So for a second I wondered if my aunt had gotten malware on her phone or something. I sent back a message asking if she needed both our email addresses or just mine, along with a comment about our weather and asking how hers was. My intent was to make sure that she had meant to send me that message before I did anything else. When she answered she said never mind, she had found the information.
Continue reading I don’t mean to be a jerk, part 1
When the iPhone was first officially announced (in 2007), I grumbled a lot. Some of my friends took issue with my grumbling, and I had to explain that I wasn’t angry at Apple, nor was I saying the iPhone was a bad idea. I was irritated at a lot of the technical press who were elaborating (incorrectly) on some parts of the news. And I was angry at the executives and processes at the company that owned my employer at the time, and another company that we were working with on a joint project.
I was angry because if they hadn’t thrown so many obstacles in our way, a phone we had been working on for a few years would have been released before the iPhone. Don’t take me wrong, the iPhone would have still leapfrogged over us, but if we’d released it when originally planned, we would have been just a competitor at a slight disadvantage. Because of the delays, the soonest we could possibly release it would make our independently developed product look like a quick attempt to copy some of the iPhone’s features.
But the story begins more than a decade earlier than that… Continue reading While we’re on the subject of smart phones…
“Oh! You work with computers?” or “You know about computers, right?”
In many ways this has gotten worse as computers become more ubiquitous.
The person most likely to ask this question is someone for whom computers are little more than magic totems. They don’t understand them. To the extent they use them, it is like a ritual. The only way they know how to do anything is to try to repeat the exact steps they have done before. If the machine reacts in a different way than it did before, they don’t stop to try to figure out what they did wrong, they just try to find a way to perform the next step in the ritual.
So they will click Okay or Continue or “that little X in the corner that makes things go away” without reading the message, and keep clicking hoping to see the thing they were expecting to see. And thus install all sorts of malware and bloatware and other things that eventually make their computer unusable.
That’s if they have a computer and programs that they have been using.
Worse are the ones (such as the last person who spoke the dreaded sentence to me) who have bought a computer “because they found a good deal” or took a hand-me-down from a friend of a friend, and now they want just a “little” help to set it up.
The particular person who most recently did this is a musician who is a new neighbor. She stopped me as I was walking past her place and asked the dreaded question. She explained that she had become very intrigued at things that another musician she met was doing in GarageBand on his iPad. He had explained that he had “the same program” on his computer, where he could do a lot more.
So she had bought a computer at a yard sale, and wanted me to show her how to put Garage Band on it so she could do the things he did.
As you have probably guessed, if you know anything about computers yourself, the machine she’d picked up at the yard sale was a really, really old PC. Probably not even one capable of running Windows. This thing was a brand I haven’t seen in decades. It probably was manufactured in 1989 or 1990, I don’t know if it would actually turn on (I didn’t let her get me past the stage where she was pointing to it through the window where it was piled up on a table).
I told her that any computer that old was either dead, or nearly so. That it would be nearly impossible to find software that would run on it. That GarageBand runs on Macs and iPads, only. It doesn’t run on Windows, and it certainly won’t run on DOS.
“But he told me I didn’t need a fancy computer…”
I tried to explain that she could pick up inexpensive used iMacs at several places that would run GarageBand. “But it needs to be a computer no more than five or six years old.”
She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t go into her house to look at the computer she had “just to be sure.” It didn’t have to be GarageBand, she could probably find some other music software, she said.
I tried to explain again that electronics that old fail, and because they’re so old, no one makes the parts any more. Also, none of the inputs will match any modern microphones or other accessories she would need for recording her music. And most importantly, the only software it could run (if all its parts were still working) was very old stuff that would have been sold, back in the day, on floppy disks. “Twenty-five year old floppy disks don’t work. The magnetic particles flake off. The plastic disk part loses its flexibility and even cracks and breaks.”
“I don’t mind a few cracks…”
I thought I was going to scream.
And it’s not just people buying really old (ancient) computers.
