« Archives in July, 2003

Parking Lots Are Bad (But Parking Structures Are Oh So Good)

July 30, 2003 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / No Comments

Earlier today I ran to Staples for some fax toner. After circling a couple of times, I found a spot in their very packed parking lot. Then i drove about 20 seconds to move to the OSH parking lot, to pick up gardening items. I had to switch spots, you see, because the two adjacent stores had nearly adjacent, (far too small) parking lots, with prominently placed “Tow Away- Customer Parking Only” signs. I didn’t want to get towed, you know.
One nice thing about malls — even strip malls — is that you don’t need to worry about parking, you just park. Now, I’m definitely not in favor of the strip mallization of the world, but they do have the right idea about parking. Suppose OSH and Staples and Lamps Plus got together and built a single parking structure? It would be pretty inexpensive split three ways. And then imagine that each person who’d gone to one of the stores thought about making a quick visit to one of the others? If each store got just 5% of the customers going to other stores to come in and make an impulse purchase, that’s a lot of money!
With the proliferation of “big box” stores, this kind of cooperative action may make more sense than it did in the past. In urban areas, you just can’t find the large open space that developers use to make strip malls for the big box stores. Then you get situations like the one I encountered today, too many stores with too many small parking lots, all near each other. If all the stores got together and developed just a little parking structure, well, customers will shop at more than one store.
Cities could do this — and often do — but companies should also think about making an investment in parking. It’s got a potential big payoff, if customers who would otherwise move their cars do just a little bit of impulse shopping..















Throw The Bastards Out

July 29, 2003 / posted in Politics / No Comments

It must be worthless bastard season, because politicians are again screwing up our futures.
In California, the legislature “just passed a budget”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-072903budget_lat,1,4183873.story that is:
* Way, way late — well past the beginning of the fiscal year the budget is for
* Fails to close a massive deficit
* Resorts to borrowing to cover the deficit
* Ensures that we have a budget crisis next year by not dealing with the deficit
* Ruins the state’s credit rating (we now have worse credit than Alabama or Mississippi), making borrowing more expensive and costing us money down the line
Why did this happen? Well, it looks to me like nobody in Sacramento has the guts to compromise and work for what’s best for the state. Everybody’s too busy scoring a few points with the partisan crowd that elects them. Everybody’s gonna get “term limited out”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-why29jul29001424,1,4042594.story. There’s no incentive to cooperate, and, without such an incentive, our elected representatives would apparently rather take the relatively non-risky path of playing to the choir than potentially fix our state’s big problems by working together and gaining wide acclaim.
So throw the bastards out unless they’re willing to do good for our state.
And then, even when they do stupid things, politicians are still too much weasels to stick by their mistake. Apparently the Pentagon decided to start a Web site at which people could invest in futures on terror attacks. Investors essentially bet on where and when terrorist attacks take place. Anybody can play. Sounds absurd, right?
Actually, it’s not. In the 60s, the Navy invented this method of statistical prediction called Monte Carlo Analysis, which assigns values to variables of unknown value by letting people guess as to said value. Basically, it’s based on the concept that, while intuition may be non-quantifiable, people’s predictions are based on unspoken knowledge and said knowledge is of value. Thus, the guessed values will normally distributed about the actual value of the variable.
This futures market is actually a spectacular way to gain valuable intelligence from previously unknown sources. This intelligence, while it may not be as quantifiable as that from other sources, provides useful “best guess” values and is after the example of Monte Carlo Analysis.
Allowing news of this futures market to get out was certainly an error; a great deal of effort needed to be expended to sell the concept so that people could appreciate it wasn’t just a morbid game. But, once the new was out and uncontrolled, well, either the idea was a good one or not. If it wasn’t good, they shouldn’t’ve done it in the first place. If it was, they should stick by it. Instead, politicians were so scared of looking bad that they backed down from a useful source of intelligence.
If politicians can’t stick up for unpopular ideas that are good for our national security, well, let’s throw the bastards out.















