Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Impressive

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Wally World does not often impress me but they did on Friday.

The Internoodle is rife with estimates of Wal-Mart’s cost to We the Overtaxed People, protests over sprawl, criticism of their labor practices in this country and the labor conditions in supplier factories around the globe, complaints about unfair treatment specifically of the women who work in the stores and Supercenters, shoddy assembly of most consumer goods driven by the way the firm has reshaped manufacturing around the world, and far more.

Opponents of a planned Wal-Mart here in North Puffin have protested for almost two decades.

PBS reported, “Wal-Mart’s [Vermont] opponents argue that the state’s economy and culture would be damaged by the retailer’s presence. In California, opponents say the company has cost taxpayers millions by shortchanging its employees on healthcare.”

Every bit of the superstore v. Main Street argument is absolutely true.

Wal-Mart built their fourth Vermont store, a 150,000 square-foot box, in Williston in 1997. I shopped there on Friday.

So did a lot of other people from North Puffin because we don’t have a department store in this county.

We didn’t need any other shopperamas a decade ago because we still had Ames back then but Ames closed all its retail stores here in 2002. Since then, pretty much everyone in Northwestern Vermont has had only a couple of choices for sox and underwear: buy them at the supermarket or the Dollar store or pay the I-89 tax to drive an hour to the big box center in the next county.

So I spent the $27.50 in gas to drive the truck to Williston on Friday because we don’t have a department store any closer than that. I also had to go to the Sears Auto Center but that’s a story I’ll tell later.

Walmart SignI saw a sign for Wal-Mart Interpreter Services in the pharmacy department. That impressed me and I said so to the pharmacy consultant.

“Surely you don’t have all those interpreters in the store,” I said, “and the tricorder/universal translator isn’t out of Google’s prototype lab yet.”

“Nope,” she told me. “All the customer has to do is point to their language on this card. We call a translator at the home office and Bob’s your uncle.”

The store can handle 12 different languages (13 if you count English) from Arabic to Vietnamese. A mom-and-pop operation can’t afford to keep a dozen U.N. translators on staff.

[Oooo, business opportunity!]

Regular readers know that I will not willingly deal with any company that requires me to “Press 2 for English” in part because immigrants to this great melting pot should help us learn their cultures while they assimilate ours and they need to learn English. Without that, America stops being a melting pot and becomes a nation of tiny, armed, walled, exclusive Arabtowns and Chinatowns and Mexicotowns and Viettowns. That said, Wal-Mart’s system to let them do business in their native tongues means they will do business outside their shell communities and that’s a good thing.

Changes

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Humans rely on habit and muscle memory to accomplish every day tasks.

Ergonomists know every detail about how we interact with our tools. Frederick Winslow Taylor who earned a degree in mechanical engineering by correspondence at Stevens Institute of Technology, pioneered the “Scientific Management” method to find the optimum method for carrying out pretty much any job. During WWII, a young lieutenant named Alphonse Chapanis eliminated most “pilot error” by de-confusing airplane controls.

In about 1973, a fellow on my pit crew installed the shift linkage backwards on the race car. I went out and shifted from third gear to first when I thought I was grabbing fourth. Surprised pretty much everyone including the engine builder when that about stood the car on its nose.

“A good driver should be able to adjust,” he said.

No. A good driver should be able to concentrate on pointing the car, not on where the next gear might be this week.

Big consumer companies employ most of the (working) ergonomists in the universe. Heck, I’d bet a doughnut that two or three of them work for Microsoft. Why are these consumer companies so blind to the way we accomplish everyday tasks? Why do they want us to keep adjusting to different shift linkages?

Liz Arden mentioned this morning that Google™ has changed its Latitudinal Check In so she can’t just poke a button on her desktop any more.

Not a biggie in the grand scheme of things but it fits the age old question, why did they have to fix something that weren’t broke?

