It's the keyboard stupid

I used to work for an embedded operating system company who's marketing slogan was briefly "It's the tools stupid", meaning it wasn't the core product that was holding up the sales, it was the tools to use the product that were the problem. The exact same thing applies to mobile applications on phones and mobile data networks. Tiny Keyboards Biggest Obstacle for Handheld Users spells out the obvious - the tiny keyboard with non-intuitive data entry is the biggest hurdle to mobile data access. Just think about it, most people have enough problems with a regular keyboard, only the youngest users are able "text" on a numeric keypad with their eyes closed.

I find it funny that it takes a study to reveal this information - its been obvious to me since I started trying to build mobile apps for devices back in 1999. Is it any wonder that even today the mobile voice market is $98 billion a year, but the mobile data market is a paultry $4 billion?

DreamHost goes unlimited - share the love

I've been pretty happy with my DreamHost hosting so far. There was one recent hiccup during the LA power outage which was a learning experience for them, but I've seen my own ISP go through the same deal - backups fail in new and interesting ways each time they are pulled into service. Apart from that the service and features have been very good.

The transfer bandwidth is at 120GB per month - about 100 times what I've managed to use so far! Even better they add an extra 1GB per week I have service. They have also doubled the disk storage I have available to 4.8GB and are adding 50MB a week to it. After a year my account limits will be looking pretty phat.

But amazingly they have just started offering of an unlimited number of domains per account compared to a previous limit of three (which was already a good deal). Being a person with a ton of domain names registered I can now actually migrate them all to one place and because the storage and bandwidth limits are so generous I wont have any problems at all. I can even start hosting friends domains for free if I want.

So, if you are interested go check DreamHost and if you want to get 50% or $50 off your plan (the lessor of) use the discount coupon code TECHTIME50. All their packages have a 97 day money back guarantee which they are extremely good about honoring.

Share and enjoy.

How shall I reboot you? Let me count the ways

Yesterday I had to reinstall Windows XP Home from scratch on a friends laptop. The laptop had caught a virus or something and after cleaning it off it seems that Internet Explorer was broken. Windows update just wouldn't work generating a blank page claiming the browser didn't support frame, and most things that used an IE control were totally broken. The IE about page didn't give a version number, all attempts to uninstall it failed, and if I tried to install a later version it claimed the latest version was already in place. Everything else worked great - if my friend was a Firefox user I would have been tempted to just let them have it back. But they weren't and the number of Windows features that are broken by lack of IE controls is too intrusive to make the machine usable for a novice - even system restore didn't come up. Since no amount of recovery console, system file checking and other things would fix it I was left with no choice but to reinstall Windows from scratch.

Unfortunately my friend didn't have the original disks but it was a fully licensed laptop so I located an XP Home installation disk (note, an upgrade wont work for reinstallation, it complains that the current version is newer and bombs out). Being an original XP Home disk and not SP1 or SP2 or the manufacturers disk I knew I was in for a long process of update, update, update to the machine back on its feet, so guess how many times I had to reboot the machine?

Well for the initial XP Home installation there were three complete reboots. I had to call Microsoft during the process too because the disk I was using was an OEM Dell disk and the machine was an HP. Fortunately they took the product key from the back of the machine and gave me my authorization code with no questions asked (apart from the usual "you're running this on only one machine in your home right?". Apart from the screen pretty much everything important was working fine on the machine without a single manufacturer driver or utility. The LCD screen was in 800x600 mode but it was still perfectly usable. I decided to wait until I'd finished upgrading and then apply the latest manufacturer code from their website.

So then I started running Windows update with the "express install" option. There was one small update, then a big one with a whole mess of security patches (19), and then I was ready for the XP SP2 update. Actually it was only about 60Mb and didn't take that long but as soon as I'd done it I then had to get back to security updates again. There was another small one with some hardware updates. Then there was another huge update containing 26 different security patches. After that I'd run out of express install updates which is basically all those marked as "High priority".