Bad Boys II

July 27, 2003 / posted in Reviews / No Comments

“Bad Boys II”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0172156 takes place in an alternate reality in which everything is highly explosive and cops get paid enough to dress in haute coture and authentic sports jerseys.
The plot is pretty simple, as is required by a movie that is principally about explosions and gunfire and driving fast. Our heroes, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, play police officers in Miami. Smith plays a richer version of Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies, while Lawrence plays a whiny version of Danny Glover. Are new heroes are partners, of course, who spend their time tracking down drugs and keeping them out of our nightclubs (schools play no role in this movie, bub).
Smith and Lawrence (I could give you their characters’ names, but, hey, the actors just play themselves, so let’s call it like it is) have tracked down an Ecstasy-importing gang and are going after a big shipment to shut the whole thing down. The Ecstasy is imported by a Cuban, played by a Catalonian; smuggled by peckerwoods (played by actual peckerwoods) and sold in nighclubs owned by a Russian (played by a Swede).
Now, I realize that the Office Of National Drug Control And Making Tobacco And Alcohol Companies Rich By Keeping Out Alternative Intoxicants Policy thinks that Ecstasy Is Bad, but it’s a pretty weak evil drug. Compared to ceroin or cocaine or PCP, it’s pretty benign, and a bunch of well-dressed club-goers (even an overdosing one) using E and having positive social interactions are not exactly as sympathetic as schoolkids getting hooked on pot or blue-collar workers falling victim to crack or even rock stars becoming junkies and living a slothful and filthy existence. Ecstasy forms a pretty weak foundation for the big evil in this movie. But, functionally, it’s nothing but a McGuffin enabling a movie full of shooting and detonations of various items, as which it serves adequately.
So the action all starts in the first five minutes when our heroes infiltrate said peckerwoods moving said Ecstasy in a Klan meeting. There’s a gunfight, and Smith shoots Lawrence in his big bootay. This is the source of much strife between the partners, allowing Bay to insert some conversation between explosions and gunfights, thus keeping the total cost of the movie down while keeping its running time up.
And it is a long, long film — 150 minutes — but it doesn’t seem that long, because the budget is plenty large enough to provide action for what must be about 125 of those minutes. The biggest action sequence takes place when Gabrielle Union, playing Lawrence’s sister and an undercover DEA agent, is laundering the Ecstasy dealers’ money. The “Red Lectroids”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0086856 (in a cameo role), for some reason, try to hijack her and her money, resulting in what is certainly one of the best car chases I’ve ever seen. The Lectrods also hijack themselves a car transporter and drive down the freeway, dumping cars off at 70 miles per hour, trying to shake their police pursuers. There follow many good smash-ups, some explosions, and even a boat tumbling across the highway.
Further good action scenes include:
* A car chase involving a hearse that sheds bodies as it flees
* A gunfight in a ghetto house involving lots of trick shots through walls and aimed by mirrors
* A pitched battle with Cuban regulars
* A Jackie Chan-worthy car chase down a hill and through (literally through!) an apparently highly-explosive barrio
* A gunfight in a minefiled, culminating in the shooting of a bad guy, who dies, falls on a mine, and whose head is blown several feet into the air
Like the first Bad Boys movie, there’s also plenty of humor. A fairly weak running joke about above-ground pools breaking will nonetheless appeal to the older demographic taking their teenagers to this movie. Twentysomethings will enjoy the long heart-to-heart enjoyed by our heroes that is all, of course, inadvertently a discussion of gay butt sex. Teenagers will dig the gross-out morgue humor.
Girls can enjoy Will Smith looking classy and toned, while men get to gaze at Gabrielle Union, who is a useful upgrade from the original’s Tea Leoni but still a bit of an less prominent sex symbol (what with all she’s in this summer, I confess to a bit of surprise that Eva Mendes wasn’t in this movie too).
So, Bad Boys II is a movie with something for everyone, so long as you like lots of explosions, fast driving, and general continuous action. Fun movie, and a worthy successor to the Lethal Weapon series.