Google had trained us to use their service one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote three years ago that Windows 7’s changes “suggest … that Microsoft is putting design ahead of usability.” Ya think? Apple afficionados say the same thing about the company Mr. Jobs built on the perfect User Interface. I Googled “Lion annoyances” and came up with about 297,000 results which is far fewer than the 1,540,000 results I found for “Windows 7 annoyances.” An entire industry has had to spring up to publish quick cures and workarounds for the two most “popular” computer operating systems.

Lion changed the three finger salute of Snow Leopard to two fingers, and reserved the three finger gesture for Mission Control. In Windows 7, you can’t tell which programs are actually running on the Taskbar and which are just links since some, like Internet Exploder, add an identical button for every open window and some, like WordPerfect and Dreamweaver, simply change the look of the one button so you know what to push. Microsoft also moved all the files around in Windows 7 so “My Documents” is now just another broken link and your IT department can’t find anything without retraining.

Microsoft and Apple had trained us to use our computers one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

And who ever heard of pushing “START” to turn off the engine.

Oh. That’s how keyless cars work now, too.

Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

NPR jumped on that bandwagon last week when Science Friday changed its website. “Redesigned with you in mind” is its new banner.

You maybe, but not me. It is now totally buggered.

I don’t subscribe to many podcasts because I don’t necessarily listen to every show and have enough clutter on both my hard drive and my broadband connection to want it filled with stuff I don’t use. SciFri trained me to go to their site to download the segments I want to hear each week. It was fast. It was accurate. It was scientific.

SciFri had trained us to listen one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.

Like host Ira Flatow’s approach to Global Warming, the site is no longer fast, nor accurate, nor scientific. In fact, of the two segments I grabbed last week, one had pieces of three with one piece repeated and the other was screwy. [ed. note: see the update from NPR in the Comments section below.]

Airheads.

I can fix this by teaching the companies just one word but I don’t work cheap.

Going to the Mattresses

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In Diane Keaton: Here I Am in AARP Magazine, writer David Hochman writes that Keaton “acknowledges how challenging it is to juggle a still-busy career with a teen and a preteen at an age most women are feathering their empty nests with IKEA guest beds.”

leirvik bedThat annoyed a midwestern friend who responded, “But then I remembered: last year I bought one. For myself, true, but still…”

I had to go look up what an IKEA bed was.

My grandfather bought new beds for the Keys house but I have never bought a bed. Other than those, I think the newest bed in my inventory was bought in 1886.

“I sure hope you’ve bought mattresses for those old beds, Dick.”

Mattresses?

Horsehair lasts forever.

(I do tighten the ropes every now and then, though.)

The truth about mattresses.

I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. I can about count on my fingers all the furniture I’ve bought in my life: an oak drawing table, a walnut sideboard, the double recliner, the dining room chairs we gave to our daughter, a bedside table, a hassock. Porch furniture doesn’t count. Nor do the beds I built in New Jersey or the shower seat and the built-ins in Vermont. Anne and I have never been able to agree on a sofa so we don’t have one.

My great-grandfather Enos Barnard was a very short man, so he had a full size low-post bed cut down — it is about 64 inches nose to tail. I slept in that bed as a six-foot teenager which is why I still sleep diagonally even in a California King. And my uncle convalesced in that bed when he returned from the War. He is 6’5″ tall. His feet hung over the end which is the actual etymology of that phrase.

In North Puffin I sleep in the same maple Sheraton “4-poster” bed with a flat tester frame that my parents did. That and all the other beds will just about fit a full size (54″ x 75″) mattress with only a wee little bit of slightly droopy overhang. Don’t sleep on the very edge. My guest room beds are the same size — my mother’s mother’s bed from uphome and the guest room bed from downhome. Someone Before Me removed their rope knobs.

The attic there has the three beds we aren’t using plus their mattresses and boxes. I think the newest bed, the 1886 iron frame I slept in after I outgrew my great-grandfather’s bed is also there but my cousin Terry may have it.

