Dumb Ass, Don't Tell

"And it was only then that I worked out with Colin Powell this dumb-ass 'don't ask, don't tell' thing."

David Brooks calls this quote from Bill Clinton's recent Rolling Stone interview, "a classic act of Clintonism" showing how he adapts his tone and language to the audience. The only problem...

"Due to a transcription error, the words 'don't ask' were printed as 'dumb-ass' in our interview with President Clinton. We regret the error."

Never mind.

Squablack?

The other day at work my boss was preparing a talk for an important muckety-muck. He wanted to use a graph that had been prepared by somebody who has since left our organization. Unfortunately, the graph needed to be updated, so my boss was trying to do it by hand. This, as one might imagine, was causing a number of problems. I volunteered that I had the program that our now departed colleague had used to generate the graph, and I could update the program to produce a new graph.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, I was asked to make a number of other changes. "Can you make this line thicker?" Then, my boss complained that since the graph was color, it was coming out as gray on the black-and-white printer. "Fine," I said, "I'll change 'blue' and 'red' to 'black' everywhere." So I did a search-and-replace. (Fans of vi will recognize the %s/red/black/g command.)

I sent off the new version of the graph to him, and he finally seemed satisified. About an hour later, I got a call from him asking why the work "squablack" was on the graph.

Beware search-and-replace.

High Standards

A Washingtonpost.com article about standardized testing in Maryland schools contained this gem:

Despite the slight gains, almost half of the state's elementary and middle schools performed below average, a cause for concern among education officials...

Viewer Mail

Happy Thanksgiving.

I don't get as many e-mails about the weblog as I had expected, but I got a couple earlier this week.

A Trevor Bryan wrote to inform me that, "lisa bangerts from mansfeild nottingam not manchester". Good to know. Who's Lisa Bangert again? Oh, yeah, she's the Page 3 girl I mentioned in my '93 Britain diary. Glad to know she's acquiring a fan base.

I also got a note from someone at Tharsis Books in response to my review of Martian Race. They plugged As It Is On Mars, which they appear to publish, and Mars Crossing.

Finally, words of praise from a fan:

Pal, I had a read through your Android's dungeon today. That's
hilarious.

The Aztek

I was in Minnesota earlier this week. My rental car was a Pontiac Sunfire -- an adequate compact car. A co-worker of mine, however, belonged to Avis Preferred. Apparently, in addition to allowing you to skip the rental counter, this program will give you a free one-size upgrade on your rental. So my Sunfire would have been upgraded to a mid-sized car, a mid-sized car would be upgraded to a full-sized sedan, and my co-worker's full-sized reservation was upgraded to...an SUV.

Pretty cool, right? I mean, better than the dorky rental cars we get most of the time. Wrong. Avis provided him with a Pontiac Aztek...truly the Pontiac of SUVs. I don't know if the pictures there truly capture the awfulness of the design. (Although the misspelled name certainly does.) Imagine a circa 1990 Honda Civic hatchback on steroids. Imagine an armored personnel carrier with less of a sense of style.

He complained that as he was driving it around, he could see people in other vehicles pointing and laughing at his car. The worst, he said, was when a woman driving a UPS truck laughed at his mode of transportation.

You know, I like the idea of skipping the rental counter, so I'm going to try to sing up for Avis Preferred. But I think I'll try to make sure I never have a full-sized car reserved for me.

Remove Fork, Insert Foot in Mouth

In an earlier weblog entry, I predicted a Gore victory in this month's elections and refered to a William Saletan article in Slate. Well, he's written another article explaining his errors. I was still holding out hope that I could say "told you so" if Gore still pulls it out, but even then I'd have egg on my face.

OK, so why was I wrong? Well, you can look at Saletan's article for some of the explanation. As for my additional insight -- Bush's a jerk -- I neglected another factor. Gore's a jerk. But he's my kind of jerk.

When I was 14, I was on a TV quiz show called "It's Academic". One of my teammates buzzed in without knowing the answer. I glared at him to make sure everybody knew he was the bozo who had rung in. This is exactly the kind of pompous behavior the nation came to expect from Al Gore. (I, on the other hand, have matured since then.) I guess I had a blind spot because I thought Bush deserved to be shown up. I didn't realize that -- compared to frat boys -- American can't stand "smarty-pants".

So can Gore still win? My thought is that he has a decent chance in the hand recounts. He's only down by about 300 votes in Florida. Given how much that dropped from the initial count, and given how prone to error these ballots seem, I think it's very plausible he could pick those up if things were counted more carefully. Bush, on the other hand, wants to stop the hand recounts. I mean I guess I understand that -- it's like a football team running out the clock when they're ahead. But how is he going to sell this to the public? "I don't want a more accurate count 'cause it'll take longer." Maybe he'll wake up and realize he looks bad -- just like he stopped demanding Gore concede before the recount.

