Country Music Songs...

Via my mom, who loves Country & Western music.  I'd never figured out why, but now I begin to understand.  I might have to listen to a few of the songs mentioned here:

Art Collmeyer...

Yesterday I heard from my friend Cliff F. that a former colleague of ours, Art Collmeyer, had died this past September at age 70.  I knew him mainly from his time as CEO of Stac spin-off HiFn, nearly 20 years ago.

My fondest memory of Art involves, of all things, email.  I was running the IT team at Stac at the time, and Art asked me to come talk with his secretary about an email problem.  I went to her desk, and asked what the problem was.  The problem, she said, was that each time Art replied to an email, it had her return address on it.  I told her that Art must have some configuration issue on his email, and I'd better go see him.  “No, no,” she said.  “You don't understand.  I answer Art's email for him!”

Upon some investigation, I discovered that a couple times a day Art's secretary would log into his email, forward all Art's email to herself, log into her email, print out all the new ones, and hand the papers to Art – who would then scribble his answers onto the printout and hand them back to his secretary.  The she logged back into her email and replied, transcribing Art's scribbles.  The solution was easy – I just told her to stop forwarding Art's emails to herself, and to simply reply from Art's account.  Problem solved.  But then I went in to talk with Art to find out why he did his email this way.  I've forgotten the words he used, but with fine humor he told me that he considered it a waste of his time to learn how to use email.  He knew perfectly well how to write an answer with a pen, and he had far better things to do with his time than to learn this new-fangled thing called email!

I recall one other conversation I had with Art, when he somehow discovered that back in the '80s I had done some design work on special effects generators for TV stations.  It turns out that he had been involved in some of the early digital graphics efforts, and his company had identified the TV stations as a potential market for them.  To this day, he's the only other person I've ever met who had a detailed knowledge of that market.

Above all, though, I remember Art as a genuinely nice guy – something that is far from universal for people with achievements like his own.  I'm saddened to hear of his death...

More info here and here...

Brushing Rocks on Mars...

Martian rocks are covered with a thick layer of reddish dust and dirt, largely obscuring the actual characteristics of the rocks themselves.  Curiosity carries a rotating wire brush – a kind of Martian whisk broom – designed to clean off rocks so that its instruments can get a clear view.  It just made the first use of this tool; results at right.  I'd say it worked pretty well!

Lakes With Ice – on Titan!?!

The intrepid Cassini robot explorer is still zipping around the Saturnian system, returning reams and reams of great science data.  One product of recent close passes to Saturn's moon Titan is high-resolution radar images of the Titanian surface (one of these is at right).

The bright areas on this image are from ground areas covered with frozen methane “ice”; these areas reflect radar well.  The dark areas are suspected of being liquid methane “lakes”.  Some of these are quite large, about like the U.S. Great Lakes.  But look closely, and you'll see some lake-shaped areas that are of intermediate brightness.  Scientists think these are lakes of liquid methane that are partially covered with frozen methane ice.

Titan is one of the most fascinating objects in our solar system.  The surface gravity is just 0.14g, or about 1/7th of Earth's.  The atmospheric pressure is about 50% higher than Earth's, but it's very cold (just above -300°F) and it has no oxygen.  Even so, biologists think that its at least possible that there might be life on Titan.  I would love to see a Curiosity-style rover exploring Titan...

Even More Linux Commands...

Another nice collection of Linux command line tricks...

Things I Did Not Know...

What's the difference between “Holland” and “The Netherlands”?  The answer is much more interesting – and involved –  than I expected it to be!

Domino Amplification...

It never occurred to me that the physics of dominoes would be interesting:

Domino...

Oatmeal's latest comic; a story about a cat named Domino.  It's a sad story with a happy ending...

The Art of the Rant...

When it comes to producing collectible rants, few living authors can match Megan McArdle.  She's just published another fine one, this time on the (apparently dead serious) proposal by some Democrats (and their fanboys) to mint a few trillion dollar platinum coins and use them to pay off the national debt.  An excerpt from Megan's beautiful rant on the subject:

The Great Platinum Coin Caper is everything that is wrong with Washington: a stupid partisan maneuver that erodes the institutions of our government for no gain other than an immediate political win. The only good thing that can be said about it is that the President seems to be too sensible to actually consider doing it. Nonetheless, the fact that intelligent people like Professor Krugman are even discussing this debacle, much less endorsing it, is a depressing reminder of just how nasty and short-sighted our nation’s capital has become.

