Lift Up Your Hearts!

Check out this TED lecture:  Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology, not only for what might be ahead in the world of computing (hint: the line between computing and interacting with the real world is about to get quite blurry) but also for what a brilliant mind can think of when pondering the workings of an ordinary computer mouse.  You are in a taxi on your way to the airport and want to check the status of your flight.  Who needs an iPhone?  Simply look at your boarding pass, and a tiny device attached to your body reads the information and projects back onto the card that your flight is 20 minutes delayed.  Thanks, Janet, for sharing this.

The latest version of Thunderbird, 3.01, includes a number of significant changes from Version 2.  I think I'm going to like it, at least once the fix a major bug, which I understand they are working on.  The old Thunderbird allowed the assignment of nicknames to e-mail addresses, so, for example, I could set up simple two-letter codes for people I write frequently, and typing those codes into the "To" field auto-completed the correct address.  The new Thunderbird still allows nicknames, but they work differently:  the named address becomes merely one of many suggestions made by the auto-complete engine, and it's rarely the first.  Hence I, and from the word on the Internet, many others, have been embarrassed by sending e-mails to the wrong people.  What's more, the auto-complete engine insists on searching all addresses for possible matches.  I have three address books in Thunderbird:  my Personal Address Book, one I call Archives, into which I put addresses I might want once in a blue moon, and one Thunderbird adds, called "Collected Addresses," which it populates from e-mails sent and received.  All of these are useful, but I'd like to be able to tell Thunderbird to ignore all but the Personal Address Book.

Like Firefox, Thunderbird now uses tabs.  In Firefox (and Internet Explorer) it's annoying, because the button to open a new tab is right next to the button to close the tab, and I'm forever closing tabs by accident and often losing work in the process.  But Thunderbird doesn't have the "add tab" button to foul me up, and it's handy to be able to have several search results and a few e-mails all open in tabs.  Thunderbird remembers what tabs you had open when you exited the program, and restore them when you open it again.

Speaking of search results, I've run into a few glitches with the new, much-changed search, but mostly it's great.  When I first upgraded, Thunderbird spent a fair amount of time indexing all my e-mails, but now it can search through my very large archive so quickly that it's almost as easy to search the body of every e-mail as just the subject or sender.  The way search results are displayed is much more useful also, showing excerpts from each match, and the distribution of matches by year (further subdividable), people, folder, and tags, and probably more I haven't yet discovered.

You can now add and e-mail sender or recipient to your address book with one click.  There's also an attachment reminder that responds to certain keywords in the body of your message.  I haven't tried this yet, but as I frequently forget to add attachments, this could be a boon.

One new feature I doubt I'll ever use, but which will no doubt appeal to the same folks who buy "skins" for their electronic devices, is "Personas," which allows you to customize the look of your Thunderbird.  The few Personas I experimented with did nothing but make the words hard to read.  Plain vanilla works best for me.

What I like best of all is the Archive button.  Thunderbird comes with a new Archive folder, and creates subfolders for each year.  When you're done with an e-mail you don't want to delete, press "Archive" (or type "A") and, presto!, it's moved to the current year's folder.  What I like best about this is that it fits exactly with my own archiving scheme (all I had to do was move my own year-named folders under the new Archive folder), and it now saves me a lot of mouse clicks.

I've been having a lot of fun with the new Thunderbird, but that auto-complete problem needs to be fixed yesterday.

If you haven't received a call from us lately, it's not only because I don't like to use the telephone.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, our previously excellent phone service started giving us trouble.  Callers could hear us fine, but what we heard from them was distorted.  Back in the good ol' days of monopoly telephone service (black, rented phones and impossibly expensive long distance), if something went wrong, you knew who to blame, and they knew it, too.  Now I can call Switzerland for three cents a minute, but problems invite an endless circle of finger-pointing.  Especially when the problems are intermittent.  Before—possible points of failure = 1:  the telephone company.  After—possible points of failure = many:  the cable Internet provider, the VoIP provider, the VoiP phone, the modem, the router, or some combination.

As the trouble began right before I left town, I decided not to worry about it.  When I came back, it was a bit better—I could live with it.  Then it got worse again, and I spent a small amount of time trying to diagnose it, but a labor-intensive Christmas present demanded more of my attention, so I resorted to using the cell phone when possible, even though the per-minute cost was worse than in the Ma Bell days.  Then we were out of town again and I was able to forget the problem for a few weeks.

We came home.  Two things were different:  (1) the phone situation was worse, and consistently so, and (2) Porter was home, and he's much less likely than I am to "make do."  We began collecting data in earnest, and convinced ourselves that the problem, or at least a major part of it, rested with BrightHouse, our cable Internet provider.  The difficulty was in convincing them, and Porter spent a long and frustrating time on the phone.  It does not build confidence in a company when you get the feeling you know more about the product than the customer service representatives do.  Finally, they condescended to send out a repairman, with the threat that we would probably be charged for the service call because it was clearly our problem, not theirs.