AOC

July 24, 2003 / posted in Food / 2 Comments

Okay, so first things first. Old people: AOC is just too loud for you. Especially early on before I got used to the noise level, I had to ask my Wonderful Girlfriend to repeat herself.
Now, said Wonderful Girlfriend and I were looking for a place to eat, and one of her cow-orkers recommended French bistro standby Lucques and its new bistro/tapas ofshoot AOC, in the trendy new 3rd Street corridor in West Hollywood. I’m a sucker for good bistro food, and had never been to Lucques, so I was all for it. The Wonderful Girlfriend, in contrast, has quite a thing for tapas, and wanted to try the hip newcomer. We went with her preference and, boy, did we end up doing good!
The space was, as I said, a bit loud, but really the bustle and noise contributed to the environment, which was something between European sidewalk cafe and Röckenwagner. Brightly lit, with adequate space between tables, square shapes everywhere, a color palette of cream and brown and an overall feeling of openness, AOC looks and feels different than most restaurants in this city. I took a few clandestine mobile phone camera shots at, at the entrance and just past:
snapshot: a good-sized room with people at several rows of tables
snapshot: happy diners at their tables, with a room in the back
With a wall of wine just as you enter and the wine bar (with bottles attached to taps!) immediately in front of you, AOC tells you what it’s about straight off. The wine list is four times as big as the menu, and presented twice as nicely. There’s dozens of wines by the glass — red, white, even sparkling — and even a couple of flights for you to sample with your meal.
The menu, although smaller, is no slouch. It’s four executive-sized pages, laser printed and bound with a classy but inexpensive metal clip — a great menu design both to project quality and to enable easy updates. The first page is cheeses, the second tapas and salads, the third main meats and fish and the last a selection of veggies. It’s apparently traditional to order a bit as you go, enjoying many courses — and the waitstaff is plenty attentive, and the kitchen plenty fast, to let you make things up as you go along. We started with smaller tapas, followed up with salads, then had meats.
The Wonderful Girlfriend chose lomo and chorizo sausages to open, while I had rilletes of pork, with roasted onions and cornichons. Sausages and pates are staples of French bistro food and appetizers, and it’s enhartening to see that AOC did quite so well with theirs. Her chorizo were spectacular, and, eaten together, the rilletes and onions were a charming medley of flavors. And, unlike most restaurants in LA, the portions may even have been excessive — for $8, enough to get the flavor and enjoy the texture would have done well, but these tapas were large enough to serve as a main course for many. Suffice it to say that we enjoyed our starters so much that I forgot to take pictures of them.
I did remember to shoot the wines, which were the perfect complement to the meal. With a variety of inexpensive wines by the glass, it’s easy to pair dishes and drinks. Some of our wines were truly excellent, including a standout St. Paul Chardonnay from Napa ordered by my Wonderful Girlfriend. I splurged and had two glasses of white and one of red.
snapshot: a glass of red and of white wine
We followed up with salads that may have actually been the highlight of the meal. The Wonderful Girlfriend chose a simpler salad with a buttermilk dressing, while I had a salad of fruit and arugula with peanuts. Both were featured dressings that were as good as the best of Escoffier’s sauces; the complexity and depth of flavors was unexpected in such simple dishes. Naturally, I took no pictures of these either; too busy eating wonderful food!
Salads like this are hard to follow up, but, if these were not the best dishes on the menu, then my Wonderful Girlfriend must have selected the one that was: Roasted lamb with an incredible squash puree. The reaction to the lamb was “mmm!” and “wow!” all at once.
I had pork cheeks with a mustard gremolata:
snapshot: a triangular pork cheek, roasted, with green and white gremolata on top
These were lovely, if not spectacular, and entirely different in flavor from the rilletes two courses earlier (indeed, it’s a problem with the dribbling-along method of ordering that one spends more time choosing the most attractive of the dishes in one’s target course than with pairing dishes between courses).
The main dishes were more of an appropriate size, big enough to be the focus of a meal but small enough that tapas could be ordered both before and after.
We finished with great desserts. The Wonderful Girlfriend asked for “the thing most like bread pudding on the menu” (for bread pudding is her particular thing), and got an italian pudding topped with fruit:
snapshot: fruit on top of what looks like a slice of pound cake
I can’t vouch for the quality of this dish, as it was entirely consumed before I had the opportunity to try some.
I, of course, can never pass up a cheese course, and ordered a combination of three cheeses, two goat’s milk and one sheep’s:
slices of three cheeses on a plate
Ordering cheeses is always an adventure, but our knowledgable waiter gave great explanations of the cheeses’ flavor and texture, explanations that clearly came from having sampled them. Two of the cheeses were good, and one, a classic goat’s cheese with an unexpected moldy (as opposed to charcoaly) rind, was spectacular. Sadly, I am still on my no-cow’s-milk diet and couldn’t have my favorite New Zealand Maytag Blue cheese, which AOC (like other trendy LA eateries) carries.
My one true disappointment with this course was the selections of wines to pair with desserts — although they had a half dozen ports and another half dozen or more sweet wines, the logical drink at this point is an eau de vie. A Poire William would have completed the evening perfectly, and would have faithfully recreated the selection available at a French cafe or Spanish tapas bar. But I did get a pot of tea brewed from fresh mint leaves — a fine second choice any day.
AOC was a fun new restaurant to try, and a sure addition to my regular rotation. It’s open late, and would be a great midnight destination for a group out to classy clubs. It would also be a great location for a party, with a dozen friends passing around various tapas plates and trying different wines. Highly recommended.