When I was reporting on Wall Street, I used to be told with some regularity that government was needed to counteract the short-term thinking of the business sector, who never thought much beyond the next quarterly earnings report. This now seems as quaintly adorable as picture hats and daily milk deliveries. An ADHD day trader with a cocaine habit and six months to live has considerably more long-term planning skills than our current congress.

That last sentence is my quote of the day.  You will most definitely want to go read the whole beautiful thing!

Officers vs. Enlisted, Part 38,205...

For the record, I was an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy.  I was not an officer.  Via reader Jim M.:

A new Marine Captain was assigned to an outfit in a remote post in the Afghanistan Desert . During his first inspection of the outfit, he noticed a Camel hitched up behind the mess tent.

He asks the Sergeant why the camel is kept there.

The nervous sergeant said, ‘Well sir, as you know, there are 250 men here on the post and no women. And sir, sometimes the men have ‘urges’. That’s why we have Molly The Camel.’

The Captain says, ‘I can’t say that I condone this, but I understand about ‘urges’, so the camel can stay.’

About a month later, the Captain starts having his own ‘urges’. Crazy with passion, he asks the Sergeant to bring the camel to his tent. Putting a ladder behind the camel, the Captain stands on the ladder, pulls his pants down and has wild, insane sex with the camel. When he’s done, he asks the Sergeant,’Is that how the men do it?’

‘Not really, sir. They usually just ride the camel into town. Where the girls are.’

On What Planet Does This Make Sense?

On Planet California, of course.  The Reader's Digest version:

An attorney works for a law firm with many attorneys.  He steals money from one of the law firm's clients.  The law firm fires him.  The fired lawyer tries to collect unemployment benefits, which by law are not paid to people fired for “cause”.  The California Employment Development Department, or EDD (the bureaucracy that makes these decisions) rules that the attorney can collect unemployment benefits – because the law firm in question did not have an explicit, written policy forbidding stealing from customers.

I'm not kidding.  This really happened.  Actually, it happens every day – I can't recall a case where the California EDD ever ruled against an employee.

We're doomed.

Much more here, courtesy of CoyoteBlog...

Another Very Fine Rachel Rant...

This time on gun control and the 2nd Amendment...

Nest...

Yesterday we received our new thermostat, called a “Nest”, 2nd generation.  Ours is just like the photo at right.  We bought it to replace a roughly 10 year old thermostat we'd purchased from a now-defunct home automation company.  Our old thermostat had a very conventional display and controls, which means it was very difficult to use, along the same lines as modern electronic watches.  It did have the ability to “talk” on the network, but the software for it was just awful, and only worked on Windows.

I'd heard about the Nest thermostat some months ago from a colleague.  I figured I'd wait until the bugs had been worked out (and there are inevitably bugs!), and until some reviews came in.  Last week I heard about the second generation version, which I could reasonably hope worked out some bugs from the first generation.  Also I found some reviews, which ranged from merely positive to all-out fanboy ravings.  So I took the plunge and ordered it.

A slight aside: a frequent comment I see about the Nest is that it's expensive – and at $250, compared to a $40 or $50 conventional electronic thermostat, it is.  But really that's about like comparing a bicycle with a Toyota – you're not talking about the same kind of device at all.  I don't know about you, but I expect to pay more for the Toyota than for the bicycle (though there are some darned expensive bicycles these days!).  Clearly there is more cost in the Toyota, and for most of my travel needs, much more benefit.  So I'm willing to pay extra for it.  Ditto with a thermostat.  It's something that I use at least twice each and every day, and it controls something expensive to run, so I'm willing to pay a little more for it.  And just for comparison purposes, at $250, the Nest was less than half the price I paid for our previous thermostat!

Yesterday afternoon I set off to install the Nest.  When I opened the box, the first thought I had was “Apple!”.  That is, the packaging looked like something you'd buy from Apple, right down to the choices in packing materials.  The presentation was a little work of art, just like opening a box from Apple.  Someone paid close attention even to this detail.

What was in the box surprised me (I hadn't read anything at all about installing the Next prior to buying it).  First surprise: it comes with a quite nice little screwdriver, with an ergonomic handle and a magnetically secured dual flat blade/Phillips head screwdriver – the only tool I needed to install it.  Nice!  Second surprise: the installation booklet came with a set of wire labels, so that I could label all the old wires before removing them.  This is a very nice detail, and I'm sure it saves them a lot of time on support calls.  Third surprise: it comes with an assortment of mounting adapters that will let you mount the Nest in any circumstance I can imagine.  In our case, our old thermostat was (much) larger than the Nest, so we had a big, rectangular hole in the wall.  No problem; the Nest's box includes a white plastic plate designed to handle this precise issue.  Nice, Nest.