Fast-forward to Monday night, after a weekend of becoming still more convinced that the problem was not ours.  The technician arrived, and in about 30 minutes found not one but two problems (one apparently caused by a previous repairman), which he proceeded to fix.  Voilá!  The phone was crystal clear, and what's more, our Internet speed had increased by nearly an order of magnitude.  We had been living with inferior service for years, and didn't know it could be fixed.  If BrightHouse had believed how close we were to switching away from their service, they'd not have been so slow to send out the friendly and more than usually competent repairman.

I wonder how many other areas of life could be vastly better if only we believed that they could be, were willing to work on them, and found the right combination of knowledge, tools, and technicians?

My recent visit with our grandchildren reminded me of why I don't like video/computer games. I don't mean I don't like to play them; I know all too well how addicted I can get if I allow myself to get started.

It began, of course, with television.  When the technological wonder entered my home when I was seven, I was already familiar with its delights, thanks to the generosity of our neighbors.  We matured together, television and I, and with such a sibling it's no wonder we bonded strongly as the years passed.  It was not a healthy bond, and I'm thankful that I went to college before televisions were ubiquitous in the dormitories, because those four years of abstention were the beginning of my liberation.  It would be many years and much struggle before I could declare myself free, but never again would the glowing opium box control my life.

Well, not that glowing opium box, anyway.

It was Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug—confirmed by my own experience—that showed me the greatest problem with television, as a medium, and it's not the content.  Certainly, content is important:  it's better to eat nutritious food than junk food, and better to eat either than poison.  But as many of us can attest, even good food, in quantity, becomes poison to our bodies. Television, at its best, is an unparalleled tool for learning and cultural enrichment.  But it has a terrible tendency to become addictive, fostering increasing demand and decreasing quality.  There is a version of Gresham's Law for television viewing, apparently.

Eschewing broadcast and cable television for carefully selected DVDs, while certainly a good thing, often misses the main point.  The question ought always be asked, "Is this a better use of my (or my children's) time than the alternatives, e.g. reading, making Lego creations, or playing outside?"  One of television's very unfortunate effects is to make itself more attractive than other, more valuable activities, just as lesser shows are almost inevitably more attractive than the better ones.  Why this is true is a mystery.  Some have posited physical changes made to the brain by the medium itself, which would also explain the similar addictive properties of video/computer games and computers in general.

As a mother and homeschooler I learned that children have a marvellous capacity to entertain and educate themselves, and can be trusted to make good use of every waking moment—and to accept sleep when that is the best use of their time.  The more I observe, however, the more I realize that what has been true for millennia is no longer.  Children who have been crippled by television and other video screen experiences have lost this capacity.  Even in our grandson I saw the terrible tendrils of whatever it is that sucks the life from us:  although his family owns no television, and only occasionally watches DVDs; although the computer games he sometimes plays with his dad are of the older, less flashy variety; although he has a wonderful, vivid imagination and can entertain himself (and his siblings) for hours; nonetheless, when I was in charge for a day, pretty much the only thing he wanted to do was play video games—at least until Grandma hardened her heart and proved she wasn't quite the soft touch he had hoped.

Who has not known college buddies who will spend every free moment (and many that are not, technically, free) with online, multi-player games?  Whose Second Life is more important than their first?  Teenagers retreating to their iPods/iPhones and choosing games over real-life interaction?  Young children in cars with the wonders of the countryside flowing past them but their eyes unmoving from their flickering portable DVD players?  Middle-aged wanna-be writers and amateur genealogists who spend so much time at the computer that OSHA would crack down if it were a workplace scenario?

Computers, video games, and television are wonderful, useful additions to our collection of tools for living and learning.  Even for loving; if e-mail, Skype, and blogging will never replace physical interaction, anyone who has family in faraway places knows how valuable they are for nurturing human relations.  The price exacted may be terribly high, however, if we cannot be the masters of our tools rather than their slaves.

Abstention, if difficult, is always easier than control, as any Alcoholics Anonymous member knows, but when the thing is good, control is the better path.  Sometimes, as with eating, it's a necessary path.  These days, computer use is nearly in the category of necessity, and therein lies my problem.  Nearly everything I do involves sitting down at the computer.  Writing, reading, researching, communicating, paying bills, organizing photos, staying informed, shopping, creating educational materials, keeping track of finances, organizing addresses and other information—all these and much more are now done, and often done better, with the use of a computer.  No doubt this tool saves us time, but as with most so-called time-saving devices, it may give us minutes with one hand only to take away hours with the other.