My husband works at a place that refurbishes and resells oldish computers. He frequently tells stories of people that buy a computer, then bring it back (sometimes months after the warranty period) complaining about problems that are always user error. Or trying to install something that it isn’t intended to run.
My friend, Mark, told the story of a co-worker who kept complaining about her iPod, that it wouldn’t take music from the Apple store, it couldn’t sync with iTunes, and it wouldn’t work with any iPod accessories she picked up. When he got tired of hearing her complain and offered to take a look, the first thing he said was, “That’s not an iPod.”
It was some very cheap, no-name music player. And no matter how he tried to explain it, she didn’t understand how he could claim it wasn’t an iPod. And when she was willing to admit that maybe it wasn’t an actual Apple-manufactured iPod, she still didn’t understand why it wouldn’t work with iPod things.
I suggested he should have told her that it was like this: a horse and buggy can get you from place to place on public roads not unlike a car, but if you try to pour gasoline down the horse’s throat, you’re going to regret it.
I don’t know if he ever got to use that analogy.
Anytime a group of geeks get together, they wind up exchanging tech support horror stories. Whether one has ever worked in a tech support type job or not, if you are a geek, there have been times when you’ve wound up helping a non-geek out of a bad situation which they created for themselves through ignorance of, ultimately, basic laws of physics.
For instance, on the bus this last week, a couple with a baby in a stroller got on in front of me. It was clear they were both bus newbies. They headed back looking for some empty seats, with space for the stroller.
This was a double-length bus, which means it is a normal bus pulling, essentially, a second bus’s worth of seats. The two pieces are joined in the center by the section that bends and flexes. The walls are accordian-style rubber, the floor consists of a round section which turns as the front half of the bus goes around the corner, then starts to straighten again as the second half follows it around the corner.
They put the baby and the carriage right on the flex. A place which, as soon as the bus took a right turn, would cease to exist temporarily. Anything in that space would be crushed between a row of seats in the front half, and a single seat mounted on the rotating part of the floor.
Crushed.
So I quickly told them that that was the part of the bus that flexed, and it was not a good place to put a child. They moved back to a different spot.
A lot of people think of geeks as computer techs, but being a geek is about being fascinated with how things work. Whether it’s the mechanics of how a pair of connected vehicles behave going around a curve, or the physics of moving a heavy weight up on incline, or how electronic devices communicate with each other, it’s all a subset of “How does it work?”
In my early days in the tech industry, I worked at a small start up. My official title was a vague Coordinator position, what I actually did was supervise the production and shipping department, write and design all the technical documentation, test some of the hardware and software, help the less tech-savvy employees with computer problems, and then fill in anywhere else as needed. Which included one day a week taking tech support calls from customers while the tech support department had their weekly meeting and training session.
We produced voice messaging/auto attendent systems back at a time when most offices still had typewriters rather than desktop computers. Our systems, which ran on a dedicated desktop computer running DOS (this was years before Windows existed), would connect to a small-to-medium company’s internal phone system in various ways. And we had a lot of tech support horror stories from our customers.
There was the customer who kept turning off the “fan box” because he didn’t think the room was too hot, and couldn’t figure out why the system stopped working. He kept forgetting that the biege-colored metal box that the “TV thing” sat on was the actual computer. And I hasten to explain that this guy was president of a company with a few hundred employees. He wasn’t the employee in charge of the equipment, he just had this bad habit of wandering around in the evening after most of his employees had left for the day, turning things off to save electricity.
But one of my favorites is about fundamental physics, though it didn’t seem like it at first.
A lot of those phone systems back then (and a lot today, because a lot of those medium-office size switches are simple enough electronic systems that they work just fine decades later) use a couple of serial (RS-232) ports for programming and data exchange. You’d plug dozens or more standard phone lines in to connect all the phones, but for other things you’d use the data port. They were originally designed for someone to hook up a dumb terminal or teletype to program and monitor the phone system, because this was back when what laptops did exist often cost more than a relatively new car.
