the moon. I know I feel like Iʼve lost something.

When I would visit the battleship Texas, it always seemed massive. So seeing it in dry dock, dwarfed by a couple of offshore oil platforms messes with my sense of scale.

Driving a forklift in the Texas sun isnʼt good for your health.

Repurposing a biohazard container as a sun shade is also probably not good for your health.

Show me a king who can tell a joke, and Iʼll show you a noble gas.

Hereʼs my million-dollar idea:

Open a Hallmark store on a cruise ship.

• Birthday cards: $30
• Anniversary cards: $50
• “Honey, she meant nothing to me” cards: $100

Show me a bunch of portals that can play jazz, and Iʼll show you some swinging doors.

Show me secondary education for our finned friends, and Iʼll show you a school of fish.

I told Pizza Hut I do not want text message updates about my pie.

Forty-four minutes later…

Thanks for completely ignoring my choice, Pizza Hut!

The SD card floppy drive emulator I use on my TRS-80 has its activity light facing the wrong direction. So I drilled a hole in the case, and voila!

I wonder how many other tech problems can be solved with power tools.

Show me a painting of a Mingo County moonshiner, and Iʼll show you a still life.

I went somewhere new to look for birds today. Itʼs the Baytown Nature Center. Four bucks gets you a friendly smile and a inkjet-printed map at the gate.

If youʼre someone whose lived in Houston for a long while, you may know it as the neighborhood of Brownwood. Brownwood was a nice little development on the edge of Crystal Bay. Today, itʼs birds and brush and otters and catfish.

What happened to Brownwood is what is likely to happen to a lot of places in the Houston area — man got too greedy, so nature took it back.

A number of places in this area get their drinking and industrial-use water from the ground. This is causing towns all over the region to sink as the water is depleted, and the soft earth above pushes down. Itʼs one of the reasons that foundation repair commercials are so common on Houston television. Yet people continue to demand that their municipalities rely on cheap groundwater, instead of other slightly-more-expensive sources. Gotta save a buck whenever we can, right?

Brownwood sank between ten and 15 feet in some places, and was a sitting duck when Hurricane Alicia came through in 1983. If people hadnʼt been so greedy, Brownwood likely would have been lightly damaged, like much of the rest of the region. Instead, it was flooded so badly that it had to be abandoned.

Nature is trying to take things back, but itʼs happening slowly. Perhaps I just went at a bad time of the year, but there was very little nature to behold. The stars of the show were the roseate spoonbills, all pink and flashy. Also, a couple of alligators, some catfish, assorted herons, and a persistently unlucky pelican.

The streets remain, though in an advanced level of decay. And you can occasionally make out where a house once stood by the sewer manholes, metal railings, boat piers, or incongruous and out-of-control landscaping.

Nature will erase all of this, too, eventually. But I donʼt think the washed out homeowners realize how awful it would have been to live there today. The place is surrounded by petrochemical plants that blare and thrum and whistle and shriek all day long, and all night. Itʼs not a peaceful place, and probably not somewhere that anyone would want to live, if they had a choice.

Birds I encountered today:

• Blue Jay
• Carolina Wren
• Common Gallinule
• House Wren
• Northern Cardinal
• Red-winged Blackbird
• Roseate Spoonbills
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet
• Swamp Sparrow
• Tricolored Heron
• White-eyed Vireo
• White-throated Sparrow
• Yellow-breasted chat
• Yellow-rumped Warbler

Show me a group of people making fun of a country singer to his face, and Iʼll show you Kenny Rogers Roasters.

A mystery error on a bank web site. Thatʼs OK. Itʼs not like people trust banks with their money or anything.

A web siteʼs 404 page is often the most neglected page of the site. Netflix wonʼt even waste CSS on it.

No one ever died on Bargain Hunt.

Citibankʼs web site says my browser is not supported. It wants a minimum of Safari 15.2.

Iʼm using 16.3.

Is it too much to expect a bank to know how to count?

Show me an ordinary spud, and Iʼll show you a commentator.

I went to a new place to find a slice of nature: The Trinity River Waterbird Rookery

Itʼs right off of Interstate 10 near Wallisville, Texas, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Itʼs great because the entrance is adjacent to a bridge over the Trinity River, so most people donʼt see it and itʼs inconvenient to get to, so hardly anyone ever goes there. The bad part is that the wildlife viewing platform is so close to the freeway that you canʼt hear whatever birds might be busy rooking up in the preserve.

Itʼs not formally a nature preserve, itʼs a flood control project, which is why it was built by the army. But when I was there, the foliage was recovering nicely from the Christmas cold blast, and there was a big fat painted turtle in the shallows looking at me with an angry face like some kind of swamp bouncer.