Box springs are more difficult with older beds that don’t fit today’s twin/full/queen/king/Cali king standards. The frame rails on my full beds are set too close together to accommodate a ready-made box so the choice is to custom make the box spring that will sit between the rails or use a sky hook to get into a bed with the frame 33″ off the floor, plus the box spring and the 14″ of poof-top modern mattress. That would be taller than the mattress is wide. It’s a good thing we have high ceilings, but I would knock that tester off with an errant elbow.

Vote Early, Vote Often

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The Media Research Center went to the Supreme Court protests to ask the question, Should Illegal Immigrants Be Allowed to Vote in America?


Cool.

The Right-Thinkers for Electoral Change (the RTEC) have a new engine to reframe the United States Congress. We’re all going to vote against Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And we can do it.

Apparently California’s requirement that “you must be a U.S. citizen; a California resident; at least 18 years of age on Election Day; not in prison or in county jail (serving a state prison sentence or serving a term of more than one year in jail for a defined “low-level” felony), or on parole, post-release community supervision, or post-sentencing probation for a felony conviction; and not judged by a court to be mentally incompetent” to register to vote is only advisory. Nevada offers similar advice.

The California voter registration deadline for the general election must be postmarked no later than October 22, 2012. The last day to request a VBM ballot by mail is October 30. Registered voters may apply for a vote-by-mail ballot for an upcoming election at any time. If you apply by mail, your application must be received no later than 7 days before an election, otherwise you will need to apply in person to get a vote-by-mail ballot for that election.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi was number five of the top 20 liberals, once the highest-ranking female politician in American history, and still the go-to Democrat in Congress according to The Telegraph in 2010. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is number nine of the top 20.

If it’s good enough for an undocumented worker, it’s good enough for me.

The general election will be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. The RTEC encourages all voters from the right-thinking East Coast of the United States to apply the suggestions set forth by undocumented worker supporters and register to vote in California or Nevada today. Or both.

Can’t You Read the Signs?

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Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars this month (Apple marketing VP Phil Schiller immediately deleted his Instagram account and declared that Instagram had “jumped the shark”). Apple will probably buy Twitter next.Pictograms.

I take a lot of pictures both for the beauty and for the story they tell, but I tell most stories with words. 50,000 a year in newspaper columns. Nearly that many again right here. I could write a book …

That said, I just replaced my cellphone because its camera stopped initializing. When I need a quick note about a concert poster or a reminder of what that unusual car or eccentric person looks like, I prefer to snap a picture and text it to my emailbox. Sometimes I send it to one or two selected friends as well.

A quick and informal survey tells me that more than half the people I know do the same. Voice calls are down. Texting is up but texting with pictures and far fewer words is climbing exponentially.

Grocery fliers have both pictures and text, but the amount of text is dropping.

Gekko and I often Skype™ instead of “just” talking on the VOIP phone; it’s the next best thing to being there. OK, that’s not entirely true but having the (moving) picture is better than not having the (moving) picture to go with our words.

A recent story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel highlighted how our communications are changing: “On a cold October night a few years ago, I got out of bed and came downstairs because I realized my cat was still outside. I turned on the porch light, opened the main door, called him and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. When I came back, there was a young man standing in my living room.”

After worrying over the story itself, a cop friend suggested, “Put a Quarantined! Infectious Disease! sign out front.”

Private Property SignHe thinks home invaders can read. (Jeezum, what’s our school system coming to, teaching burglars to read!)

“. . . attached to an explosive charge.”

It’s not the sign that will stop the burglar or home invader. It’s not even the silhouette of a weapon on the sign. It’s the 700 security cameras that take his picture as he walks up the sidewalk, turns up the lane, and steps onto the porch.

The world is progressing back to cuneiform.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

I carry a 17″ ThinkPad workstation that my friend Liz Arden dubbed the “patio stone” but I do hope the next big Android isn’t a stone tablet.