Sharp And Pointy!

July 23, 2003 / posted in Food / 2 Comments

One of the first things I discovered when I started to take cooking seriously as a hobby was just how important having a good knife is. For most home cooks, three or four good knives are enough — and spending just a little bit of money on them pays off big-time!
These are my knives:
three knives, one 8 in. long, one 6 in. chef's, one 4 in. chopper
Yes, I know, somehow I get along with no paring knife — I must be a philistine, especially in my presentation. In all honesty, I do wish the 8” knife were a 10”. I’d get more use from it then — it’s a little too close in length to the 6” chef’s knife in the middle. All three are great knives; the top and bottom are Globals, a trendy Japanese knife that gets oh so sharp, while the middle one is a nice reliable Wüsthof. All well-weighted full-tang beauties with that will last until I decide to splurge on that plasma vibro-knife after my big promotion in 2035.
The Globals were originally procured at the somewhat intimidating “Standard Cutlery & Supply Company”:http://ypng.infospace.com/_1_24YLTO10UVNRZO__info.zip/ypv3/detail.htm?qb=&recid=0018230467&xmlurl=http%3A%2F%2Fyp110.superpages.com%2Fxml%2Fdetail.phtml%3FT%3Dbeverly%2Bhills%26N%3Dstandard%2Bcutlery%26PG%3DL%26R%3DN%26SRC%3DInfospace%26S%3Dca%26AL%3D%26MC%3D%26map.x%3D212%26map.y%3D125%26level%3D8%26lat%3D034070477%26lng%3D-118404607%26POI1lat%3D034070477%26POI1lng%3D-118404607%26POI1name%3DStandard%2BCutlery%2B%2526%2BSupply%2BCO%26streetaddress%3D9509%2BSanta%2BMonica%2BBoulevard%26city%3DBeverly%2BHills%26state%3DCA%26zip%3D90210%26LID%3D0018230467%26LS%3D%26display%3D1%26AD%3D%26GV%3D0%26GL%3D%26FN%3D%26PP%3DN%26CID%3D&kcfg=ypus&ypinsp=0&resolve=location&searchtype=all&fromform=qsearch&qhqn=standard+cutlery&qn=standard+cutlery&qc=beverly+hills&qs=ca&qk=15&recid=0018230467 in Beverly Hills. I say intimidating for two reasons:
# The staff is all quite knowledgeable about knives and will call you on any mistakes you make in discussing your desired cutlery with them.
# The guy who does the sharpening will call you out for any signs of abuse to your blade.
# They stock a crapload of knives.
This is what you are surrounded by when you enter the store:
display cases of knife after knife
And this is what you see behind the counter:
easily 50 knives behind the counter
Ah! Here are more Globals! Drool…
a wide selection of knives by the Global company
I picked up a few knives to give as gifts to a few friends who love to cook; the nice people at Standard sold me some nice stuff for just $30-$50, good starter knives that my friends can do awful things to without feeling guilty.
In a month or so, I’ll need to get my knives sharpened, they’re starting to really show their use. The only challenge then will be to suppress my lust for a good cleaver and a passable parer. Remarkably enough, I’m actually thinking of going serrated for that latter item.
I’d love to get a flexible boning knife but it won’t be until I save up enough $$$ to take some real cooking school classes that I’ll know how to use such a thing.