When I switched to the custom update option and found four hardware patches available and six software ones. I was able to do all the hardware patches in one go, and then all the software ones (which I found surprising since they included WMP 10). But the software installed included the .NET framework which forced another two complete update cycles for software patches and then updates.

Finally I was up to the point where I had only device specific stuff to install from the manufacturer. That would get the one-touch keys, WiFi support and other stuff running and took another three (it might have been more, I lost count). After that I put on Microsoft AntiSpyware and Grisoft AVG Free also requiring reboots.

The final damage?

Install XP Home - 3 reboots
Express Updates to XP2 - 3 reboots
Express Updates after XP2 - 3 reboots
Custom non-critical updates - 4 reboots
Manufacturer updates - 3 reboots
Antivirus and antispyware installation - 2 reboots

Grand total for bare machine to completely up to date XP Home install ready for consumer use: 18 reboots

Okay so the good part is everything went without a hitch. All updates just ran smoothly without hanging, all software was readily available for download and the machine is tip top again. That kind of thing would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It might even be safe to use for another few months until so more critical security updates come along!

My biggest beef with this whole process? That Microsoft doesn't just have, ready for download, a complete and fully patched Windows XP SP2 image. If their activation code works so great why not? What is the harm in allowing people to download it? Ditto for system manufacturers - why can't they keep a fully patched OS install download available with all the device specific stuff already thrown in? This would have saved me literally hours of time and that was all for just one installation. Cumulatively across the entire Windows XP user community that's probably millions of hours of saved time every year, just think what the benefit to mankind it would be!

Google goodness

If Keyhole was awesome, Google's purchase of it and liberation of its capabilities along with GoogleMaps was, well double awesome? Super fantastico? Worlds fail me. Now there is an API for people to overlay their own data with GoogleMaps all kinds of groovy stuff is happening. The latest one I found is a site called WeatherBonk which overlays personal weatherstation data from Weather Underground, web cam locations and also regional radar info.

Since I fly paragliders I need to know about the weather - not just the forecast but actual current and trending conditions. A site like WeatherBonk is great for checking out my local flying sites before jumping in the car and going to fly. Sure I can check them manually by going to Wunderground but WeatherBonk is way more groovy. Plus I just discovered a whole bunch of personal weather stations and web cams I never even knew about.

To me this a perfect example of open APIs allowing synergy, innovation and unleashing Google goodness all round.

Patents and innovation

EWeek's Jim Rapoza is writing about patents and innovation in his article Innovation: Don't Get Me Wrong. Having thought long and hard about this before, and the problems our current patent system is causing I couldn't resist posting a reply to his article especially since my "unpatent database" idea has been discussed here before. Here is what I wrote with a bit more detail because space eWeek comments are limited in length.

---

For a long time I've pondered the same dilemma [patents and innovation]. I know the economic argument in favour of patents, that having them encourages people to invest time and more importantly money into research and creating new ideas, and then having a protected period to recoup those costs. However I actually believe that argument now applies to a tiny, tiny percentage of ideas patented.

I believe that the vast majority of patents are applied to ideas people just have with little or no effort to create them beyond some thought, and that by and large such ideas are obvious and could be replicated by almost any expert in a given field. Many times I have thought of original ideas, written it down and found someone had implemented the exact same idea a few years later.

This leads me to conclude that by far the greatest effect of patents is to stifle innovation. People do not pursue ideas because the believe they have to get a patent, or they just don't care to, and hence many ideas are lost. Or people patent obvious ideas and then implement or productize them badly so the idea is underutilized or completely wasted. These are both bad for society at large.

Think about it - there are over six billion people on this planet, and millions must come up with ideas every day but do nothing with them. If even a tiny percentage of those ideas were original and good that is still thousands of inventions going to waste every day.

So, what if people could just donate their invention to society for free exploitation, with no strings attached? It would establish a kind of copy-left for ideas, you can use it but can take the idea an further restrict it. There would soon be a vast pool of ideas out there for people to work with and everyone would have a chance to exploit such ideas equally.