As I once asked when contemplating allowing our children to watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on a daily basis, "What is not being done during the time dedicated to this activity?"  There is an opportunity cost in time as well as in money, a far more serious cost, because if time can be saved, it cannot be banked, and moments wasted are lost forever.  The time we spend in front of the television, playing video games, and working on the computer was, not that long ago, available for other projects.  What have we gained?  What have we lost?

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook, finding it simultaneously useful and annoying.  But here's a funny thing about Facebook, as reported by Eric Schultz, who is the Chairman of the Board of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and writer of The Occasional CEO. (The NEHGS library, both online and in person, is one of my favorite and most helpful resources for genealogical research.)

This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.

I'm sure there must be a legitimate reason behind the new Federal Trade Commission rules for bloggers, but it looks pretty nonsensical from my perspective, another example of one-size-fits-all rules that inconvenience millions in an attempt to collar a few offenders.  It invites comparisons with the TSA's airport screening, except that I'm a lot more worried about terrorists than about those "I lost 300 pounds on this simple diet" ads.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.  Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.  Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products.  [From the Hartford Courant, October 6, 2009]

So here goes.  I suppose I'll have to put it in my About link, too.

I have no idea what others should expect from anything I review or comment on.  I'm one person, not a research laboratory.  You may love a book I find objectionable; you may dislike the recipe I say is fabulous.  Such is life.  Sometimes I get books for free, from publishers, which I'll acknowledge in the review, but no small tip is going to make me say I liked a book when I didn't.  (So far, I've received all of one book this way, and I haven't read it yet, which is why you haven't seen any such acknowledgement.)  I also get incalculable return from Lime Daley, but I like to think that's because of my familial relationship with the owners, not because of any endorsements I make on this blog.

I don't mean to pick on the FTC; they have a tough job.  But I'm much more interested in disclosures, say, of gifts given by textbook publishers to school boards, or from pharmaceutical companies to doctors.  When Internet bloggers attain the respect, authority, and power of doctors and school boards, when it takes more than common sense to realize their reviews might not have universal applicability, then I may be convinced of the need for regulation.  I won't be in that category anyway. 

Many years ago, Porter attended a course taught by Bill Oncken, which added at least two phrases to his vocabulary:  "Don't be a monkey-picker-upper," and "Feed it, or shoot it, but don't let it starve to death."  The first advises against meddling in tasks (monkeys) that don't belong to you, especially after you've delegated them.  The second requires you to work on tasks, or scrub them, but never let them languish.

I have a backblog of over 100 items about which I want to write—and that's only the ones in my bookmark list, which are less important than those on my mental list.  Flush from success with whacking my e-mail inbox from over 200 down to less than 30, I feel Bill Oncken's ghost hovering over my shoulder and challenging me to take on the backblog.

If these were real monkeys, the ASPCA would have had me arrested months ago.  Some of them have already died of starvation; all I must do is dispose of the bodies.  Some intrigued me at one time, but I now don't find them worth the time and effort; these I will happily execute with a click of the delete key.  Some remain healthy enough to go into a "priority pen" until they can be tended to properly...after I extend Oncken's options a step further:  I intend to take most of these monkeys and turn them loose to forage on their own.

Thus I am reviving my "Casting the Net" series, and you will see, in the coming days, posts with several short comments and associated links.  I hope to put in enough detail to enable readers to decide quickly whether it's a subject worth pursuing or ignoring, but you won't get the detailed commentary and quotations I normally like to include.

It's either that, or declare blog bankruptcy.

Google Fast Flip seemed like just another gimmick, but having given it a test drive I'm already hooked.  Pick a newspaper, say the New York Times.  Or a topic, such as Health.  You're presented with an eye-catching snapshot of the beginning of the first article.  You can see the headline, the first several paragraphs of text, and probably a graphic, pull-quote, or summary.  Oh, and also some ads—but (shhh, don't tell Google) the ads are blessedly easy to ignore.

If you like what you see in the article, you can click on it to read the rest.  Or you can hit your computer's arrow key and move quickly on to the next article.  Did I say quickly?  That's why I'm so excited about this.  No point-and-click, no waiting for a page to load, just one keystroke and you're there.  In a flash.  It takes me about a second per article to determine whether or not I want to know more—usually not, it doesn't take much time to scan a lot.

This is far more satisfying than scanning news headlines in a feed reader.   The headline itself does not usually give enough detail, and I find myself wasting too much time clicking on links that might have been interesting but are not.  With Fast Flip I can take most stories with a single glance, while for many others I find that reading the first several paragraphs tells me what I want to know without having to bother to click through to the whole article. When I want more detail, it's there—but doesn't intrude unless I seek it out.

What will Google think of next?  I hope this catches on in a big way; as yet there is not a great choice of sources.