Do Blogs Belong In Google?

July 22, 2003 / posted in Tech / 1 Comment

“Matt Haughey”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archives.blah/007181 has recently added his name to the row being raised by “The Register”:http://theregister.co.uk suggesting that blogs be removed from search results at Google. Now, when an A-list blogger and longtime proponent of the medium suggests such a thing, well, it may be time to seriously consider the proposition.
The controversy centers around a simple set of observations:
# People use Google extensively to search for stuff on the Web
# The ability to find stuff is key to the usefulness of the Web
# Therefore, it’s important that Google continue to return high-quality results
# But, increasingly, blogs are showing up as top results in many searches
# This is because blogs are frequently-updated, heavily linked-to, and link, in turn, to other heavily linked-to sites
# Blogs also tend to have better-structured information that Google’s bots have an easier time handling and relating to other information
# As a consequence of blogs being rated so high in search results, sites selling items and news sites reviewing items receive comparatively low rankings in search results
# It is these news and sales sites that users are trying to find
# Blogs, therefore, obscure the sites that users are looking for
Writers at The Register have long held that blogs should be removed from Google results before they drown out all other results. But that position relies on assertion #8 above being true. I tend to disagree with that, and here’s why:
* Searchers on the Web are looking for relatively specific information
* This information involves specific items (concepts, etc.)
* Searchers are looking for information on these items (concepts, etc.) that is _relevant to them and their particular situation_
* Sales (advocacy, etc.) sites provide only information designed to turn the visitor into a customer
* News and review sites provide information targeted at a wide demographic, or at a very specific (and usually clear) demographic
* Bloggers provide information about their knowledge and experiences
So, what of the above information best matches the searcher’s needs? Well:
* Sales sites only match if the searcher is planning to make a purchase _and_ if the searcher is not going to make that purchase from a well-known and trusted store, such as amazon.com, bestbuy.com, etc.
* News and review sites only match if the user is in their demographic
* A blogger may have experienced _exactly_ the same set of needs or events that the searcher has — they may have looked around for a new religion, or tried to buy a DVD burner, or whatever.
To me, it looks as if the blog result may actually be the _most_ relevant of all listed. For instance, Matt Haughey talks about his TiVo blog turning up as a high result for TiVo searches. That’s exactly the site I’d be looking for, with information on usage and upgrading and personal experiences that might be like mine. Why drop it?
Now, blogs aren’t perfect. They tend to be incestuous, absorbed with minutae and even masturbatory. Worst of all, some lack any kind of peer review or outside responsibility (some bloggers, however, have made their name from providing high-quality information on their sites — and it’s these who are the most-linked and therefore would likely turn up highest in Google results). Some proportion of blogs are likely to be the _worst_ results returned. It’s probably best to remove those results. But how do we do this without removing blogs in general? Here’s a few ideas:
# Relegate blogs to a different section of Google, and return no results in standard searches. This fails the smell test because it discards a substantial portion of useful results.
# Let the user selectively exclude blogs from search returns. This is a reasonable approach, although it begs the definition of a blog. It also would likely have to be relegated to Google’s advanced search options, given that company’s unwillingness to complicate their front page in the past.
# Maintain a higher standard of accountability for blogs. Google bases much of its ranking on the quality of incoming and outgoing links on a site. If blogs were required to have more (or better) links to achieve the same PageRank as a non-blog site, this would mitigate the excessive influence of _most_ blogs, while still ensuring that the best bloggers got the results that they deserved — and that searchers were looking for. Again, this begs the definition of blogs and also is invisible to the user, who doesn’t know that certain sites are being rated comparatively poorly.
None of these approaches are perfect, but some combination of the three (in fact, *all* could be implemented) would increase the quality of Google’s search results without excluding a large pool of potentially useful sites.