I have coined a new idiom:

That dude is high from sniffing his own diapers!

I havenʼt decided what it means yet, but on the surface is sounds both clever and marginally offensive. Iʼll have to come up with a way to work it into polite conversation.

That's the wrong body of water, Mack. Turtle Bayou is one stream over.

The Turtle Bayou Nature Preserve also has a less-traveled eastern unit. There's hardly any bids to hear there, though. It's much drier, and a much less thorny hike along the water.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one on the right because there was more shade.

Man, that FM-563 traffic just never stops.

I spent the morning at the Turtle Bayou Nature Preserve. Turtle Bayou used to be a oil town, but when the oil ran out, so did the people. All that's left of the town is an abandoned ferry landing, scattered concrete foundations, and the occasional bit of rusting oil infrastructure.

Today, the preserve is a refuge for various birds and other wetland critters from coyotes to crawfish. It is also occasionally occupied by herds of cattle, who crop the greenery, fertilize with abandon, and churn up the soil so it doesn't get too compacted. Pretty much the same thing that deer and elk and buffalo used to do here, before they were driven out by suburbia.

The area also functions as a geologic sponge, regulating water levels and cleaning pollutants from the water that flows from the surrounding 88,000 acres into Galveston Bay. That's why the Chambers-Liberty County Navigation District supports this project. It helps both birds and barges.

Birds tallied on this visit:

• American Goldfinch
• American Kestrel
• American Wigeon
• American Crow
• Belted Kingfisher
• Boat-tailed Grackle
• Blue Jay
• Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
• Brown-headed Cowbird
• Carolina Chickadee
• Carolina Wren
• Cedar Waxwing
• Common Gallinule
• Dark-eyed Junco
• Golden-crowned Kinglet
• House Wren
• Mallard
• Northern Cardinal
• Pine Warbler
• Red-bellied Woodpecker
• Red-shouldered Hawk
• Red-winged Blackbird
• Royal Tern
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet
• Savannah Sparrow
• Sedge Wren
• Swamp Sparrow
• Yellow-rumped Warbler

My recommendation: do not hike the trails with flat-bottomed shoes. You need hiking boots at a minimum. Well-worn cowboy boots are probably best. Especially if it's rained in the last week, and if the cows are visiting.

Show me a green onion that can rhyme, and I'll show you a rapscallion.

Well, hereʼs something you almost never see: an error message from the B&H web site.

B&H takes its web presence very seriously, and is among the planetʼs biggest targets for criminals. But somehow the boffins on 9^th Avenue manage to keep the fraudsters at bay, while maintaining a web site that is fast, complex, and fairly easy to use.

This error message didnʼt last long. Only a few seconds. Perhaps today is a good day to buy a lottery ticket.

Not every guy proposes with a 12-foot-tall “Will you marry me?” sign atop a downtown parking garage.

But this one did.

If you had plans for a tropical island vacation, better check your reservations. Google Maps says that all Jamaica is temporarily closed.

You want to be mad because Carnivalʼs web site is needlessly complex. But who can be cross with a towel animal?

Yes. The error was doing business with MediaTemple/GoDaddy.

It seems that I can do things.

Today I received an e-mail telling me that my Windows Server training has earned me a major award. Maybe not major. Minor. OK, itʼs a PNG.

Collecting these badges is the way nerds boast to one another these days. Kind of like the way certain birds will collect shiny objects to attract a mate.

According to the company that taught the class, I am now thoroughly stilled in the following:

I may have made up that last one.

It may be a symptom of age that I looked at this album on iTunes Japan and thought, “Eldo is the better song, but Halo is over six minutes long for the same price!”

For what itʼs worth, Eldo costs 2¥ per second, while Halo costs a little over ½¥ per second. So Halo is clearly the better value, even though Eldo is more popular.

Disgusted with myself, I bought neither.

Silicon Valley tech companies gotta Silicon Valley. Amirite?

Apple has a new version of its HomePod device available. Much like most of its previous devices, itʼs built for people who live in the greater San Francisco area, where the weather is largely placid, boring and uneventful. In other words — entirely unlike most of the rest of the planet.

The web page about the new HomePod includes this footnote about its temperature and humidity sensors:

Temperature and humidity sensing is optimized for indoor, domestic settings, when ambient temperatures are around 15°C to 30°C and relative humidity is around 30% to 70%.

Well, 15°C is 59 degrees. How often do people let it get down to 59 degrees in their homes? All the time.

There is no shortage of basements in places like Green Bay, Minneapolis, and the entire nation of Canada where people have a basement that has been kitted out as a family room, or a den, or a home office and that remains unheated most of the year. One of Appleʼs scenarios for using the HomePod temperature sensor is that it can be paired with other HomeKit gear to automatically turn on a heater if it gets too cold. Great. Except that if your chosen temperature for activating the heat in your unused basement or attic rec room is below 59°, Apple admits itʼs not going to be reliable.

