Just waiting my turn for the microwave.When our microwave died late in February, it was a bit grumpy-inducing, but it wasn’t really a disaster. A microwave oven is a convenient appliance, and while my first reaction when Michael sent the text message that it seemed to be dead was annoyance, my second thought was that at least it wasn’t an important appliance, like the stove.
That was the thing: the stovetop and oven were still working just fine, and we have a nice toaster oven for those times you don’t want to heat up the entire oven just to cook one small thing, right?
In the three or four days that we didn’t have a functioning microwave, it seemed that I had a hundred moments when I wanted to use it—to heat up some leftovers, or to heat up a cup of coffee I’d let get cold, et cetera. Each time I would get a little more grumpy about not having the option I was used to. But what made me even more grumpy is the knowledge that it was really a minor inconvenience at most (not to mention a first world problem), and I shouldn’t have been letting it get to me like that.
While the latest statistics I can find indicate that an estimated 90% of U.S. households have microwave ovens, when I was growing up my family didn’t own one. For most of my teen years, the estimates are that only between 1% and 5% of households had them. I got by for years as a young adult without a microwave. I remember one time being appalled when I found out a friend who wasn’t that much younger than me had never cooked anything on a stove—because his family had owned a microwave oven for as long as he could remember. He was genuinely afraid to even try to heat up water on a stovetop.
While I had laughed and rolled my eyes back then, it was a little weird to catch myself reacting as if it was a great hardship to get by without a microwave for just a few days.
One of our neighbors had her microwave die this week. I happened by while she was unboxing the new microwave, and we got talking about our experiences. This woman used to run her own catering business, so she is no stranger to cooking, right? But she had the same sort of issues I did. Particularly because she lives alone, since retiring she’s gotten into the habit of doing virtually all of her cooking in the microwave. As she said, it seems a waste to heat up the whole oven for just one potato.
No one wants to become so dependent on something that we’re unable to function for a few days without it. Things happen, and we have to get by. Of course, I did get by. It was not a hardship, just an annoyance.
But while humans are tool-making animals, it’s important to remember that we’re also tool-using animals and social beings. An important part of our species’ survival traits is our ability to share knowledge. We don’t each of us have to re-invent everything. We can use what has been learned and made by others to learn and make new things.
Using technology doesn’t mean we’re helpless, it simply means that we stand on the shoulders of giants. And from there, we do what we can to make the world a better place, so that those who come after us start on our shoulders, and can reach heights we can only imagine.
An oldie, but a goodie by D.C. Simpson.So, Mozilla, the non-profit company that produces (among other things) the Firefox web browser, recently appointed a man as their new CEO who, a few years ago, donated the maximum amount allowed for individuals to the Proposition 8 campaign. And several developers, most of them gay married developers, have decided to boycott. Note, since the entire purpose of Proposition 8 was to take away the legal right to marry from an entire class of citizens, and since it won and did then remove those rights, one can understand the sentiment.
I’ve seen several people say it’s wrong to do this, because boycotts don’t accomplish much, it’s hypocritical of gay people to demand discrimination against others, and beside, a company isn’t legally allowed to make hiring decisions based on political affiliations.
Two of those statements are unequivocally false. And the third isn’t much better.
I’ll tackle the last one first: there is no federal law prohibiting private companies from hiring, firing, or promoting because of one’s political affiliations. There is a federal law against the government doing so, but no such federal law applying to corporations, non-profits, et cetera. Only a limited number of states have such laws applying to private employers.
Even then, most of the legal protections for employees’ political activities are fairly narrow: in five states it’s specifically only illegal for employers to post or announce that workers will be laid off or fired if a particular candidate is elected or fails to be elected. Only two states have a more generic ban against any attempts by an employer to coerce employees to vote one way or another. Several states (I could find five) have laws prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees for off-duty political activity, but most of those have exemptions that are broad enough that even a passing reference to their political opinions in the workplace is enough to qualify as political activity on-duty, and therefore subject to being fired. And, of course, one may recall the employer in 2004 who threatened to fire all the workers who had John Kerry bumper stickers on their cars. That was totally legal.
So, no, it would not be illegal for Mozilla’s board to decide not to hire this guy because he is known to have supported (and actively took part in enacting) a law that took away civil rights from a number of their own employees, vendors, et cetera.
Second, everyone over simplifies boycotts. They say a boycott doesn’t accomplish anything if the target doesn’t immediately reverse their position, for instance. It is true that the outright and instantaneous admission of wrongdoing and a change of policy is a very rare thing. But that doesn’t mean the boycotts accomplish nothing. The boycott of Florida orange juice in the 70s because the Florida Orange Commission’s spokesmodel, former beauty queen and singer Anita Bryant, had become prominently involved in a number of campaigns to pass anti-gay laws around the country, didn’t effect the outcome of the first several votes. However, the boycott got more coverage than Bryant’s speeches. And though the Florida Orange Commission never admitted that the boycott and negative publicity was the reason they significantly reduced Bryant’s sponsorship deals, it was clearly a factor.
