Tick-Tock

I don’t appreciate digital clock faces because you have to read them. You can glance at a traditional face with two arms and know immediately it’s ten after two. Digital reads, 2:10—a minimum of two steps, one for the hour, one for the minutes. And with digital, you have to think how close your time is to the hour, or quarter-hour, or half-hour; and how far from noon (or midnight) you are, proportionally. One quick glance at a clock face with hands and you know it all. Digital, well, you have to think about it. Not for very long, hopefully, but it’s not a welcome effort.

Another benefit: With an analog clock face you get aesthetics. There are attractive digital displays out there, but so many more traditional clock faces are minor works of art—especially if you’re into classic utilitarianism.

A mechanical stopwatch is an even simpler pleasure. A glance at one hand and you know how much time has passed—as long as you’re under a minute. All right, I’ll grant that, in the case of a stopwatch, having a digital number blinking at you may be saving mental effort, because you want that single number, and as precisely as possible, usually.

But if a one-second margin for error is acceptable, and you really want to know roughly how close you were to some mark, say 30 seconds, or a minute, then once again the mechanical watch is more friendly to your task.

And, by the way, for any hand-held stopwatch, digital or analog, I feel a one-second margin for error is the best you can hope for. Our reaction time is human.

I'll leave for another day whether "human" is naturally more analog or digital, but I bet you can guess how I feel about that.

Blogging Hiatus

Please read today's post on my Meta blog, which explains my recent absence from these pages.

What Do You Know?

Once in a while I see technical position advertised with the expectation that the applicant can do their work completely from memory. I have a friend who can do this, and he has an amazing career.

Most of us rely on a variety of references to back us up. One of the first lessons I was ever taught ended with this advice: If you’re ever asked if you know something, say yes, take the assignment, and get a manual.

The knowledge most of us carry around with us falls somewhere between total recall and knowing where to go to get it.

I have a personal bias toward knowing where to go. My reasons are that I have too many technical interests to have it all memorized, and also that so much rote memorization tends to crowd out original thinking—including the latest-and-greatest technical information, which becomes out-of-date the moment you commit it to memory.

It does slow a person down, admittedly, if they have to look everything up. Success with technology involves knowing what to know, and where to go to find the rest.

3-Button Mouse, 3-Button Velcro

I lament the demise of the three-button mouse. What an intuitive interface! You would wiggle your three fingers in a balletic dance, and the need for a very large number of keystrokes was eliminated. Of course, you’d have to have a program which incorporated the elegance of the device, and there were few. So few that the 3-button mouse fell out of favor.

I lament the demise of the three-strap Velcro on tennis shoes. Never very popular, people just didn’t get it. That third strap provided much additional comfort. It also provided security. If one of a two-strap Velcro opens, you feel as if your shoe is about to fall off. If you lose one strap and two are still secure, you feel just fine.

The best doesn’t always prevail.

Belt Ring

I have a ring for my belts. It came with a hook, but the hook is superfluous. Better to hang the ring on a hook for quicker access. Grab the belt you want, open the ring, take the belt, close the ring, hang it back on its hook.

I’ve looked for this item for sale the internet, no luck finding one as sturdy with a hook as easily removed and discarded. Closest available I found is here.

Perhaps it’s just too perfect a solution to be popular.

My Favorite Algorithm

There are algorithms for everything.

My favorite represents a combination of numbers in a single number. The value of that number is determined as the sum of all 2 ** (N-1) for each N included in the set.

For example, the set containing 1, 7, and 11 is:

(2**0) + (2 ** 6) + (2 ** 10) = 1089
(1) + (64) + (1024) = 1089

This algorithm was particularly useful when computer space and processing time were at a premium. But even today, it’s cool to be able to “say” several specific things with a single number.

The way it works is that each combination will have its own unique number, no matter how many items are in the set, using powers of 2.

Best to limit the range of “N” so you can decode your result number expediently. The software I know that employed this algorithm used it for a range of 1 to 15.

When to Upgrade Software, Hardware—or Anything Else

It's reasonable to have to pay for upgrades, but you should only upgrade if you require the functionality the upgrade provides.

The only reason to upgrade when you don’t require upgraded functionality is because the current version will no longer be supported. If you upgrade in this case, you aren’t actually upgrading, you’re meeting a support requirement.

Upgrades which increase performance, or correct errors or design flaws, should be called fixes.

It's not reasonable to have to pay for fixes.

Number, Please?