My suggestion is someone like the FSF, EFF, or some other open source group create a "un-patent" database for people to file their ideas into and for others to search in. We'll soon have a huge database of all kinds of ideas - not all good, some really bad, many obivous and some perhaps already patented. But unpatenting an already patented idea does no harm - it has no legal effect on an already patented idea. Putting something in the unpatent database establishes no legal right at all other than preventing someone establishing a patenting on that idea. This is because someone cannot patent an idea that has already been published in the public domain.

So the effect is the this will prevent a huge number of obvious ideas (like hyperlinks) from being patented by companies just because they have pots of money to patent everything in site. It will effectively narrow the utility of patents down to only those ideas that are truly non-obivious and trivial. Ones that take lots of original thought, research and investment - those are the ones that deserve patents (if at all) and those are the ones that wont turn up in the "un-patent" (or perhaps Open Source Invention) library. All obvious and trivial ideas will end up in the unpatent library which is readily searchable and exploitable by all.

Furthermore, because so many ideas will be found in the unpatent library people will waste less money patenting obvious ideas, or fighting patent suits from people who did so. You'll virtually be guaranteed that if you do extensive original research and come up with some new invention that it wont be in the unpatent library and that patenting it will be worthwhile and that patent will be worth defending. In addition companies will not be bought and sold based on worthless and indefensible patent portfolios which are maintained only as bargaining power to fend off other patent suits.

The upshot: less money wasted in litigation, more money spent on innovation, more obvious ideas widely and efficiently implemented and available to everyone. Yes - everybody wins!

Just my $0.02c - its my idea but I'm throwing it out there to the public domain hoping that someone will run with it. I don't want any money for the idea - its obvious isn't it, just give me credit assuming I'm the first to think of it.

Palm R.I.P.

Now that Palm has just officially announced the new Treo 700w running Windows Mobile its clear that Palm has put the final nail in its own coffin. While the Treo has been a very popular gadget it never really was because it ran Palm OS, more that it was a good encapsulation of phone, PDA and keyboard. The keyboard was the key - businessmen just don't scribble with a stylus, or do Graffiti but they have been known to peck with their thumbs. So now that Palm has put Windows Mobile in its ever popular Treo package there really is no reason to ever bother with Palm OS again.

Palm OS is, and always was, a pigs-ear of an OS that lived largely unchanged for way too long. Even at its inception there were other more advanced OSes in use on PDAs (like the predecessor of Symbian - Epoch). That Palm OS lived so long is a wonder, or maybe a mystery, perhaps a testament to its fiercely loyal user base who kept buying new Palm versions with wreckless abandon, much like Apple fans keep ugrading to the latest iPod every year (or even six months these days!).

Unfortunately for Palm their newer customers were less loyal, less likely to use Palm for anything other than reading email, occasional Internet browsing and keeping their phone nubmers. With email and a browser there never was much need to add 3rd party apps to the device and this made moving away from Palm, or in particular Palm OS, a very easy thing to do. As far as I know the new Windows Mobile based device wont even run old PalmOS apps, the press release certainly doesn't say so - although it hints that perhaps they have ported some Palm application features, but nothing about binary compatibility via a simulator.

With PalmOS (the company and the software) sold off to the Japanese company Access, it seems only a matter of time before Palm itself is producing only Windows devices. At that point it'll just be another competitor in the already crowded SmartPhone space. Even Microsoft has a big splash about Palm's switch to Windows, they must be peeing their pants with delight that PalmOS is finally dead (it just hasn't stopped moving - yet). Can Palm compete in the smartphone space? I really doubt it. As I mentioned the Treo is a nice design and all, there is a loyal hardcore following, but really the just don't have the edge to become the Apple of smartphones. The big guys like HP and Samsung who can exploit economies of scale, direct supploy of LCD and flash memory, will surely eat their lunch on pricing alone.