Our system could connect to those ports as well as a couple of phone ports to do all the call transferring and message taking and so forth. But often it wasn’t convenient or even possible to set up the computer running our software right next to the switch. So we recommended a particular 100-foot long RS-232 cable in case the systems had to be really far apart and you needed to run the cable around something.
The one we recommended had really good, clean signal because the individual wires were thicker than in cheap cables (wider diameter wire means lower resistance to electrical signal, for one thing), with really thick, durable insulation, so the cable wouldn’t be ruined simply by being stepped on a few times.
We strongly suggested that the systems be set up as close together as they could and to use a shorter cable, just because it was easier.
We had an experienced dealer who had sold one of our systems in a larger office with one of these systems that needed the serial connector, and they had ordered one of the 100-foot cables, because they thought they would need it. They set everything up, but when they were testing the system, things weren’t working right, and it was doing it in an inconsistent way.
The cable used had 25-pin connectors, whereas the phone system used 9-pin, but adaptors for that were usually reliable. The computer had one of each type, for a while we thought they had enabled the wrong port on the computer. Ports were tested, software was re-installed, the whole configuration process was gone through step-by-step. They finally decided that the cable was the problem, because they could make everything work with an 8-foot cable they happened to have, but the shorter cable was stretched tight across the room, right where people needed to walk, so they couldn’t use that one.
Because we had sold them the long cable, we wound up sending them a new one.
A different dealer technician went back to the site with the new cable a few days later. He walked into the room, and immediately knew what the problem was.
Whereas the 8-foot cable had been too short, the 100-foot cable was too long. So when they had installed the system, the other technician had carefully coiled up the extra 50-feet of cable, secured the coil with twist ties, and set the coiled middle part of the cable on a very large, humming box that was midway between the two system.
The very large box had “Danger! High Voltage!” labels on all sides. It was a big transformer for power for the entire building. And the technician had set a multiple-wound cable that was supposed to be carrying a low-voltage data signal, right on top of it.
For those that don’t know: a large electrical device such as a transformer will generate a cycling magnetic field. If you move a metal coil through a magnetic field, the field will induce electrical currents into the coil. If you place a stationary coil into a cycling magnetic field, the same thing happens.
Setting the coiled excess cable on the transformer sent an extra current into the cable, messing up the signal.
It would be like two people were trying to have a quiet, complex conversation, while four rock bands and a jet engine are pumping out all the noise the can, right on top of them.
I understand after the tech explained it, they then had to explain that, no, you couldn’t just open the transformer and remove the magnets, because there weren’t any magnets. The magnetic field is generated by the electricity. “But I thought you said the magnets made electricity?” Which apparently turned into something resembling the old Who’s On First Routine.
A long, long time ago I was invited to take part in a meta-writing and meta-publishing project. This was before more people knew what the internet was. It was called an APA, for Amateur Publishing Association. There were tons of them dedicated to lots of different topics.
Everything was conducted via physical mail. At regular intervals you would send in your contribution, which was a minimum number of pages of writing (or writing and art) in which you would talk about your most recent challenges or successes in your writing and publishing projects, or ask questions, and respond to things the other contributors had sent in previously.
That sort of communication tends to happen on forums and blogs, now. Not unlike blogs, each person’s contribution tended to have its own personality. Rather than just call your contribution “Gene’s pages” or “Pages from Margaret” people often named their section, as if it were a syndicated column or a separate publication. My pages in this particular project were called “From the Desk of the Script Doctor.”
“Script doctor” comes from the movie and theatre industry. A script doctor or script consultant is a writer who is brought in to rewrite an existing script. Sometimes they call it “polishing.” Usually the script doctor is just fixing problems with structure, or pacing, or dialog before a script goes into production. Usually the script doctor is a more experienced writer who has gotten a reputation for being good at significantly improving a script while staying true to the original spirit of the story.
As a fiction editor, that’s what I’m particularly good at. I’m horrible at copy editing. I read right through all sorts of typos without them bothering me, for instance. But figuring out where your characterization is going off the rails, or finding holes in your plot and suggesting fixes, and similar things, I’m really, really good at.