The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

July 22, 2003 / posted in Reviews / 2 Comments

First of all, “The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0311429 is, as my girlfriend pointed out, a guy movie. Second of all, it’s a fun movie. Third of all, the early buzz that it was going to completely die in the summer movie buzzsaw seems to have been somewhat overly cautious; it’s no blockbuster, but it’s making money.
And why not? It’s got fun characters and good actors. Sure, there’s flaws (more on those later), but everything’s got flaws. LXG (as they like to call it) is, nonetheless, a movie that can be appreciated for what it is, a good time for guys.
There’s a certain conflict in LXG, and it’s not between the good guys and the bad guys — it’s a fundamental question, is this a movie about gadgets or a movie about superheroes? The director, or whoever, holds off on deciding until the very end, when the climax is all various people and their particular role in the big fight. It’s a good denouement, and it follows from what’s gone before, but if you just saw the first and last ten minutes of the film you’d say “Where did these people come from? What happened to all the wonderful gadgets?”
Wonderful gadgets aboud throughout the film. Machineguns, tanks, even missiles take center stage during different scenes. They’re all brilliantly visually executed, in keeping with the movie’s setting of 1999. One favorite is Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, all decked out in art deco metal-plated bunting and with the shape of a flintlock musket. But, it seems, we can’t decide how big the darned thing is — in one scene it’s dozens of feet across, in the next it fits in the Venice canals. Perhaps Captain Nemo is actually a Timelord, Nautilus a Tardis, and the inside of his submarine is infinite. It would not be inappropriate for the movie.
The characters are finely done as well. Sean Connery of course dominates the screen as white hunter Alan Quartermain. The parts of The Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde) are sympathetically played and well enough developed to build a real connection with the audience. The real standout is Peta Wilson’s Mena Harker, made a vampire by Dracula. She plays her role with the appropriate violence and eroticism while preserving the demure aspect of a 19th century woman.
But there are weaknesses in the gadgets and the people. It’s the person with the most gadgets — Nemo — who’s the worst developed, and the person with the most personality — Quartermain — whose gadgets (wonderful hunting weapons, after all!) are the most overlooked. Other gadgets and powers are simply overlooked — for instance, there appear to be robots running around with flamethrowers, but I’m not quite sure of that. And Mena’s primordial lust for blood is only noted in the most minimal way.
It is probably the plot that is the greatest weakness of this movie. I’ve not read the graphic novel, so it may be that the script was simply an adaptation of that; in that case, much was lost. It proceeds along herky-jerky, with no overall arc but a few major forced developments. Venice? Mongolia? Much of the action could have taken place, frankly, anywhere, and the script probably would have profited from not taking place in such unique locales, as they distracted from the real action.
The greatest disappointment, however, is the cinematography. Oh, it’s fine, and probably quite authentic as the colors and composition are always reminiscent of a comic book. But this movie takes place in London, Venice and Outer Mongolia. Is there no opportunity for a shot that blows us away? No chance to say, hey, let’s make this movie gritty in London, beautiful and sensual in Venice, and cold and empty in Mongolia? It was the same throughout, and so failed to build atmosphere. This probably also dragged down the plot, for, with all locales seeming the same, why move around the world?
All in all, it was a good effort, and well set up for (and probably deserving) a sequel. But let’s drop the LXG thing, it’s just silly. A movie about 1899 isn’t hip — it’s cool, it’s exciting, it’s engrossing, but it’s never hip.