On the hot side, OK, itʼs unusual to have an indoor temperature above 86°. But Iʼve had it in my house many times when the humidity was low and I lived in the desert. Many days in the spring and fall when Iʼd have the windows wide open enjoying the warm breeze and low humidity, the indoor temperature would get to 86°. If the cat was sleeping, that was fine. Sheʼd eventually wake up and start complaining, and Iʼd have to close the windows and bring the temperature down to 80-ish for her. But thatʼs to be expected, since she wears a fur coat. If I didnʼt have the cat, Iʼd probably have the temperature higher. And Iʼm not alone. Thereʼs a reason millions of people retire to hot places.

The humidity range is oddly narrow, too. Iʼm sure that 30% humidity is bone-crackingly dry in Cupertino. In Nevada, itʼs a bit clammy. When I lived there, the outdoor humidity reported by the National Weather Service was regularly in the single digits. And both of my indoor humidity sensors almost always showed readings well below 30%. Both of them appeared to have the same sensor under the hood, since they both stopped reporting humidity at 10%. These werenʼt expensive high-tech scientific humidity sensors. One I bought at the Apple Store for about $100. The other came from the supermarket, and cost about ten bucks. But it was perfectly happy reporting humidity far lower than what Apple considers reliable for its equipment.

Living in the Bay Area, Apple employees canʼt possible envision indoor humidity above 70%, but guess what — thatʼs a perfectly ordinary occurrence in most of the southern United States, including Florida, New Orleans, and Houston — the fourth-largest city in the nation. According to my HomeKit-connected humidity sensor, the humidity inside my house has been over 80% five times in the last two months.

All of this continues a pattern at Apple of designing products that only work well in the very specific, very ordinary weather conditions of Silicon Valley. Things like iPod headphone cords that get brittle in a Chicago winter, and iPhones that shut themselves off in temperatures that are common for millions of people who live in desert environments.

Apple has the money, the resources, and the people to do better. Why it chooses not to remains unclear.

Google Glass? Apple realityOS? Noobs all around.

Reflection Technology was doing augmented reality 35 years ago.

Iʼve had bad days. But at least Iʼve never been a Microsoft employee that got locked out of Microsoftʼs system while demonstrating how great Microsoftʼs products are to a group of 50 potential customers.

If thereʼs a feature article in the newspaper about how debutante balls have changed over the years, you may live in Texas.

It must be interesting to work for a company big enough to invent its own HTML entities.

It must also be interesting when your boss lets you know that you didnʼt escape them, or parse them, or whatever and theyʼre showing on the public web site.

I presume that &NFi; is supposed to be parsed as <i>, and &NFi_; as </i>.

Such a happy little pizza poof. Just birthed from the Totinoʼs bag, heʼs enthusiastic and engaged and ready to explore a new world of possibilities and hope.

He was delicious.

I almost beat a computer at chess today. Almost.

I've been playing chess against computers for four decades now, and have never beaten one. Not even once. Not even on “novice” levels. If a chess board had pieces more worthless and expendable than pawns, I would be one of those pieces.

But I keep playing. Atari 2600 Video Chess? Kicked my ass. Sargon Ⅱ on a Commodore 64? Took my lunch money and gave me a wedgie. Battle Chess on an IBM XT? Bought me flowers, took me to dinner, brought me home, kissed my hand and then didn't call me the next day.

Tonight I did something I have never done before: I managed to “check” a computer opponent.

The opponent was MicroChess on a KIM Uno, the modern-day incarnation of the old MOS KIM-1 machine.

The KIM did eventually beat me, but for once it wasn't the sort of Gulf War shock-and-awe defeat I'm used to.

I got the KIM because I nurse a fascination with the early days of computing, and because I found out that one can be built for under $20. That's another of my fascinations: Ultra-cheap computers.

The KIM Uno is a good way to get a taste of what it was like to compute in 1976. But it's not a faithful reproduction. It's more like a tribute than a recreation. The KIM software runs on a miniature single board computer, and has been modified in ways that make a lot of concessions to the limitations of the Arduino side of its split personality.

There are a lot of web sites on the internet that talk about the Uno, but it's clear that the people who blog about this machine put the parts together, poked in about six instructions of 6502 assembly, and then moved on to other things. If they had stuck with the KIM Uno, there would be an extensive library of modern software available for it the way there is for other new models of old computers.

One sure sign that nobody has ever used a KIM Uno for anything other than a minor plaything is that nowhere on any of the web pages flogging it do the writers mention battery life. I surmise that none of them used it long enough for that to be a concern.

