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!

I parked at an Intel plant in Israel, and was delighted to note some conveniently located parking spaces marked “Expecting mother”.

I just love this idea: employees carrying a next-generation employee inside certainly deserve this convenience. Besides, just because we provide parking for the handicapped (and very rightly so) doesn’t mean there aren’t other people in need of special consideration.

Well done, Intel!

There is no place quite like Israel, and this is reflected in many design decisions made in this country. For instance, consider the Arrivals Hall at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which is designed around our family-centric cultural attitude.

While in many airports arriving passengers just go out into the street to pick a taxi, in Israel they go out into a huge arrivals hall. You see, it isn’t exactly about arrivals… it’s about reunion. Its Hebrew name translates as “Welcomers hall”, which reflects the fact that Israelis just love to welcome their friends and relatives when they come from overseas. Entire families show up to pick up their returning kin, and they can’t wait to hug and kiss them! Hence the huge waiting hall. This setup poses a unique design problem: how to allow the arriving passengers, as they file out of the door from Customs with their luggage carts, to come into the hall without this door being jammed with hugging, kissing family groups?

In the beginning, in the old Terminal 1, the police kept the crowd away with a plain crowd control fence; which of course only made my countrymen laugh. Would they let a flimsy fence keep them from embracing auntie a few seconds earlier? The younger kids would simply squeeze through or jump over the barrier. So when they built a proper arrivals hall they replaced the fence with a real moat, a long pool with water fountains in the middle. Moats have effectively kept attackers at bay here since the days of the crusaders, so this actually worked. And when they built the new Terminal 3, they kept the idea, now as a triangular glass fence with water flowing down its edges (a good idea, since kids can’t fall into the moat in this arrangement). You can see one of many sections of this barrier in the photo.

So now the families wait behind the water, and strain their eyes to see who will be first to spot auntie as she comes out that door at the far end of the enclosed area… and to help them in this, the airport has placed a large screen above the door that shows live video of the people approaching the door on its other, hidden side.

What a family-friendly airport!

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?

Cross-posting this from my Information Overload blog… a look at the original Blackberry from 1998, a winning design with different functionality, different constraints and a quite different usage model from today’s designs. Read all about it here!

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!”

We all know about vestigial organs in living creatures, such as the useless vermiform appendix that gives many people a bad time. These were useful in earlier releases of our body plan, but are now just along for the ride.

So here is a sighting of a similarly useless historical remnant in a Bosch power drill.

I refer to the rubber part affixed to the power cord near the drill’s grip. This well-designed part was very handy in the drills of our youth…

The intent was to keep the chuck key from getting lost, of course… you could stick it into the hole and the rubber flaps would keep it in place when it wasn’t being used to tighten the chuck. These keys were all too easy to misplace, so this was an excellent solution – as the vermiform appendix used to be when we were all eating leaves before we became humans and learned about chocolate and other delights.

The thing is, my drill came with the now common keyless chuck… so the key holder is totally unnecessary. At least it isn’t prone to inflammation…

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…