Speaking of looking bad, I'm afraid that Gore will have to drop the Palm Beach bad ballot challenge. Yes, it stinks. Yes, it probably cost Gore the election. But there's no realistic way to turn the clock back. And if they somehow manage to do that, it could open up all sorts of unpleasant challenges in other states. What's going on now is reasonable -- but I don't want to see this tied up in court for months. Hopefully this will at least throw the spotlight onto usability issues related to ballots. Yes, it's obvious to me how to fill out that ballot. No, it wasn't obvious to enough people. Let's make it more obvious.

Search Engine Madness

Inspired by West Coast Girl, I present my "Search Engine Outtakes". (All searches on Google unless otherwise mentioned):

• Android's Dungeon -- #1 !
  
• Southwark colleage -- #1 (oops)
  
• boy-in-the-bubble disease -- #4
  
• android sketches -- #12
  
• Paul Simon's Graceland -- #50
  
• dancing chicken carcass -- #16
  
• Gibbs Lisa -- #16
  
• android -- #14
  
• Jaye P. Morgan gong show -- #17 (Northern Light)
  

Haircut

I got my hair cut today.

While I was trying to decipher what the guy cutting my hair was saying about the Redskins (he mumbles, and speaks with a Cuban accent), I heard the woman cutting hair next to me say something to her client like, "And that converts it back to decimal." After more discussion of the merits of Brad Johnson vs. Daunte Culpepper, I decided to listen in on the conversation taking place to my left. I heard the guy getting his hair cut say, "So 127 is localhost?" His sylist said, "Yeah," and then proceeded to go into a discourse on routers that went over my head. It was completely surreal. It was like I had been transported into some sort of .com commercial. I'm not sure what the tag line would be -- "Feel like everyone's getting in on the Internet economy but you?" or "Where do you go for your technical information?"

I briefly considered getting her to cut my hair instead because -- I mean, how cool is she? But then I realized that I was confusing two totally different skill sets, and I was really there to get a good haircut. Which I did.

I Feel Your Pain, Al...

"And the awful truth is that America doesn't like knowledgeable, well-educated white guys who preen visibly over their grasp of detail. If it did, Al Gore wouldn't be fighting for his political life."
--Marjorie Williams, The Breakfast Club, Slate

Why Me?

On my recent flight to Chicago, the woman in the adjacent seat woke me up to ask me to hand her my copy of the in-flight magazine. I was so stunned, all I managed was to be as surly as possible while handing it to her.

I used to be scared of 8th grade girls, too..

This made me laugh.

"Speaking inside a middle-school gymnasium in the Chicago suburbs today, George Bush tried out what seemed a clever new way to contrast his proposal for "tax relief" with Al Gore's. The distinction collapsed, however, under tough questioning from a girl in the eighth grade."
--Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Read the whole article here.

HmMm...

"After many false starts and delays for reasons beyond telling, there is now a Mensa SIG^* for prisoners: Mprisoned."
--Mensa Bulletin, October 2000, p.5

^*Special Interest Group

Why Service Stinks

''We're just putting more of our energies into rewarding our best customers.''
--American Airlines

Business Week has written an article addressing the topic of why customer service has gone downhill in recent years. I've felt that this was because the cost of providing it has gone up (or at least, hasn't gotten cheaper as fast as other things). But this has some good points about market segmentation I hadn't taken into account.

The first part of the article paints a bleak picture of a world where only the wealthy get good customer service. But continuing on, there are some bright points worth noticing. First of all, "Thanks to the Internet, for example, consumers have far better tools to conveniently serve themselves." I get far better customer service from Amazon than I've gotten through most off-line bookstores, all without interacting with a human being. And don't get me started on bad travel agent stories.

But the most interesting part is the admission that companies may not be doing such a great job in their market segmenting. "The problem, of course, is that what someone spends today is not always a good predictor of what they'll spend tomorrow." Nationsbank (now Bank of America) doesn't have me as a customer any more partly because of how they treated me when all I had to deposit was my grad school salary. But I think the best hope may be embodied in this sentence: "In the future, therefore, the service divide may become much more transparent." Somehow, it's not so much lack of service that's annoying -- it's bad service. If companies admitted, "Hey, you're on your own," we might all be a little happier.