The Kim Uno's primary problem is that it lack expandability. One of the greatest assets of the original KIM-1 was that it could be expanded in many ways. You could add memory. Add storage devices. Add circuits and relays and printers and terminals and pretty much anything the hobbyist could imagine. The KIM Uno leans on the Arduino's built-in serial port, and that's about its only connectivity. But even that serial port is fixed at a speed and parameters that make it incompatible with a number of era-appropriate terminals.

There is an expansion port of sorts on the KIM Uno, but it isn't documented. There's a single picture on the internet of the KIM Uno driving a small OLED display, but no information about how to do that. And worse, the KIM Uno machine driving the display isn't even running the KIM-1 ROMs. It's being used to emulate a COSMAC ELF.

To summarize: unlike the KIM-1, the only thing the KIM Uno is good for is to play chess. But on the other hand, the KIM-1 cost the equivalent of $1,300 today dollars, while the KIM Uno can be had for less than $12 in parts. But with that reduction in price comes a reduction in possibilities. And the whole reason people got into computers in the 1970ʼs was because at the time, we thought the possibilities of technology were endless.

Anywhere else, this would be a Christmas decoration. But since this is Houston, itʼs probably a protest against mass transit.

The bakery down the street serves a mean Turkish coffee, but I didn't expect a 15^th-century Ottoman invasion to remove the faces from all of the gingerbread men.

Every now and again I see a Millennial or Gen Z person on the internet proudly crowing that they have never owned a television.

Some of the nuns knew in elementary school had the same boast. Only, they were more sincere, and more convincing.

At first, I thought it was bad when GoDaddy told me I would be unable to chat with someone in its Customer Service department for 2⅔ hours.

The actual wait time ended up being 19 hours.

Iʼll write that again so you donʼt think it was a typo: The actual wait time ended up being 19 hours.

I didnʼt choose GoDaddy for this project, Iʼm just fixing something for someone else. But I now have an idea why everyone Iʼve ever spoken with in the tech world says to avoid GoDaddy at all costs.

This morning the big story on WGN-TV news was another mugging in Chicagoʼs Lincoln Park neighborhood, as illustrated by the screenshot above.

Why is yet another mugging in the nationʼs third-largest city a big news story? As a former television news producer, I can answer that.

• Itʼs part of a series of muggings that appear to be caused by the same group of people.
• It happened in a part of the city that is generally considered safe.
• It happened in the middle of the day.
• The mugger threatened to shoot the victimʼs dog.
• There was video available of the crime.

I canʼt speak to what happened in the WGN-TV newsroom when this story was written. I can, however, state that if I had aired this story in any of the cities where I produced TV news — Chicago, Houston, Cincinnati, and even Green Bay — the newsroom would have gotten complaint calls from people claiming that the only reason we aired the story is because it happened in a “white” neighborhood.

This is incorrect.

While itʼs true that muggings happen all the time Chicago neighborhoods that are more “diverse” and impoverished than Lincoln Park, the reason this was a big story is because it was the intersection of the five factors listed above. And of all those factors, the last one is the most important: There was video.

Television is a visual medium. TV without pictures is called “radio.”

Lincoln Park is a rich neighborhood, which means more people can afford personal security cameras, which means more video of crime is available. Englewood, as a random example, is a poorer neighborhood, which means fewer people can afford personal security cameras. Therefore, thereʼs less video of crime from that area, and thus itʼs less likely to be the main story of the newscast, unless itʼs made into a larger piece with crime statistics and interviews with cops, politicians, criminologists, residents, and whoever else is available.

I canʼt count the number of times Iʼve had to weigh two news stories, and chose the lesser one simply because video was available. If the news program isnʼt visually compelling, itʼs an important factor in people tuning out, ratings going down, and the next thing you know, youʼre on the street.

Struggling to make important, but non-visual, stories more palatable to a television audience is the reason that TV stations put all kinds of text on the screen. A still picture with a caption over the anchorʼs shoulder. A list of bullet points on one side of the screen. Even putting text between two anchors sitting in front of a chroma wall. And sometimes all the visual tricks in the book canʼt make a non-visual story work on TV and Iʼve said, “Let radio have it.”

Race is often an easy answer to not understanding how things work, but in local news it is seldom the right answer.

On a side note, Iʼve noticed that reporters in Chicago now call muggings “robberies.” The common term for a mugging when I lived in Chicago was “strong-arm robbery.” Itʼs a very Chicago term with a long history. I suspect the problem is too many people working in Chicago TV who are not from Chicago, and not thoughtful enough to adopt the local customs.

Tech people know that search is hard. But itʼs not this hard.

A search for “Cheddar cheese” at H.E.B. shouldnʼt show me mascara.