So I used that as the recurring name of my contributions in that APA. And when I was invited to join another writing APA, I used the same name over there. Years later, when I started blogging on LiveJournal, I used the name there, and so on.
When I first set up my twitter account, for the short bio I wrote something like, “A script doctor reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.”
My account all set up, I searched for and followed a few people. As most folks setting up a casual account do, I followed several real life friends that I knew were using Twitter. When I checked my account later, I wasn’t surprised to see that the friends had followed me back, along with one or two other friends whose accounts I hadn’t yet found.
The next day, there were a bunch of followers, almost none of whom I knew. The really odd thing was that they were mostly business accounts, mostly local, and all related to medical equipment or services. I clicked on one of the unfamiliar accounts that didn’t look like a business, and the bio had a URL for his private medical practice in a neighboring city. “That’s odd,” I thought.
The next day, the number of medically-related business or consultant accounts following me had doubled. And then I realized what was going on. Whoever was running these accounts was doing dumb searches on the keyword “doctor” and following every account that popped up.
I went through them all and blocked the ones whose streams consisted of nothing but advertisements for their business. Then I changed my bio to “A sentence wrangler reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.” I figured that would take care of the spammy medical-services related accounts, right?
As time went on I got a lot of the obvious spambots following me, as well as the slightly less obvious spamming accounts for businesses or services. Don’t get me wrong: not all business-related twitter accounts are spammy. But there are a lot out there where the person running it just doesn’t get it. They either never post anything at all, or they post virtually the same statement again and again with a link to their business web site or an article about some service they offer, or they post random quotations/words of wisdom with a link back to their company website.
I really crack up at that last one. There either must be a manual out there “Tweet Your Business for Dummies” that tells people to download a giant list of these quotations and several times a day copy one out of the list, then tweet it with your link.
But I digress.
All those other kinds of thinly disguised advertising accounts follow me, yes. However, even though all mention of my old “script doctor” joke had been removed from my bio and any other information I see on my account, it was still the case in the following months that about four out of every five of these spammy accounts that followed my account were a medical services-type business.
Even now, when my profile reads “A typographer and sentence wrangler writing, dabbling, publishing, and analyzing in Seattle”, and when I’ve replaced my avatar with a cartoon unicorn, they still come for me.
What’s happened is that these accounts aren’t being set up by someone who is doing a manual search of twitter bios. Instead, during that week or so that my bio had the phrase “script doctor” in it, some data aggregator recorded my account into a database, along with the keywords it was searching for that it found in my information. And now, I’m in that database as a doctor forever.
My day job(s) have included being responsible for managing documents or contents for about 25 years, now. I understand from personal experience that one of the least pleasant tasks is to go through older metadata and clean it up. For example, when we released that new product in 1990, all of the documents that went along with it were applicable. When we released a newer version later that year, several of the documents were replaced with newer versions, but several of the previous version’s docs didn’t need updating, so they weren’t marked as superseded. As time goes on and more products are added along with new versions of old products, and as the business grows and more employees come along, you keep adding docs and no one has time to go back to comprehensibly review all the older data on documents that no one has touched for years.
So I understand that I’m forever going to be listed in various lists—as companies share, acquire, or otherwise mix their data together—as a doctor. One wonders if there are also databases that list me as a unicorn, now.
Tempts me to find excuses to put other words in the bio. I’ve always liked the job title, “Emperor.” What do you think?
All: “Want a plane that loops the loop!”
Alvin: “I still want a hula hoop!”
All: “We can hardly stand the wait!
“Please, Christmas, don’t be late!”
Everyone likes something shiny and new, at least sometime. Everyone wants things that they like to remain comfortable and familiar. The struggle between these opposing and seemingly contradictory desires can be used to explain just about everything that happens in the world of consumer activity, particularly in the tech industry. Though sometimes it is a bit of a stretch.