Name changed to protect the clueless

From: Xxxxxxxx@aol.com
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 19:34:20 EDT
Subject: JUST CHECKING IN
To: xxxxxxxx@yahoo.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 117
Content-Length: 588



I GOT YOUR ADDRESS FROM YOUR MOTHER. IWANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE
GONINGTO VOTE FOR GEORGE. I HAVENT SEEN MIKE LATELY TO TALK HIN INTO VOTEING
FOR GEORGE, I KNOW IT WOULD BE A WASTE OF TIME, BUT IT WOULD BE FUN. WELL HOW
IS LIFE IN THE NORTHWEST? I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB, HOW IS
IT COMING? I HAVE A FRIEND WHO RETIRED FROM ONE OF THE PHONE CO. IN DALLAS,
I'LL GIVE HIM A CALL AND SEE IF HE CAN BE ANY HELP. SEND ME A OF YOUR RES..
HOW ARE THE KIDDS, AND OF COURSE THEBOSS? WE ARE ALL DONING FINE AND
THEWEATHER IS COOLING OFF AS YOU CAN SEE MY TYPING LACKS.

Rocknrace

Today I woke up at around 8:30. Last Sunday, it was a different story. Up at 5:30, out of the house by 7. I was off to the Rock 'n Race. The goal of the Rock 'n Race was to raise money for and awareness of colon cancer. I must admit, though, it was the prospect of seeing Paul Simon at the post-walk concert that drew me in. That, and the 5K walk. I needed the exercise. In fact, my joke was that while everyone else was walking to fight colon cancer, I was walking to fight heart disease.

As the beginnning of the race approached, I joined the mob at the starting line. Looking around, everybody else had their number pinned to their shirt, like I did. But many people had placards pinned on their backs. "I am participating in memory of..." "Mom"..."Uncle Joe"..."Grandpa" Wow. That really got to me. Eventually I looked around and saw that some of the placards said, "I am participating in support of..." That made me feel somewhat better. Of course, eventually I noticed someone whose placard ended "...myself." Wow, and I was just out for a walk.

Then Katie Couric fired the starting airhorn and we were off. Shuffling very, very slowly. Was the whole walk going to be this slow? No, it turned out, it was just as we were passing by Katie Couric, and everybody strained to get a look, or a picture or an autograph. Once past her, the pack spread out to a reasonable pace, it was time for a nice walk around DC. We walked to Union Station, then swung back and walked up and down the mall. Beautiful day, nice and invigorating.

Then it was back to plop down on the mall for the entertainment portion. I munched on the breakfast provided for me. (Hey, between that and the t-shirt, I hope they saved some money out of my registration fee to fight colon cancer.) I listened to the Max Weinberg Seven and profiles of people who had survived colon cancer...and those who had lost loved ones to the disease. Again, pretty moving. And I should mention, it's worth reading up about colon cancer. Something like 90% of all cases are cureable if caught early enough, so if you're at risk, it's really worth it to get checked out. Please.

After that, by 11, it was time for the main attraction...Paul Simon. This summer I went through my entire CD collection and listened to all of the CDs. I realized how great Paul Simon was. Wow; the guy put out wonderful music from his work with Garfunkel in the '60s until 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints. (I wasn't familiar with the Capeman, and I don't have his new album yet.) And here was a chance to see a living legend for far less than a concert ticket. And get a free t-shirt! And fight colon cancer! How could I pass this up?

Anyway, it was a really nice experience. For an hour-long concert, he played quite a number of songs from Graceland...4, I believe -- Boy in the Bubble, Graceland, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and You Can Call Me Al. He also did Bridge over Troubled Water, a very different version of Kodachrome, The Boxer and three songs from the new album. His encore was Late in the Evening.

As I shuffled off to the Metro to get back home in time for the Redskins game, I was pretty darn happy with what I had gotten accomplished by noon that day. Today, I'll have to settle for writing this as my accomplishment.

England Pictures

I've uploaded pictures from my recent England trip here.

George Hits Japan

And now for the final entry in the George Trilogy, as our hero arrives in Tokyo...

I can't remember the last time I was doing something peaceful like getting off an airplane that I got shoved so many times. Then the cab ride from the airport to the hotel was damn expensive and the parts of the city that we drove through didn't look like a place worth driving through. But things get worse...

The meter on the taxi is ticking away, the city is just a mass of concrete with no style at all, and we finally get cleaned out of cash when we get dropped off, and the ride cost us 25000 yen. 25000 yen is roughly equivalent to 250 dollars. The hotel looked ok from the outside, but it had all the signs of being a low budget place to stay. There was no driveway to the main lobby, no doorman, and no bell boy to tote the luggage upstairs for us. All of these things were standards on my previous trips for this company. At check in we learned that the front desk staff doesn't speak good English, and you guessed it, we don't speak good Japanese. We get checked in after a while and head upstairs. The room looks like a jail cell. Very small box of a room with a crapper that spit at me when I went to use it. When I got into bed I found that the pillow must be stuffed with beans, and then the whole thing smelled of cigarette smoke. Needless to say we moved to a better hotel the next day. This one had all the features that I expect to have on business trips.