The trouble with Skype

I've been using Skype for about a year now and although I haven't been a heavy user of it I've found enough of my friends use it to make it worthwhile keeping around. I've paid to be able to make outbound calls to the telecoms network and have only encountered two problems with voice quality.

Firstly I often get echo when the other person is not using a headset, i.e. they have a non-directional microphone and PC speakers. This is not really Skype's fault - its very hard to deal with - people should get a directional microphone that picks up only their voice, and they should use headphones unless they absolutely have to have "speakerphone behavior". That said various speakerphone manufactures have solved this problem, usually by some variation on making the connection singleplex and heavy echo cancellation.

Secondly there is much more delay on a Skype line over a long connection than I am used to with a phone line. This can result in higher than normal instances of interrupted speech and just a general feeling of disconnectedness. Again this isn't really Skype's fault - its a factor of the high latency on Internet connections between countries, we're talking 100-250ms (or sometimes more) from the west coast of the USA and mainland Europe. Which means when you pause for breath, if the other person starts it can easily be half a second or more before you hear them interrupt, which is often enough for you to have started talking again and interrupt them unintentionally. Then you get an experience like a packet collision on a shared medium network (ethernet or WiFi) - both talkers must back off and negotiate who starts speaking again. At that point you really notice the extra delay. In conversations with video support I've noticed this isn't such a big problem even though the delay is still there - you can give some little visual cues to help.

Like I said, neither of these problems is really Skype's fault, they are common to all VoIP and voice chat systems (Skype doesn't actually use VoIP) done via a computer over the general Internet. A really first class VoIP system should provide headsets (or great echo cancellation) and be able to tunnel long haul voice traffic over low-latency connections.

Finally my biggest issue with Skype that is Skype specific - their voice mail. If it wasn't for how limited Skype voicemail is I would certainly pay up the €30 a year for inbound Skype and start using it as my main "landline" phone number. Unfortunately Skype doesn't allow you to check voicemail by any other means than their client application which isn't much help if you're on the road just want to use a web browser to get voice mail, or have voice mail delivered to you as an attached file in email, or even just call into a regular phone number and check it. All of the above are available from other carriers like Vonage - Skype needs to catch up.

If there is one thing I really like about Skype, its their price - €30 a year for inbound Skype is way lower than the competition. True I still have to pay on top of that for outbound calls, but really I don't make that many outbound calls, and most of those are to 1-800 toll-free numbers. And the few toll calls I do need to make I tend to make by my cellphone since it has inclusive long distance minutes I need to use up. What I don't need is another subscription to a service like Vonage that charges at least $14.95 per month (more like €150 per year!) for their most limited service, forcing me to pay for 500 minutes of long distance calls a month that I'll never use.

I'm sure the packages that Vonage, Packet8 and others offer a good for some customers, otherwise they wouldn't buy them. However you have to ask yourself why a tech-savvy customer who would try VoIP as a landline replacement, is going to want to invest an extra $15 or much more a month to use it when they could just throw that money at their cellphone carrier to buy more minutes. To me the key sell of VoIP is that it follows your Internet connectivity, is highly integrated with Internet protocols for communication (email, web, and SIP) and that it doesn't cost you a penny when you're not using it. That point seems to have been missed by all VoIP offerings I've seen so far.

So the upshot is that until something happens to Skype voicemail or the service packages offered by Vonage et al I'm going to sit on the fence an only use Skype only for in-network chat and the occasional outbound call. The consequence is I don't get to exploit all the great features available and they don't get to exploit any of my hard earned Euros.

Tech-Time for the natural disaster

About two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck I heard a day by day summary of what went wrong during the emergency response. One thing stood out - the early response was severely hampered by lack of power for handheld devices, most notably radios and flashlights. What happened was that the disaster plans assumed either landlines would be available or the mobile phone network would be available. Unfortunately neither was forcing first responders to use battery powered handheld radios which soon ran out. Apparently the radios were not able to use disposable batteries but had to be recharged and there was no power to recharge them because most of the state's emergency generators were out in Iraq with the national guard. The result was teams of rescuers wandering around New Orleans and the rest of the state in the dark and with no way to coordinate their activities. Not a good thing.

