Whenever I’m hosting a meeting, I always ask people to turn their cellphones to vibrate mode. This reduces distraction, but it doesn’t help when someone does receive a call: they have to answer it in furtive whispers as they scramble towards the door. Here’s a better way:
1. Incoming call, phone vibrates, callerid displayed.
2. Press key on the phone. This picks up the call, mutes the speaker and mic, and plays back a recorded message. Examples of messages:
“I’m in a meeting right now, but I do want to talk to you. Please stay on the line while I excuse myself and step out of the meeting.”
“I’m sorry, but I have guests and it’s not convenient to talk to you right now. Your callerID information has been saved. If this call is urgent, press 1, and my phone will page me. Otherwise, press 2 to leave me a voicemail message.”
Nokia? Ericsson? What are you waiting for?
Author: geoff
Dude, where's my blood pressure?
As I blogged earlier, we went to see Control Room yesterday. When we got home, the DVD of Outfoxed that I’d ordered had arrived. We watched it this evening. It was good (though not as good as Control Room, which was quite brilliant), and it left me feeling very angry – which is the point, isn’t it? It’s worse than Berlusconi in Italy, because at least everyone knows that he’s a crook who uses his media empire for illegal purposes.
Anyway, the next time some slimy Fox pundit-masquerading-as-a-journalist begins a comment with “Some people say…”, watch out – a bunch of people are liable to throw up.
Hippocratic oaths for software designers
ALL AUTO-CORRECTION SHOULD BE OFF BY DEFAULT!!!!
This is a rant. If I’m going to be responsible, I guess the rant should eventually get turned into a bug report. But I’ll start with the rant.
I hate autocorrection. Automatic hyphenation, automated spellchecking, automated URL completion, automated correction of capitalization…. I’m not saying that I don’t make mistakes that need correcting: what I find is that autocorrection gets in my way, interrupts my thinking, and – overall – makes me less productive.
Now I’m sure that some people, somewhere, must like it (although I hear more complaints than compliments for it), and I’m not opposed to making these features available. What makes me furious is that they are turned on by default. Every time I encounter a new spreadsheet or word processor, I get bitten by the “feature” and have to take the time to turn it off. And how should I turn it off? That’s another source of frustration. In OpenOffice, things like automated capitalization and hyphenation are specified in Options->Language Settings->Writing Aids, while things like word completion are in Tools->Autocorrect, and configuring spellchecking requires you to start a spellcheck via Tools->Spellcheck->Check and then use Options to change its behavior. (Then remember to cancel the spellcheck!) (OpenOffice is not unique in this: it follows Microsoft’s lead slavishly in this respect.)
OK, you’re saying, but it’s just a one-time frustration. It’s not a big deal. Wrong. Consider the situation that the Register reported a couple of days ago in a piece entitled Excel ate my DNA. Scientists imported genetic data into Excel, Excel “autocorrected” it, and the result was unrecoverable data corruption:
The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.
I’m sure that these researchers installed MS Office in good faith. I’m sure that the installation program never asked them, “Shall I enable a bunch of options that may lead to silent data corruption?” And now they’re screwed.
Software designers need the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath, combined with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. I do not expect my word processor or spreadsheet to change my data in any way without first asking me if I want it to do so. Out of the box, all automated corrections should be turned off. No exceptions. First, do no harm. (And one day someone will test the legal disclaimers in the software licenses, and the whole “repudiation of liability” nonsense will be exposed. But that’s another discussion.)
So which Bugtraq category do I file this under?
Preaching to the choir… or not
In today’s New York Times there was an op-ed piece by Nicolas Kristof entitled Jesus and Jihad. In this piece, which Kristof admits he had reservations about writing, he shares with us some scenes from the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers. He writes:
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is Glorious Appearing, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In “Glorious Appearing,” Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.”
He concludes:
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah’s son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God’s word – but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people’s religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don’t think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.
Obviously as an atheist I find the last couple of words incoherent, but overall this seemed like a very sensible – and very relevant – commentary. And so, as an inveterate blogger, I wanted to blog about it. And then I wondered who might read it. I think that most of the people I know well would agree with Kristof that the popularity of these books says something important and disturbing about America. But would any Left Behind enthusiasts read this, and if so what might they say? Could any kind of dialogue follow, or is that a futile idea? Would we even speak the same language?
Curious. And troubling. [Cached]
The Control Room
We went to see The Control Room today. Highly recommended. If you didn’t realize that the Jessica Lynch story was released in order to bury another news item, you need to see this film. If you didn’t realize that the US deliberately targeted three separate groups of journalists in Baghdad, and why, you need to see this film. If you’ve already forgotten the things that people were saying at the time of the invasion, and need to be reminded of how they sound against the backdrop of over a year of fighting, occupation, torture, and chaos, you need to see this film. In fact, you just need to see it. Period.
(And don’t just take my word for it. Last time I looked, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film was 97% fresh – 75 critics positive, 2 negative.)
Update: If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this piece in Salon about Lt. Josh Rushing, the press officer at CentCom.
Self-perpetuating stereotypes
Reading Terry’s blog (which everyone should do, not least to get an Iraq veteran’s perspective of some of the unbelievable stuff which is going down these days), I came across a link to this thought-provoking essay by Dawn Taylor on the other side of sexism: the “men are jerks, and they can’t help it” nonsense that you encounter every day. And I was reminded of the strange story on Yahoo! Oddly Enough about how blondes do worse on intelligence tests after they’ve been exposed to “dumb blonde” jokes. This stuff is not innocuous: it changes the way people think and act.
Oh, well…
PS: Everyone has that dream. |
Which Trickster Are You?
Take the Trickster Test at www.isleofdreams.net.
Our worst fears
Back on June 11 I posted an entry entitled This is a blog entry I hope I’ll be able to delete. Weeks went by, and I began to hope that Sy Hersh had got it wrong after all; that the things to which he’d alluded were unsubstantiated. But today Salon Magazine has posted a piece entitled Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape.
WARNING: It’s pretty upsetting stuff.
UPDATE More info here at Boing Boing, including new info from European sources.
Library
Terry Karney’s blog pointed me at this wonderful poem. Here are the first few lines….
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
Yes, it’s vaguely reminiscent of David Moser‘s self-referential tour de force (published by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas), but it’s a much more beautiful and thought-provoking piece. Pass it on.
Kabuki review
Yesterday evening my daughter (Kate) and I went to see the final performance of the Japan Society of Boston‘s presentation of Kabuki at the Cutler Majestic theatre in Boston. The performance was given by the Heisei Nakamura-za Kabuki Troupe starring Nakamua Kankuro, who are touring New York, Boston, and Washington DC this summer. (There’s a fascinating interview here, in which Nakamura Kankuro talks about the challenge and opportunity to bring kabuki to the United States.)
The troupe – actors, singers, musicians – performed two pieces that showed different sides of kabuki, Bo-Shibari (“Tied to a pole”), and Renjishi (“Dance for two lions”). There’s a detailed description of each here, with comments by Kankuro. The performance was in Japanese (obviously), and there was no printed or simultaneous translation, although Peter Grilli, the president of the Japan Society of Boston, provided a short introduction to the pieces. But the language was not a barrier.
The result? It was glorious – visually stunning, dramatic, funny, clever, musically exciting, challenging, dramatic, exuberant, and just plain fun.
One point of note was that the audience included many Japanese, mostly living in the Boston area (though some had travelled a long way to attend the show). As a result there was much bowing as people met. There was even one woman in a beautiful pink kimono, with all the trimmings.