Bryant had a difficult time getting any sponsorships after that, and went from donating her time and semi-famous face to the anti-gay cause to charging exorbitant fees to speak at churches and religious events about various moral issues. In other words, diverting money that might have been spent on more campaigns to take away our rights to trying to pay off Bryant’s enormous debts.
When the Coors Brewing Company starting routinely giving polygraph tests as part of the hiring process, and one of the questions was whether a person was gay, a boycott was called. The company never admitted when they dropped the questions for the test and added nondiscrimination language to their employee’s handbook that that was the reason why. It was decades later, when Scott Coors, an openly gay member of the family that still controlled the company, was unable to buy a Coors beer at a gay bar in San Francisco (because the Coors family charity foundation had continued to donate huge amounts to anti-gay causes), that we learned that internally the leaders of the company had been very aware of the boycott and specifically the publicity. On the other hand, Scott’s surprise indicated that the boycott’s effectiveness had sufficiently diminished when the media stopped paying attention (which they had done as soon as the company changed its anti-gay hiring practices). The company had been well aware of it, and had been trying various ways over all that time to convince gay bar owners that the foundations activities had nothing to do with them.
A boycott’s publicity doesn’t just negatively affect a company, a boycott serves as a way to raise awareness within the community as to who some of the culprits out to hurt us are. Talking about and debating the boycott within the community and with allies gets more people talking about the situation.
Boycotts are also personal statements. I can decide that I don’t want to spend money supporting someone who promoted discrimination against me. Whether they are hurt by it or not isn’t always the point.
Don’t forget, every time the queer community even hints at a boycott, the right wingnuts all start screaming that boycotting is homofascist intimidation, intolerance, and bullying. They also insist that calling a boycott tramples their religious liberty and right to free speech. If boycotts didn’t accomplish anything, why do the wingnuts get so upset?
Third, we throw around the word discrimination without qualifying the difference between fair and unfair discrimination. To discriminate is to draw a distinction between things. When we decide not to hire a person because they have no experience applicable to the job, we have made a distinction between candidates, but we have done so in an area that is pertinent to the job. Everyone agrees that that’s fair. If we decide not to hire someone because of the church they belong to, most people would agree that (unless you are a church yourself hiring a pastor) that’s not pertinent to the job, and isn’t a fair distinction to draw.
A CEO is not just a manager, they serve as a spokesperson for the company. You want a CEO to represent a company’s values to current and potential customers, as well as to vendors, partners, and even the employees within a company. So what sort of value is represented by a CEO who actively worked to take away civil rights from his fellow citizens? And make no mistake: this isn’t just a privately held belief. A privately held belief means you keep it to yourself, voting in the privacy of the ballot booth, and never say anything to anyone except possibly close personal friends.
When you donate the maximum amount of money allowed under the law for an individual to donate, you have become an active participant in the political process. In the case of Proposition 8, it was an extremely focused effort. The only effect was to target a specific group of people and strip them of a right to marry that they had recently won. To strip them of the other 1000 federal rights that come with marriage and which are not available by any other means. To strip them of the right to designate their partner as the person to make medical decisions if they are incapacitated, to strip them of community property rights, to strip their children of the rights that come from having both parents legally acknowledges as guardians, et cetera, et cetera.
Supporting Proposition 8 literally and unequivocally makes him an oppressor.
And the real problem here isn’t that he supported this thing a few years ago that has since been overturned. The problem is that he has not disavowed his position. He said he didn’t want to talk about it at the press event, and then he talked about it for quite a long time before finally saying that, of course he will abide by the law. And did he mention that the company has a nondiscrimination policy?
Sure, the company has a right to hire him if they want. But all of the rest of us, especially their vendors and partners and customers who happen to be members of the community which was the victim of that attempt at oppression, has a right to tell the board of directors that selecting this man tells us that we aren’t part of their values. It tells their gay and lesbian employees that respecting their rights isn’t part of their values.
And that sure as hell is pertinent to that job.
This photo of Edith Windsor greeting the crowd of supporters after stepping out of the Supreme Court building one year ago today after the court heard arguments in her case against the Defense of Marriage Act adorned the cover of Pride Magazine.It’s true that Prop 8 was overturned. In fact, exactly one year ago today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on challenges to Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. And eventually the court overturned a crucial section of DOMA, and let stand the lower court ruling declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional (without actually declaring it unconstitutional themselves). It can be argued that we won. It has certainly been argued that we should be gracious winners. But we have only won the last few skirmishes, we haven’t won the war, yet. Remember: we haven’t won until every queer person has full equality before the law. Everywhere. Not just marriage rights in some states (with other people having the right to discriminate against us because of the gender of our spouse), but all rights, everywhere.