This all lead me to think about what emergency power resources I have at home. Basically I'm down to a lot of candles (not much use outside), a few flashlights, and a battery powered radio or two including my ham radio. I do have a pretty hefty UPS for my computer which on reflection I'd probably turn off right away if there was a big quake, then I could use it to recharge various battery devices like my phone. Similarly I have an AC inverter that can be plugged into a car 12V lighter socket to charge devices. But when the UPS is out of juice, the car has run out of gas I'd be pretty much down to whatever disposable batteries there are available.

Now it just happened that as Katrina came along the local public radio broadcaster KQED started their latest fund raising pledge drive. These fund raisers usually have some gimicky gifts to lure you into giving, like a bag, hat, mug, and a magazine subscription. However this time around they actually had a couple of cool items - a USB powered radio called the Radio Shark that also supports time shifted recording TiVo style for radio. Of even more interested was the Eton FR300 radio which has a builtin hand cranked battery charger. 90 seconds of cranking gives you an hour of listening. Even better it comes a builtin flashlight, siren, and power out socket that can be used to power/recharge cellphones. Finally it actually receives broadcast TV audio (until those frequencies are relinquished) and the NOAA weather channels that give 24x7 weather information and emergency reports.

Needless to say I just couldn't resist one of these babies and got my credit card out to make a donation to KQED, although I have to say it was when they announced they were throwing in a years subscription of The Economist that I finally caved.

Those interested in other hand cranked gadgets might be interested in the Freeplay line who were arguably the first company to make it big with self powered devices. Their website is full of hand cranked radios, flashlights, phone chargers and now even a foot powered generator the Freecharge Weza. I'm now considering picking up one of the flashlights Freeplay sells, and possibly the foot powered generator too - I think cranking out 40W would be a good thing even when the power isn't out. I wonder if there is a PC that make do with that little power these days?

Most loathsome technology award

I hate leaf blowers, I hate car alarms, and I really hate unsilenced motorbikes, particularly Harley Davidsons driven round and round my neighborhood late at night.

Fortunately there is a cure for the former - the electric zero-emissions (potentially, if your volts are generated by clean renewables) leaf blower. I'm hoping that one of the consequences of spiralling gas prices will be less desire for people to santer around their yards blowing bucks worth of gas instead of blowing a few calories pushing a broom or rake.

As for car alarms and Harleys, I'm still waiting for the cure. Maybe people will become so deaf from their boom-da-da-boom stereos that they can't hear either no matter how loud they are. All indications are that the day might not be too far off after all.

Person to person market freedom

Economists, capitalists, republicans - they all espouse the efficiency of unfettered free market trading. Efficiency is their nirvana, minimum waste means more money to make progress. However in real life the free market is anything but free. Never mind the myriad of laws that control it, the reality is there is no one market, but a vast array of interconnected markets, all with trading laws in between them.

Probably the closest approximation to a free market we have now is the Internet itself. Accessible in almost every country, hundreds of millions are able to come together and exchange content for clicks, other content, and occasionally actual money. The fact that "trading" on the Internet can be done with little intervention and across international borders (especially if the commodity is digital) makes it an ideal location for real person to person trading. That trading is typically done with very little overhead (if any), usually just enough to keep people honest. Such systems have sprung up with great abandon - Craigs List, EBay, the old peer to peer "file trading" networks, and now Peerflix.

Now Peerflix being an obvious play on Netflix and Peer to Peer is an interesting beast. It allows people with DVD content they no longer use to exchange the physical DVD with another person for a small fee ($0.99 plus postage). The key word is "exchange" because Peerflix is a barter market so in return they get another DVD, or depending on the desirability of their DVD, more than one (all movies are not created equally).