A friend of mine was looking for a phone number the other day. It wasn’t written in his address book, it wasn’t in his Blackberry. It wasn’t on his laptop computer, and wasn’t anywhere to be found in address books on the computer network at work.

He eventually found the number. It was on a scrap of paper .

Information aids can keep us from finding what we need to know.

Software: IdeaFisher

IdeaFisher is one of my favorite programs. Its benefit is the ability to associate ideas, just like we do. It's like plugging in an expansion module into your brain. The associations you make in your thinking are suddenly increased many-fold by IdeaFisher's creative suggestions.

IdeaFisher is now ThoughtOffice, and I don't own a copy. ThoughtOffice taps the internet, and includes images in its associations--certainly a boon.

But ThoughtOffice cut out IdeaFisher's most appealing and useful feature: the ability to add your own associations and ideas to the ThoughtOffice database.

I really liked being able to add associations to the IdeaFisher's database of ideas. It's as if ThoughtOffice turned the IdeaFisher model on its head, giving me countless associations but no ability to delete those I don't care for nor to add my own.

How I enjoyed IdeaFisher! Over time my "version" of IdeaFisher became startlingly familiar, a database of my thought processes, surprising me with associations I'd never made myself between my own ideas--it out-thought me. It was rather spooky, like the thing was my smarter twin, having original thoughts that could have been mine.

How many times have the simple, elegant uses of a program been hobbled by "improvements"?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Project Competition

I see too many projects in competition for the same business real estate.

If you want to get something done, and it will take coordinated teamwork and many steps to complete, making a project out of it is defensible, even smart. But too often, in the name of better business, project-making becomes a distraction from actually doing business.

If you have a project in mind that's similar to one already in progress, you should consider whether it's really worth it to scrap the original effort for the sake of some new approach. It's probably better to finish what you started, and follow-up with an intelligent evaluation period. It's even a worse course to start the new approach concurrently with the old, either denying that their end goals are the same, or squandering resources in the name of "healthy competition."

I should cite examples, but the best of which I'm aware I'm not at liberty to talk about. I appeal to your common sense—cite your own examples.

Win98 Was Stable

Windows 98 was a stable and secure operating system.

It was stable because you could simply reinstall everything if it failed, or restore it from a tape backup. You’d have a tape backup because you assumed Win98 would crash.

Win98 was secure, at least during its heyday, because this was prior to the exponential growth of internet viruses.

A case for the robustness of Win98 (second edition) is hard to make from a technical standpoint. But in practice, I never had problems with it. Subsequent Windows operating systems increased in complexity and, in my opinion, were rushed to production (release “updates” have multiplied almost as quickly as viruses). I feel we now live in a very uncertain computing environment.

Disagree, please. I’m surely not accounting for the increased sophistication of today’s software. But how much of that sophistication do we need, and at what price? And not a dollar cost so much as a demand for more of our time.

If hardware and software are ends in themselves, then we live in the best of all possible worlds, and it only gets better. But to the extent computers are tools intended to accomplish real-world tasks, we need better mousetraps.

Note-Taking

It is not true that you remember everything, or even that good ideas invariably resurface when they’re due and may be safely ignored when they first occur to you. Fact is, a new idea appears under a unique set of circumstances which never occur again, and an idea that’s ignored is as likely to vanish without a trace left in your memory.

Okay, I don’t know for sure this is a fact, but it seems reasonable to me. And I’m retaining far more information since I started taking note of my Big Ideas.

But who wants to lug around a notebook? I mean, a paper journal—leave your computer at home. I carry a rugged but ultra-thin and pliable pad, a Moleskin Cahier Pocket Ruled Journal :

How to Shovel a Driveway with a Snowblower

We make work for ourselves misusing lower forms of technology, too. Time and energy clearing your driveway steals precious time away from the off-hours overtime you want to spend solving computer network glitches at work via your remote home office desktop.

Please note: this post does not apply to those who do not experience snowfalls. Nor does it apply to those who use human-powered shovels.

If you use a snowblower, you know you should first shovel down the middle of your driveway, right?

No matter where we begin our task, some of the snow—maybe most of it—will fall short, on as-yet-un-shoveled portions of our driveway, particularly if we have an economy model costing a mere several hundred dollars—which still doesn’t fit in the garage unless you collapse the handle, a nuisance on the coldest days when shoveling is most urgently required.

But if we drive our snowblower down the middle first, and work our way outwards towards the driveway’s edges, at least we’re not blowing snow on areas previously addressed.

Glad I thought of it. Actually, honestly, I’m glad my wife thought of it.