It took me perhaps five minutes to remove my old thermostat and label the old wires.  Then perhaps another five minutes to install the Nest's base plate and connect the (labeled!) wires to it.  Then I snapped in the actual Nest.  The installation instructions basically end at this point, with a sentence that tells you to follow the on-screen directions to finish setting up the Nest.  There's a web URL in case you get in trouble, but otherwise, that's it.

So when my Nest powered up, I really didn't know what to expect.  I was actually a bit surprised at this point, as I expected to have to first attach the Nest to my computer to set it up (I could see the micro-USB port on its bottom).  But the installation booklet made it clear that the setup was performed through the Nest itself.  The reason this surprised me is that the Nest's “user interface” is pretty darned basic: you can twist it clockwise or counter-clockwise, and you can push it to “click” it – but that's it.  No more user interface!  So I wondered how on earth I would, say, enter my WiFi password?

The answer delighted me, in fact I laughed out loud (which quite amused Debbie).  When you get to the point where you need to enter information, the Nest's display shows a circle of possibilities (such as the letters of the alphabet).  Then you just twist the Nest to select the one you want, and push it to “click” and select it.  That's it!  It took me no more than five more minutes to get it connected to our WiFi and to handle the other bits of its setup.

There was one little scary bit, though.  During the setup, there is a stage where the Nest tells you what sort of equipment it detected.  In our home we have both a heater and an air conditioner, but the Nest reported only finding an air conditioner.  In our case we have five wires connected to our thermostat, and I made the connections blindly following their directions – I had no idea which wire did what.  I remembered that when I installed our old thermostat, I basically had to reverse-engineer our heating and cooling system to figure out precisely what each wire did, then figure out which of the numerous terminals on the thermostat to connect them to.  I recall that it took me several tries to get it working.  Naturally, that got me imagining that I was about to go through the same thing again.

But first I thought I'd double-check that I'd actually installed the wires correctly.  So I pulled the Nest off it's mount and looked at my wiring job.  Oops!  The white wire wasn't actually in its little socket!  I pushed it into place and secured it, popped the Nest back on, and voila!  A little screen came up telling me that the Nest had detected an equipment change – and that now I had both a heater and an air conditioner.  Yay!

Next, I went to Nest's web site and registered my Nest.  That allows me to control my Nest from any web browser.  Sweet!  Then I went to the Apple app store, and downloaded the free Nest app – and now I can control my Nest from my iPhone.  Super sweet!  And all that took me another five minutes, tops.  The Nest people have made this a very painless process.

I don't have much experience with actually using the Nest yet.  I can report that it does the things you'd expect a thermostat to do (turn the heater on when it's too cold, turn the air conditioner on when its too hot), but I can't report on the Nest's vaunted learning features yet.  That will take a few weeks, as the Nest builds its knowledge of our habits.  What I can report on is what the geeks would call the “user interface” – what it's like for a human to actually use the thing.  Our Nest is mounted in our hallway, and we're finding the user interface to be as natural and simple as an old-fashioned mechanical thermostat.  The main thing one needs to do with a thermostat is to set the desired temperature, and on the Nest you do that by turning the dial.  It feels very natural, very simple.  There are separate set points for the heater and the air conditioner, and switching between them is just a click.  Again, simple and natural.  The fancier features are available from a menu, and while that's not quite as simple as setting the temperature, it's darned close.  Best of all: you don't need to remember anything all, as the screen provides all the reminders anyone would need.

I've left out one of our favorite features of the Nest's user interface: it detects your presence in front of it, and turns its screen on.  That's a very simple idea, but one that delights both of us.

Compared with our old thermostat, the Nest's user interface is spectacularly usable – but that's mostly a statement about how bad the old one was :)

The web site and iPhone apps are not quite as impressive.  They're fine, and easy enough to use – they just didn't delight me in the same way the Nest itself did.  In particular, the iPhone app doesn't let you use rotation the same way the Nest itself does.  I'd love to be able to move a set point by dragging it around the dial with my finger, but I can't – instead, I have to “click” on an up or down button.  Perfectly functional, but not the same experience as the Nest.  I can imagine that some might actually find it confusing, simply because it's different than the Nest itself.  But the fact that I can now check – and change – my thermostat from anywhere at all, any time at all, more than makes up for my picky complaints about the iPhone user interface!

Bottom line: two thumbs up for the Nest...