I like the concept of Peerflix, the creators will probably go far with it and find their model copied many times. They could even launch their own open source peer to peer goods trading platform. The key point being it is a barter market for physical goods and not just digital files, all you get in return for trading a DVD is another DVD so it dramatically reduces the opportunity for fraud. For instance trading a big pile of stolen DVDs will get you... another pile of DVDs, not a big pile of cash. Yes, barter enables laundering of illicitly gained goods for legitimate goods but so long as the transaction isn't completely anonymous there should still be some recourse or at least paper trail to follow in the event of problems.

The spanner (wrench to you Americans) in the works will of course be the content copyright holders. They will kick, they will scream, they will investigate, harass and eventually they will claim Peerflix is just a huge mechanism for assisting DMCA infringements. Why? Well because they will claim it encourages people to use software that will copy their DVDs for "archival purposes" (several home media systems have this built in now) and then trade them on Peerflix for something else while retaining the ability to watch the original DVD from its digital copy. Thus they will use Peerflix as yet another reason to tighten up the screws copyright protection for everything, be it movies, music CDs, and software. They will go to the Federal government and have them move to make systems like Peerflix illegal, just like they tried (and sometimes succeeded) with VCRs, photocopiers, MP3.com, Napster and the like.

The upshot is yet another person to person market will probably get shut down because, you know, people just can't be trusted to do business with themselves without the Federal government in the way. People can't just trade among themselves without paying their dues, and without the watchful eye of regulators, copyright monitors and the like. My beef is, sure copyright holders have a right to protect their copyright, but if they weren't so bone headed about their content distribution systems in the first place then there never would be movies sitting on a shelf that have only been watched once or twice. More to the point, if you want to give me a perpetual license to watch some content then you should jolly well find a way to allow me to securely transfer that right.

Fairly priced and accessible video on demand over the Internet is coming - real soon - but the reality is it is just not "real soon" enough to stamp out consumer desire for services like Peerflix. In the mean time Peerflix will probably flourish until it is crushed by the industry. If it look at it long enough you'll see its not really that much different from consumers selling their surplus books online via services like Amazons Z-Market and Barnes and Nobles used books system. The only significant difference is that people usually don't make a photocopy of their books before selling them, its just too impractical. However I think its actually only a matter of time before automated book copiers (I have an idea how to do copy a book extremely quickly) turn up in the hands of consumers, and that that point the book publishing industry had better watch out.

It's the simple things

A recent Wired article describes who some PhD student figured he could make clothes drier by using a simple mixture of common washing powder ingredients to reduce capillary action that causes fibres to hold onto moisture. Turns out that with little effort he was able to make clothes coming out of the washing machine 20% drier. Which means 20% less energy required to dry them. Since clothes drying apparently takes 5.6% of all US energy consumption his simple idea could just shave 1% or more off the total.

Wow.

Now imagine if we all just hung our clothes out to dry on the line?

Yeah I know, we can't do that any more because the air is so filthy clothes would just get dirty before they dried. Besides, so many Americans are just pertrified that pictures of their underwear would appear on Flickr.

Bye bye iPod Mini, hello Nano

Driving to the coast today I spotted the billboard for the new iPod Nano. I just checked the specs for it just now and my conclusion is everyone who just bought an iPod Shuffle or Mini is probably hopping mad. But you know how those Apple people are - they are hopping all the way to the nearest Apple store to buy one. Yes, they just can't get enough.

The question is, what will come after the Nano? iPod Femto? I'm assuming they skipped the micro because of the Zen Micro but really they seem to have penciled themselves into a corner on the naming front now. Perhaps they'll explore the root Lacie took with their external drives - big, bigger, biggest - and use smaller, smaller, smallest?

Anyway, who cares what its called. I admit its a very sleek package, I'm sure they will fly off the shelves. Howewever until they open up their DRM or support a DRM with subscription based rights like Napster uses I'm afraid I wont be buying one.

Making money one click at a time

As some of you may know I have not been working in a full time job for over a year now, hence the desire to make some more of my time consuming activities, such as blogging, pay for themselves. That's why after a comment from a friend who has the web site My Daily Yoga I decided to put some Google Ads on my two blogs.