Instead of having to argue about one of the oppressors who tried to take rights away from some of us (and seems to still wish he could keep the rest of us from getting them) we ought to be hailing our heroes. Such as Edith Windsor, who went to court to defend her right to inherit property from the woman she legally married in one of the few jurisdictions that allowed it back then, and eventually fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. Which got us last summer’s ruling that is beginning to look like the tipping point that may eventually bring marriage equality to every state.
What big teeth I have.Several weeks before Christmas, my aunt sent me an oddly worded text message, “Hi. I need your email so I can send you and mike somewhat of an informative form to fill out and send back please.” It had that stilted construction that makes you think of someone who is not a native english speaker using something like google translate to compose a message, almost, right? Like from a phishing attack.
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→
My first iPod was pink.I was 19 years old when I got my first Walkman. It played cassettes, which while more compact than vinyl LPs (which was the dominant format for commercially purchased music at the time), they were large enough that carrying around more than a few albums worth of songs could be a bit awkward. So I usually had only one or two tapes with me at any time, and therefore tended to listen to the same album over and over again throughout a day.
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.
“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.
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 lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking.
But to folks like me? Gay men who no longer can be described as “young” by any definition? It’s amazing. I literally never believed I would see the day when someone would so casually create a show about them self that included the phrase “Your Favorite Gay Marine.”
The fact that Russ and Matt are just two adorable young guys in love, who just happen to both be in the Marines, and happen to be in love with each other, and how matter-of-fact they can be in this very public way is just mind-boggling for an old fart like me:
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?
My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely slightly more rapid bus.
They achieve the faster trips through several clever tricks, one of which is having pay stations at several of the bus stop (it’s supposed to be at every bus stop, but they haven’t gotten them all installed yet), so people who have bus passes can just board through any of the three doors on the bus without waiting in line behind the people paying cash. It really does make loading the bus go much faster.
As I was taking a seat on one bus recently, a lady in a nearby seat was ranting to the guy next to her about how the new buses must be rampant with cheating. “Us honest folks are paying for the other riders! Look! Look! How can they tell which people have actually paid before getting on! It’s such a waste!”
Since I could hear her clearly through my headphones, I knew she was talking very loudly, so I didn’t feel that this counted as a private conversation. I leaned forward and said, “Random fare inspections.”
She looked utterly shocked that a stranger would actually talk to her, though the guy next to her just grinned and said, “See, he’s got your answer.”
She blinked and said, “What?”
“They have guys that come on board with a scanner and ask to see everyone’s card or transfer. I’ve had it happen several times. They can scan your card and verify that you paid. So cheaters get caught.”
She nodded. Then she said, “Wow. Don’t you think Seattle is getting too Big Brother? I mean, scanning your card…”
Just a second before she was angry because she thought people were taking advantage of the public transit she was paying for. But rather than get into an argument with a stranger (I really had just been trying to be informative), I said, “Oh, no! Not at all!” And pulled my headphones back up onto my ears.
She shook her head, said, “You don’t?” Then turned to the guy and went back to talking. But I couldn’t help but notice that she’d switched to an indoor voice. So I guess my attempt to enlighten had at least made her think about how loudly she was talking.
I understand that relying on an honor system means that some people will cheat. On the other hand, I have seen Fare Officers remove someone who hadn’t paid from the bus. I know that when they do that they write you a ticket and it’s handled like a traffic fine. So there is a penalty that cheaters risk facing.
I’m sure some cheating still happens, but similar systems in other transit systems collect an awful lot of fees matching fairly closely to ridership numbers gathered other ways, so the honor system isn’t a failure. And mathematic models have shown that the savings from the shorter trip times more than make up for the theoretical revenues lost through uncaught cheaters.
And in what way is verifying that passengers on the bus have paid through random sweeps “being Big Brother”? She had just been angrily ranting about how “they” have instituted a system that she thought wasted tax dollars because “they” weren’t making absolutely certain that each and every passenger had paid. “They” should do better!
It’s like the people who scream about “guv’ment regulations” hindering business, who then scream “how can they let people sell that?” if there is a salmonella outbreak and their favorite food is being recalled.
Confirming that someone has paid for the bus ride they are currently taking hardly counts as “Big Brother.” And if you think it does, I shudder to think what sort of aneurism you’ll have if I explain to you precisely how cellphone companies figure out which signals are coming from authorized phones. Or how quickly your position can be pinpointed, even on old, cheap phones that know nothing about GPS. Hint: In order to get your 9-1-1 call to a local emergency operator, they have to be able to figure out your position before you hear their first ring.
Font Folly 