This morning my notebook’s battery died an ignominious death, and I had to hurriedly procure a new one. Not a good start for the day.
I called the vendor’s customer support center, and plodded through the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu, fully expecting a harrowing experience. Instead, I was routed to a service rep who gave me the information I needed (well, it was not rocket science after all) but did it in a manner that completely undid the bad mood I was in. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but she was cheerful, confident, friendly, and really conveyed the feeling that she was proud to be able to solve my problem, and solve it fast. Basically this woman was transmitting good service vibes, and the positive mood was contagious.
I suppose it goes to this particular rep’s character and style, but the difference from service reps I usually talk to anywhere was impressive. The others were polite (or not) and doing a job; this one was enjoying it. What a difference this can make in the user experience!
Here is a screenshot from the form you fill to join the El Al Frequent Flier club. The form has the usual fields (take my word for it, you to whom Hebrew is Greek), but the one that drew my attention is the Title field preceding the first name. This uses a drop-down box, which presents a very comprehensive set of options: there’s Mr and Mrs, There’s Dr, there’s Prof and Rabbi (hey, this is El Al), and there’s even Adv and Judge. But the one highlighted in the screenshot is – get this – Lord.
Which is really amusing… for one, El Al is Israel’s airline and we have no Lords in our system here. Nor do we have a flood of British nobility flying in and out all the time; I’m sure some Lords may fly El Al on occasion, but hardly enough of them to justify such consideration. In any case, if we have Lord, why not Earl, Baron, Marquess, Viscount, or – more useful – a plain generic Sir? And why stop at British noblemen – surely a traveler might be a Graf, or an Alderman, or a Fellow of the Royal Society?
And, while they’re at it, what about Lady?
Edible fruit have been on this planet since the Cretaceous, but they know how to move ahead with the times.
See the photo: this pear, recently arrived from our greengrocer, has a barcode on it!
Why does a pear need its own barcode? I could understand putting one on the crate, for easier shipping control and stock management; but nobody scans an individual pear, do they? In fact, people have been eating pears for ages (seven millennia, more or less), and for 99.9% of that time they managed just fine without a barcode, as you can see in this snippet from a botanical illustration from 1771.
And our modern pear has more than a barcode: it has a logo, and it has a catalog number, and – wonder of wonders – it has a Web site! This is nicely done, chock full of pear lore and fun. I’d joke that at this rate it will soon have its own fruity Facebook account, but of course, it already does. And it’s on Twitter, too: @usapears.
These Generation Y pears sure are getting ahead in our hyper-connected world! 
I was in a building where someone decided to give the signage a modern look, and I saw this sign outside a restroom. The people have this angular look, with slanted heads – why not? Anything for effect…
But it does occur to me that the guy on the wheelchair with the nonagonal wheel (yep… look it up!) will have a rather bumpy ride. There’s a reason why the inventor of the wheel chose to make it round!
Check the new article on my History of Computing exhibit: a century old teaching aid from Germany, with the added twist that it anticipates today’s well known slogan: “To each pupil his own counting machine!”
I was shopping at Office Depot, and next to the checkout line they had this bin full of cheap items on sale. And in it, thrown carelessly with less decorum than potatoes get at the grocer’s, were blister-packaged Flash memory cards.
They had 2.0 GB units selling for a pittance. That’s two billion bytes, or 16 Billion bits. I remember Thirty years ago, when a solid state memory board of 16K Bytes would come very carefully packaged – rightly so, as it cost thousands of dollars. The unit in the blister pack shown has a Million times as much capacity and costs 10 bucks. Of course we all know how Moore’s law is driving densities up and price per bit down, but this infamy of selling Gigabytes like peanuts brings it home with some poignancy.
And Below is a similar case, this from our neighborhood general store. Here the Flash Disk-on-key packs are hanging from a shelf alongside Energizer batteries, chocolates, candy and chewing gum packages.
You can bet the core memory stack I show here was not sold with chewing gum…
I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title…
Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly maintained; it’s well documented in the literature:
“He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.”
- The little prince, ch. 9.
From what we hear Iceland uses its geothermal energy extensively, whether or not they use it for heating breakfast… you’d think they could do the preventive maintenance part too!
When will they ever learn?…
I was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo.
Of course there are Lego kits today for anything from Rocket ships to Medieval castles, but Zaphod Beeblebrox?!…
Here is a striking photo I snapped in Tubingen, in southern Germany, showing a building with a tile roof… bearing a weird pattern:
The cause of the red circle on the roof is unmistakable, the air flows around the chimney… but it is the opposite of what you’d expect, and the details are a bit unclear (considering the darker soot circle around the cleared out area). If you care to speculate, do it in the comments!
Isaac Asimov once wrote a SciFi story named The feeling of Power, in which a future age has become so accustomed to computers that the rediscovery of how to calculate sums with pencil and paper – or in one’s head – is considered a major breakthrough.
That age may be nearer than we think. Recently we went shopping and were told by a pleasant young salesgirl that we’ll get a 10% discount on an item listed at 360 NIS. I figured the final price in my head, while the girl whipped out a rather large desktop calculator and proceeded to pound its keys, displaying the result a few seconds after I’d finished. Not that I claim any arithmetical prowess: it wasn’t like I had to figure 83.45% of 382.44 NIS. Taking 36 from 360 is no big deal.
But I was curious, so I asked the young woman whether she could have figured the result without the calculator; and she admitted she couldn’t have. She didn’t seem embarrassed about it; she sounded as if I’d asked whether she could read cuneiform script, or design a spaceship. Of course she couldn’t; that’s what calculators were for, after all…