So, as well as "What a sell out!" I expect you might be wondering how it is going. Well I never expected to get rich, or even make a living from Google ads - my main goal was to cover my hosting expenses. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have been a reality and I'd have to have about five times the traffic to make that happen - or a lot of willing clickers.

Last month (August) Adsense recorded 2092 page impressions - there were 6 clicks on ads (0.3% of impressions) and that earned $1.81. Also there were 7 queries using the Google search with Adsense ads thrown in, resulting in two clicks on ads earning a mere $0.08. I've also noticed that the amount you earn for a click can vary dramatically - one click alone last month earned $1.41, most earn between 5 and 10 cents. I don't know if Adsense has some way to track when a click results in a sale and hence the big pay out, or maybe some advertisers offer premium amounts based on their product prices (like car manufactures).

So thus far Google's adsense hasn't exactly been money maker and since they don't pay out until you earn over $100 it could be several years before I even see a penny of it :-) But I can't complain really 2,000 page impressions a month isn't exactly a huge amount and to be honest my ads are often not that relevant to the page content (but certainly not completely irrelevant!). My alterior motive for having Google ads remains - if I ever get slammed by a Slashdot effect event the ads should probably generate enough ad clicks to pay for any bandwidth overage I incurr.

Finally to all of you who believe I'm a sell out for including ads I would like to remind them that it turns out that these days virtually the entire Internet is massively subsidised by advertising revenue so we all benefit from it, whether it be directly or not. Now I agree that an alternative is to completely do away with unsolicited advertising which would probably knock a significant percentage off all product prices, free up millions of people from the advertising business to do something more productive, encourage people to be more critical in their product purchasing, and save massive amounts of resources that are otherwise expended on advertising (be it billboard space, paper for junk mail, or bandwidth for advert images and videos). However just how likely is that to happen in our lifetimes? So my take is if I'm going to suffer the ills for advertising then why shouldn't I exploit it myself for my own benefit?

Y2K de ja vu: digitally challenged gas pumps

The acronym LOL comes to mind when I read about gas pumps that can't display a $3 gallon. I mean, the whole Y2K problem I can understand, but what pray tell was someone thinking when they left of digits 3 to 9 on one of the mechanical pumps? Did it really save any money to do that, wasn't it actually more expensive to have a special dollar indicator with less than 10 digits on it? Doh!

However, while I'm laughing out loud about mechanical pumps with a G3G (gas-three-gallon) problem I'm starting to wonder about what happens when the $10 gallon comes along which surely can't be that far away, probably when oil reaches $200 a barrel I guess. At that point the G10G (gas-ten-gallon) problem will be apon us. Better start planning now because I reckon there are tons of digital pumps with only one digit to display the dollar amount.

My suggested solution for G10G - sell it by the pint (because we certainly couldn't do it by the liter as the Europeans and Canadians do!). I figure that solution will probably see us through to the end of the oil age, assuming of course it doesn't compound the problem due to SUVs and trucks requiring over a 1000 pints to fill up!

Underwater sculling

On a recent visit to Partridge Lake in New Hampshire I was privileged to participate in what may be the first instance of underwater sculling. The vessel was a vintage aluminum Grumman canoe filled with water, but still floating with us in it due to buoyancy tanks. Because the canoe has no rowlocks it required two people to row - I played the role of rowlocks, also providing some counterpull on the strokes, and my friend was the oarsman. It was hard work and very slow compared to the real thing, but amazingly it worked and naturally it was insanely silly to participate in. Watch the full movie here.

Technology doing its job - saving a life

As someone who has nearly drowned twice in their life I really appreciate a computer computer system that can save someone from that fate. That's exactly what the Poseidon system did recently when a girl swimming in a pool blacked out and sank to the bottom under 12 feet of water. Within 3 seconds the system detected her motionless form at the bottom of the pool via video imaging, sounded an alarm at the pool side, and the girl was promptly rescued and resuscitated by a life guard who almost certainly would not have seen her until too late.