When I switched back to Apple nearly four years ago (after my switch from Apple to PC back in the late 80s), I made my plans based on those decades of previous experience in the computer world. I knew, for instance, that I didn’t like doing a major upgrade of my personal desktop more often than every three years. Because in my experience, it usually took me about a year after switching out a machine to both get familiar with the new system, experiment with both new equipment and software, and to get everything the way I liked it. Having made that investment, I wanted to then enjoy the familiarity and predictability for a couple of years before contemplating the next switch.
My husband, on the other hand, starts getting itchy for a new system a bit over a year after getting the old one. He disagreed when I told him this. So, after we’d had this discussion a few times, I started putting labels on machines when we bought them, listing the exact date they were purchased. He would say, “It’s been over two years since we replaced that—” and I would show him the label indicating that it had only been fourteen months. He would frown and genuinely be surprised that it was only that long.
It was my reluctance to change out systems so often which I used to rationalize my decision to buy a Mac Pro tower for my desktop system. My other reasons are that while I don’t like to change the system out very often, I like having the option to upgrade monitors, hard disks, and other peripherals along the way, and the Pro tower is the Apple machine most suited to that task.
It was also fun to buy a machine with two four-core CPUs and all the other high-end options.
The truth is, I didn’t need all that power. Sure, because I have this bad habit of leaving open scores of documents in dozens of programs at the same time as I work on projects, and several of those programs will be resource hogs such as InDesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator (yes, always at the same time!), the extra computing power of the pro-level machine comes in handy.
Also, during the first couple years of the switch, I would more than occasionally have to fire up the virtual windows machine to access something from the clone of my old PC, or to use one of the programs that I hadn’t obtained a Mac-replacement for, yet. The extra power made it easier and faster to run a virtual machine within my Mac environment and move data back and forth between the two.
But, even with the massive memory upgrades, larger and faster hard disks, and improved video card I’ve installed, at not-quite four years old, it’s performance is not significantly better than my nearly new laptop. Its newer 2-physical cores multi-threading i7 processor can actually beat the tower’s 8-cores on some benchmarking tests.
The laptop’s close enough in power and so much more convenient to use anywhere I’m comfy, which means the vast majority of my work is done on it. The tower is used more as a support server than a workstation. I only do things on it when I really need both the big screen and the extra graphics oomph. Even the iPad is used for more serious writing than the tower.
So, on one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for the folks who are irritated that Apple hasn’t released a significant update to the tower in a few years. On the other hand, I seriously think that when I next update my laptop, I may find that it, a docking station, and some well-chosen peripherals will meet all my needs.
Though I do still hold out hope that Apple and others will leverage the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt connection to give us a way add additional CPU and gaphics processing power to any computer. Soon.
That would be even cooler than Alvin the Chipmunk’s hula hoop.
I’ve been working on computers for an incredibly long time.
My first computer was from before the era of floppy disks. Printers cost about the same as a four-bedroom house at the time, so it wasn’t a tool I used for writing. It was a toy.
My second computer could have a floppy drive added to it, but it loaded programs by plugging cartridges into a slot. Reasonably priced printers had come into existence, then, but they were dot matrix printers that produced very low resolution stuff.
My third computer had a floppy drive built in. At the time I bought it, the first consumer-priced 1 megabyte hard disks were just coming on the market. Yes, I said 1 MEGAbyte. And it wasn’t the first consumer-priced hard disk, it was the first that was that large. Two friends of mine who both worked in electronics stores got into an argument in which one claimed that no one would ever, ever need anything that big, the other claimed that lots of people would. They both thought I was insane for saying that anyone would ever need more.
Computers were still primitive, in other words.
Let me describe the process for spellchecking a document on that third computer:
1. Insert boot disk into floppy drive, turn on computer, wait for it to load the operating system from the disk (about one minute).
2. Remove the boot disk and insert the word processing program disk into the drive. Type some commands, wait for the program to open (another minute or two, depending).
3. Type a document. Pull out the program disk and insert a data disk. Save the document to the data disk.
4. Pull out the data disk. Insert the boot disk. Exit the word processing program. Wait a few seconds for the computer to verify that the boot disk was there.
5. Pull out the boot disk. Insert the spellchecking program disk one. Type a command. Wait for the disk to load the spell checking program (this wait was for about four minutes).