Saturday, without checking out the weather we joined a bus tour to Mt. Fuji. Along the road it started to rain pretty hard. No problem, it will probably blow over. No such luck, we get there in a serious rain. No problem, I've been wet before. Boy did I get wet, and although I was standing on it, I never actually saw it. The clouds were so low you could see about 20 feet in front of you. The next stop was lunch. They took us to one of the traditional places where you sit on a mat on the floor and cram you legs under the table. It was ok, but being far from decent plumbing I wasn't going to take any risks and didn't eat much of it. After that we went to The Valley of Big Hell. This is where an ancient volcano had collapsed upon itself and now it smokes and bubbles up hat springs of water high in sulfur. Just in time to hike around here the rain started to come down like crazy and we got soaked through and through. The thing to do here is hike up a
bit to this shack that boils eggs in the hot spring water and eat one. Supposedly it gives you seven extra years to live. They looked pretty bad but tasted like normal eggs. The trip back to Tokyo was on the bullet train. I was a bit disappointed with its speed because it didn't feel like it was going fast, but it shortened a 3 hour drive into 36 minutes. Not too bad. We had to walk back to the hotel from the subway station that evening. You guessed it, raining even harder now. Joining the rain were high winds and lightning. We looked like we had been through hell when we got to the hotel.

Sunday I found out why the weather just got worse as the day went on. Typhoon #17 approached Tokyo on Saturday and passed by just to the east on Sunday. Sunday was boring as a result of the weather. I did the next best thing and hung out in the bar.

George and the Singapore Sling

The second of three installments from my friend George...

A great thing happened the same day I sent my last report. It was my last
night in Singapore and I still had not been to the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel
for my Singapore Sling. Now, for all of you who don't know the importance
of Raffles (I was one before heading on this trip), The Long Bar at this
hotel is where the Singapore Sling was invented. Being here for so many
days and not having one was eating at my conscience. So after work off we
went. A pretty good drink too. Didn't taste too fruity, and packed a
decent punch. A few went down and the guy I'm travelling with got a bit
tipsy. Next thing I notice is this bar menu telling me that the kitchen is
about to close and lo and behold they have hamburgers for $13 and it costs
an additional $1 for cheese and an additional $1 for bacon. Hell with it
all, I want two with both cheese and bacon. The tasted good and were a good
size so I didn't mind spending that much.

Anyway, we had to leave the hotel at 4 AM to get to the airport for our
flight to Tokyo so I got loaded on Singapore Slings and stayed up all night.
Singapore is a nice place, and I finally felt satisfied with my stay there.
I would go back if anyone comes up with a reason.

George in Kuala Lumpur

Well, I've run out of England stories. For your vicarious traveling pleasure, however, George has agreed to let me post his Tales of the Mysterious East. Today: Kuala Lumpur.

Greetings from the other side of the world. Everything is going along mostly on schedule down here. We have made it past Kuala Lumpur and are pretty much finished with Singapore now.

We only had one day free in KL and pretty much got lost walking around the city. We walked over to the Petronas Twin Tower (tallest building in the world), and then proceeded to get lost in interesting parts of the city. Not necessarily parts we wanted to see, but definitely educational. I don't think I had ever seen so many chickens running around in a city before. Malaysia appeared to be a country desperately trying to not be third world, but at the same time definitely is third world.

Singapore though is completely modern. Heavily influenced by the Chinese, and somewhat enjoyable. For a place as small as it is, there seems to be a lot to do. Just don't go to the beach expecting to see Singaporean babes in bikinis. For some reason they wear more clothes to the beach then they do to go shopping. It's been fun though.

The food is killing me though. I'd had enough of oriental foods before I got off the plane in KL. By the time I reached KL I had endured two days of nothing but curried chicken or Chinese food of some sort. Last night we attempted to eat hamburgers, but even these were Japanese style with some kind of onion/tomato/gross stuff all over it. When this trip is done I might not eat Oriental for a few years.

Who Won the Debate?

I watched the presidential debate last night. I admit, I thought Gore won, and Bush looked out of his depth. But then, I went in with that expectation. So I turned to the commentariant to tell me what the "consensus opinion" was. In Slate, Jacob Weisberg explained that "Bush got his clock cleaned." So I was right. And in Salon, Andrew Sullivan concludes, "It was a knockout." For Bush. Hmm. So maybe this debate just did confirm whatever expectation people went in with.

Here's what confirmed mine. After Bush suggested getting the Russians to mediate in Yugoslavia, the following exchange ensued.

GORE: ...But I think we need to be very careful in the present
situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in
mediating.

BUSH: Well, obviously we wouldn't use the Russians if they didn't
agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.

GORE: Well, they don't.

The "Well, they don't," just had this air of, "Is it too much to ask you to pay attention?" It cracked me up.