I know enough about my computer's software to get by; in fact, I know enough to do many wonderful things.  But what I don't know exceeds what I do to a depressing degree.  Only today did I stumble upon the fact that with Office 2007 I can publish documents in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.

It's not obvious, because there's an add-on required, but the add-on is free and available from Microsoft.  It's a quick and very easy download and installation process; it would have taken less than a minute had I not bothered to read the directions and the license agreement.   :)

I don't know what I'll use this new-found ability for, but now that I know about it, I'm sure I'll think of something.

In case anyone got excited by seeing what might have been an new comment appear, only to be led to a couple of old posts, I apologize.  I've been finding and fixing some broken links and trackbacks, and my efforts to make them appear old rather than new failed.  Just maintenence, nothing new, sorry.

James Burke's first Connections series drove home the idea that change in one area can have unexpected impact in far different fields.  The Butterfly Effect reminds us that the tiniest difference may lead to great changes.  The invention of the automobile was one event that led to vast societal changes no one could have predicted.  Television was another.  Then the Internet.  Within the Internet, there was Google, which may be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in our time, who knows?  And now there is Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Take time to check out the Stephen Wolfram's introduction.  The demonstration explains faster and better than I can the power of this not-just-another-search-engine.  It's still in its infancy, and I was easily able to come up with searches it did not understand.  But what it can do already is amazing.

Is anyone else as frustrated as I am with Word's so-called Title Case (called "Capitalize Each Word" in Word 2007)?  I haven't actually found any use for that option; in general, only the more important words of a title should begin with uppercase letters.

But ta-da!  The Internet comes to the rescue, again.  Allen Wyatt's WordTips has a macro that will do what is needed.  Here it is, modified slightly—I added "an" and "and" to the list of words that should not be capitalized, and removed "is"; I was taught that all verbs, even small ones, are important enough to be capitalized.  It's easy to change the list to suit your needs, and I may modify it further through time.  If the excluded words occur at the beginning of the title, they are left in uppercase.

Sub TitleCase()
    Dim lclist As String
    Dim wrd As Integer
    Dim sTest As String

    ' list of lowercase words, surrounded by spaces
    lclist = " a an as and at but by for from in into nor of or the this to with "

    Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord

    For wrd = 2 To Selection.Range.Words.Count
        sTest = Trim(Selection.Range.Words(wrd))
        sTest = " " & LCase(sTest) & " "
        If InStr(lclist, sTest) Then
            Selection.Range.Words(wrd).Case = wdLowerCase
        End If
    Next wrd
End Sub

I'm no Word macro expert, but found this easy to install in Word 2007.   On the View tab, click the arrow under Macros.  Choose View Macros, then change the macro name to "TitleCase" (without the quotes) and click Create.  Visual Basic opens up with your macros, including one at the end for TitleCase.  Replace the rather empty text there—from "Sub Titlecase ()" through "End Sub"—with the macro above.  I added a button for the TitleCase macro to my Quick Access Toolbar, and now it's ready whenever I want it.

As I try to steer a course between providing too much information and too little, let me attempt to explain what I plan to institute as a general policy with regard to links in my posts.  I provide links to other sites for various purposes:  to give credit where it is due, to provide resources for further exploration of a subject, and/or because I think I can't do justice to the source with a few excerpts.  At the request of several of my readers, what I will try to do is provide enough information within my own post to make it informative and perhaps interesting, providing links for the above-mentioned purposes but not expecting the majority of my readers to follow them.  When I do think a link is particuarly important, I'll make that clear.

I've been thinking about the subject recently, as the amount of information that comes my way continues to expand exponentially.  I like to think of myself as an aggregator for my friends and family, passing on important ideas, worrisome trends, and interesting stories that others might not find; I know that I am grateful to people who provide that service for me.  But I also know that merely being sent a link is no longer particularly helpful.  If I don't know something about the subject, and what's more important, what the sender himself thinks about the link he has sent, I find I'm less and less likely to check it out.  Too much information, too little time.  Since many of my readers have less time than I do, I'll try to provide better service here.

Feeling the relief of the immediate pressure of travel/Christmas/wedding, I decided to make some long-overdue blog modifications.  Some were easy, and some...well, let's just say that—as with much system maintenance—it started by breaking more than it fixed.  Specifically, links.  And because this particular change was system-wide, it messed up Janet's links as well as mine.  Not all of them, but some, and finding out which ones is part of the fun.  :)  So please be patient as I continue to work on this, all the while trying not to let it consume too much of the time that should be spent on laundry, etc.

Your Webmaster.

Please be patient, those of you who sent me the innundation of e-mails that awaited me tonight.  You know the stories you hear about people in a coma who can understand all that is going on around them but can't respond?  It's something like that.  At the moment I can receive e-mail but not send it.  I have no idea why, but I'll be working on it soon.

Maybe after the Scattergories game that is calling me right now....