6. When prompted, pull out the spellchecking disk one, insert the data disk. Pick the document from a list displayed. Wait for the program to load the document.
7. When prompted, remove the data disk and re-insert the spellchecking disk one. Press a key. Wait for it to scan the document (this wait was for about two minutes).
8. The program then would begin showing you chunks of text with incorrect words highlighted, and offer you the option to leave it as is, or re-type it. It did not offer suggestions for how to spell it correctly. Press a key to go to the next word.
9. When it reached the end of the document, it would prompt you to remove spellchecking disk number one and reinsert your data disk. It would save the corrected document, then it would inform you that you had successfully spellchecked words beginning with letters from A-M. Would you like to spellcheck the same document for words beginning with letters from N-Z?
10. If you said Yes, it would prompt you to remove the data disk, and insert spellchecking disk two. Wait for it to load the second half of the spelling dictionary (this wait was for about three minutes).
11. When prompted, pull out the spellchecking disk two, insert the data disk, pick the document from the list (That’s right! It didn’t remember which document was already half-checked!). Wait for the program to load the document.
12. When prompted, remove the data disk and (this is the tricky bit!!!) re-insert spellchecking disk ONE. Not disk two, disk one. Watch it load something from disk one.
13. When prompted, remove spellchecking disk one and re-insert spellchecking disk TWO.
14. Repeat step 8.
15. Repeat step 9.
Now your document is mostly spell checked. I say mostly because, let’s say during the second half of the alphabet sweep it found the work “spplication.” And let’s say you realized that it was supposed to be “application” and you went in to correct the spelling, but you accidentally deleted both the s and the p, so what you typed in to replace “spplication” is “aplication.”
The half of the spellchecker that was running at that time doesn’t know how to spell any words beginning with a… or b, c, d, et cetera, through m, right?
It wouldn’t tell you that you had replaced one typo with another in that case. It was a rare case, but it could happen.
So for a small document of say a couple thousand words, spellchecking was a complicated procedure that took about 40 minutes, all told. And that was if you didn’t screw up and insert the wrong disk at any of the dozen-plus times that you had to insert and remove a disk. Depending on when you did that, sometimes it meant starting all over again.
A second floppy disk drive made that process considerably easier, as there was less swapping out of disks. Unfortunately, a second floppy drive cost almost as much as the original computer had, so I didn’t get around to buying a second drive for at least a year after getting the computer.
In order to use that computer, you had to understand a lot more about operating systems, computer logic, and the hardware than the typical user of modern computers. You had to be comfortable typing commands like EXEC APWTR2 to start a program. Or to format text by pressing the ESC key followed by another key in order to turn on Italics, then moving to the end of the word, press ESC and a different key to turn it off. And programs had no What-you-see-is-what-you-get mode. You had to just take it on faith that: “I read ♦IThe Hobbit♦N in fourth grade.” would print out as: I read The Hobbit in fourth grade.”
Very few people would put up with that. I well remember the strange looks I would get from people when I was trying to explain the process of just getting the program going and writing a simple paper. They would look at their familiar typewriter and tell me the computer seemed like a whole lot of fuss to do a very simple thing.
And that’s exactly how I find myself feeling sometimes when talking to people about some of their modern gadget and computer choices. “Yeah, I had to root the device and sideload some patches to get it to work.” Or “This open-source program does everything your page layout program does… except use real fonts, or allow you to actually layout text and pictures on the page without hacking some of the configuration files, inserting a lot of extra codes, and experimenting for about a half hour per page. It almost looks the same, see?”
I understand that they’re perfectly happy working that way. I understand that it meets their needs. I understand that they think their own time isn’t worth anything. I understand that producing something that looks like utter crap doesn’t bother them.
Those things are their choices to make, and I wouldn’t dream of forcing them to do otherwise.
Now, if they would only allow me to do the same. Because my time is very valuable, and I’d rather spend it producing something I love than trying to make a poorly designed and under-powered tool do it half-assed.
Font Folly 