Truth In Business Cards December 3, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Business Cards, Interfaces
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I get handed a lot of business cards. Some get keyed into my address book; most do not. All get thrown away. And many suffer from the same problem: unnecessary labels.
Why do people have business cards that needlessly prefix their phone number with the label “Telephone?” Is that really necessary? Is there anyone, anywhere in the world that does not recognize a lengthy string of digits as some sort of telephone number? Do you really need to take up precious space on the card to clarify that number? Do you think a lot of people mistake a phone number for some odd post office box or extended zip code? Me neither. Yet, there it is.
Some would argue that cards with multiple numbers need to clarify which number is which. I agree. But let’s agree that your main number doesn’t need further elucidation. For your cell phone, a simple “C” would suffice. And honestly, why are you putting a fax number on your card? When is the last time you faxed something to anyone without first calling to confirm that you were going to do it? For the two faxes you send each year, call their main number, ask for the fax number, and you’re good to go.
Even worse are those cards that label your email address as “Email” or (the worst) “Email Address.” Let’s face it, if a person doesn’t realize that the odd string of characters with an “@” in the middle is an email address, the odds of them successfully knowing how to use that address are pretty slim. Let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that we can all successfully find the email address on a business card.
Finally, drop the separate listing of your company’s web site. It’s only there because someone in marketing thought this would be a great way to drive traffic to the site. If your email address is correct, I already know what your company URL should be. If I can’t figure out that prefixing “www.” to your email domain name does the trick, I’ve got bigger problems. And if your company web site isn’t the same as your email domain, your company has bigger problems than both of us.
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What’s Under A Tree? November 26, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Conundrums
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Why isn’t there an enormous hole under every tree?
Plant a seed and a tree grows. Small at first, but becoming huge, until a multi-ton organism towers over your head. Everything above you was once below you, drawn in microscopic amounts from the ground through the roots and sent upward to form new branches and leaves.
Granted, a lot of the tree is water, but a lot of it is not. A tree is just hundreds and hundreds of pounds of minerals and base elements, attractively arranged in the shape of an elm or maple. If all those elements were drawn from the ground under the tree, why isn’t there a hole of equal size under the tree? Why doesn’t the tree slowly slump into the ground as it grows? Just the volume of dead leaves each year is easily larger than a toddler; is there a new toddler-sized cavity under each tree each year?
I’ll concede that equivalent material may be drawn from around the tree to replace what was pulled up to create it, so that may be the answer in the wild. But what about potted plants? I have a plant in my office that has more than doubled in size in the past year. Originally eighteen inches tall, it’s now easily over three feet, but it still lives in a little pot no more than eight inches square and three inches deep. I’m guessing that if I took all the new growth on the plant and crushed and compressed it into a block, the block would not fit in the pot. How can this be?
I await any rational explanation.
Another Ancient Artifact November 3, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings, Technology.Tags: Computing, History
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I had another “really old” moment with my son the other day. My first job out of college was with Harris Corporation, and I was explaining how Harris evolved from a company called Radiation. Back in the 1950s, Radiation got its start building telemetry equipment for the space program. I told my son that it was very clever technology for the time, capturing real-time data from rockets and recording it on magnetic tape.
And then I got the blank look. “Magnetic tape? What’s that?”
Certainly we haven’t reached this point with magnetic tape, have we? I scrambled for some common point. Finally I settled on cassette tapes. “Remember how we used to have those cassette tapes? The tape in them is magnetic tape. It’s plastic, coated with iron oxide, and you can record data and music on it. The telemetry was recorded on tape like that, but wider.”
My son nodded in understanding, but it was clear that this was a distant memory, at best. And why not? He grew up in the tail end of the CD era, the last physical media we’ll probably ever know. He manages his data online, shuttled between various devices via networks both large and small. He still likes to buy CDs for the cover art and liner notes, but immediately rips them to iTunes and puts the CD on his shelf.