The Santa Monica Farmer’s Market Accident: Did The Car Cause It?

July 20, 2003 / posted in Usability/HCI / No Comments

There was this awful accident in Santa Monica last week — an elderly driver got in a minor fender-bender, got confused and drove into the street Farmer’s Market, which was packed with pedestrians and farmers peddling their goods. He killed more than ten people, including a two-year-old girl and an elderly survivor of Stalin’s oppression.
There are a great many issues that have been found already to have contributed to the accident, from the initial fender-bender to the fact that Santa Monica only used wooden sawhorses, not concrete Jersey barriers or metal posts, to stop traffic from entering the Farmer’s Market, which was on Second Street itself.
One factor that hasn’t been discussed much is the proximal cause of the accident, admitted by the driver — he confused the brakes and the gas and floored it while he meant to brake. “According to the LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-me-pedal18jul18,1,3118417.story?coll=la-news-a_section, this is a common error and has happened more than 10,000 times in the past 20 years. Apparently, it’s particularly common among older drivers.
But it’s not that odd of an accident, when you think about it. A driver doesn’t normally look at the pedals at all, and on some cars they’re basically impossible to see when you’re driving. We don’t expect people to carry out any other tasks in which they can’t see what they’re doing — sure, people touch-type, but many more hunt-and-peck. It’s only in driving that virtually every single person is expected to be able to carry out major tasks — operating the pedals — while they attend to another, substantially different task, working the wheel. The nature of this task seems to increase the chance of errors just like the tragic one that took place in Santa Monica, in which the operator makes a serious mistake in the secondary, non-viewable task.
The software project manager in me wants to fix the interface to reduce the chance of this error. For instance, we might move the throttle control and brakes to the wheel column, a configuration already used by the disabled. Or we might put switches on the wheel itself, near where drivers’ hands should be. Usually, fixing a broken interface involves just this kind of an approach — thinking outside of the box to place controls and options in more useful, reasonable places.
But driving is a special case — dozens of millions are already trained in using the existing system. And learning a new system always results in an increased rate of errors, errors we can’t afford in a new throttle control system (after all, the goal is to reduce the rate of injuries). So, we need to work from the existing approach and expand or adjust it prudently to limit the kind of errors that are our targets. I can think of two reasonable modifications:
* Display a light on the dashboard to indicate acceleration. This light should be hooked to the pedal itself — perhaps pressing the pedal could close a circuit. A company could probably fairly easily produce a kit that garages could install on existing cars. This light would inform people when they’re accelerating by command (as opposed to by accident), so, if they’re expecting to stop, there will be visual evidence that they’re using the gas pedal. The LA Times article states that elderly drivers accidentally press the gas rather than the brakes at a much higher rate than younger drivers; elderly drivers already modify their vehicles with accessories like curb feelers, so it’s likely they’d be willing to add a gadget such as this. The heads-up displays on high-end cars could also be tweaked to display information on acceleration.
* The gas pedal on automatic transmission cars could be moved to the left, where the clutch currently is. The gas and the brakes are really only next to each other because they need to be operated in unison with the clutch, but most cars these days are automatic transmission (and people who select manual transmissions attend more to driving and are probably less likely to confuse the gas with the brakes). So why not use that space left free by the deletion of the clutch to contain the gas pedal? People currently drive with their right feet, so by putting the new gas pedal under their left foot you minimize the chance of them accidentally accelerating. Braking, however, will continue to be natural and operate as expected.
Stupid ideas? Probably so. What did you expect? You’re reading the blog of some idiot from LA. But if there’s really more than 1000 cases every year in which drivers confuse the gas and the brakes, well, let’s test some modifications and see if they result in any decrease in accidents. I’d bet that the latter option presented above would have prevented the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market accident, and that the former would have drastically decreased the death toll.