I’m proud to report that I actually have a nine-track, 6250 bpi tape. (That’s bits per inch, by the way. Much denser than the old 1600 bpi tapes.)
When I moved from my first job at Harris (writing compilers) to my second (researching parallel computer architectures) I dumped all my mainframe programs to tape in case I would ever need them again. Fat chance! I’ve never read that tape, and I’ve never had a need for a crucial snippet of PL/I to complete a project. But I still have that tape because, well, you never know if the need will arise. Now, I just need to track down a nine-track, 6250 bpi tape reader. And a matching channel controller for it. And an IBM mainframe. And a 3270 console. Ebay, perhaps?
My Book Signing October 29, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Best Of 2008, Humility
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I once wrote a book called HTML: The Definitive Guide. As the title implies, it is not so much as blockbuster bodice-ripper as it is a technical book. It covers everything you ever wanted or needed to know about creating web pages using raw HTML. When it first came out in 1996, HTML was all the rage and the book was favorably received among those who know their attributes from their end tags.
But this is not a tale of technology, but one of humility.
Needless to say, when my book was first published I was very excited. The book even hit #1 on Amazon’s technology book charts for a while, which was kind of cool. So you can imagine my excitement when my publisher, O’Reilly & Associates, called to say that my local bookstore wanted to sponsor a book signing.
A book signing! This was the real deal! I imagined sitting at a table, a stack of books to the side, a line of people trailing off into the store, engaging in brief but fascinating small talk as each prospective web author came up to get their book signed by the Author.
So the big day came. I arrived at the store and found that they even had a sign announcing the big event. Wow! There was my table, and a stack of books, and a few pens. I took a seat and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And no one came. No one. I sat and smiled, hands neatly folded on the table, as shoppers came and went, buying real books that they would actually read. For over an hour, I sat. Most people awkwardly looked the other way as they passed by my table.
And then, a woman approached. Yes! She paused, looked at my sign, and asked, “Is your book about the Internet?”
“Yes! Yes it is!” (sort of, but at this point, my book would be anything she needed)
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Absolutely! How can I help you?” (By now, I actually had a pen in hand)
“I have a computer at home, and it has one of those modem cards in it. And on the back of my computer, where the card is, there are two places to plug in the phone wire. One is labeled ‘Line’ and the other is labeled ‘Phone.’ Which one do I plug the wire from the wall into?”
“You should plug it into the one labeled ‘Line.'”
“Oh. OK. Thanks!”
And she was gone. I put down my pen.
No one else came. I never signed a single book that night.
Sometimes things that mean a lot to us don’t mean so much to everyone else. And sometimes things that mean very little to us mean a whole lot to someone else. And sometimes we can have a very difficult time telling which is which.
Where Does This Go? October 27, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Automobiles
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This weekend my son found a bolt lying in our driveway, where I normally park my car.
Sigh. I had a lot of work done on my car last week, all of which seemed to go well. The goal was to stop stuff from dripping out of the engine (accomplished) and to replace the timing belt (presumably accomplished). I also put on new wiper blades, but there were no bolts involved with that.
I inspected the bolt carefully. Covered with grime and oil. No apparent wrench marks on the head. No shiny threads, indicated that it had recently been loosened. No, based upon my expert mechanical analysis, this bolt looked… inactive.
I completed my diligent investigation by doing what any guy would do. I lifted the hood and looked at the engine. There were no obvious open bolt holes. In fact, all of the bolts I could see were pretty clean, furthering bolstering my “inactive” assessment. While in there, I topped off my windshield washer fluid. (I have got wiper-related maintenance covered).
The car runs fine. Nothing is clattering (a sure sign of missing bolts) or dripping (possibly bolt-related, I’m sure). Plus, I have to believe that really important engine parts are attached with more than one bolt, so nothing is going to immediately fall off the car. What to do?
Loyal readers know that I do not like taking my car to the shop. Still, this cannot be ignored. So I will take the car back to the shop, bolt in hand, and ask, “Where should I put this bolt?”
I’ll let you know what they say.
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