Morningsomnia

July 19, 2003 / posted in Dreams / 1 Comment

For the past week or so, I’ve been waking up — regardless of what time I go to sleep — at sometime between 5 and 6 am. I’m tired, but I’ve slept enough off that I’m wired and can’t get back to sleep. If I do stuff for about an hour, maybe two, I work off some of that nervous energy and can go back to sleep (thus this post).
See, I’m big on sleep. I love it, and it loves me back. I’m an 8 hours guy, every night, maybe 10 or 12 once on the weekend. Sure, I can do less and feel fine if there’s a reason — but for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, our ancestors have been sleeping more than 8 hours a day, with the exception of a few days around harvest time. It’s what my body’s evolved for, why should I deny it?
So not getting sleep — and particularly, waking up when I’m specifically planning to be sleeping — is annoying. And then I need to sleep in later, because otherwise I’ll be tired all day long and fall asleep while I’m driving to my wonderful girlfriend’s, crashing my car into a tree or, if it’s a Friday night or Saturday, one of the many Hasidic Jews walking to and fro.
This morning I woke up at 6 am, after a dream about a hot new comedy variety show on Fox. You know you’ve been living in LA way too long when you dream up TV show concepts. But this one, see, it involved funny comics, customized matching New Beetles, and said comics jumping said Beetles through a ring of fire. I really think this is a can’t-miss concept.
Okay, it’s 7:30, I’ve got to find a way to get back to sleep so I can get up and go out with my friends and do important things like paying my bills.
Although, if I could turn this dream into a TV show, well, that should pay the bills pretty well, eh?















Look, Ma, It’s A Facelift!

July 12, 2003 / posted in Meta / 2 Comments

Now I’ve had this here blog/diary up for nearly two months now, and maybe it was getting a little embarrassing that I was still using the default template provided with every installation of Movable Type, seeing as I’m supposed to be a professional Web designer and all.
See, the concept all along was that I would write, not design, but it’s true the two are linked. I preach this to my clients all the time, really — your look is part of the message that people take away from your site, so make sure you mean the way you look — and maybe it came time for me to swallow some of my own medicine.
The color scheme wasn’t the hard part. When your site’s named after your bird, and your bird is white, several shades of gray, and yellow, well, yer palette’s pretty much picked out for ya. No, the real challenge was of the visual architecture of information on the page, and in particular the main page that everyone will visit most often. Fortunately, organizing information is one skill that I actually have.
So, you’ll find on this page several key elements:

  1. This main entry here, occupying the choice space on the page
  2. The weblog to the right, a list of links of the moment
  3. Navigation options, allowing you, my beloved visitor, to browse the site both by date (which is interesting in its own way), and by topic, which holds together a bit better
  4. Links to my friends, who are interesting and whom you should visit!

And hopefully the visual presentation will draw your eyes to these items in succession and whatnot, and even make you suspect that those of the above items that lay “below the fold” exist despite their initial invisibility.
Of course, even if the design does none of these, I’ll still have succeeded, because this is my site, and this page looks like I wanted it to, so, hey, that’s success. Thbppt!
There’s a few bugs still left; most notably, the blog doesn’t display right in IE/Windows. That’s because my approach was to remove all the space between headlines and paragraphs and so on, then add in new space between entries. IE/Win doesn’t understand how I added in new space (technically, it doesn’t understand adjacent sibling selectors), so it doesn’t add that space in. Thus everything looks all jammed together. Of course, everyone else sees it fine. I’ll probably have to reverse the method I use and just subtract space in specific situations, which will result in IE/Win showing the blog too spaced out (because, again, it won’t understand the selectors I use to subtract space), but I think that’ll be easier to read.
Enjoy your visit! If you have any comments, or catch any more bugs, hey, make a comment!















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