Assorted Afflatuses

Microsoft of late has received quite a beating, at least in the public perception and advertising department, from its rival-in-chief, Apple, Inc. of Cupertino. Those "Get a Mac" advertisements — featuring "Too Cool Mac " Justin Long and "Lovable Workaholic PC" John Hodgman — have wreaked havoc on Windows Vista's reputation, portraying it as more of a downgrade than an upgrade.

Today, two years after Apple launched its "Get a Mac" advertisements, Microsoft took the wraps off its own marketing push back. As of this writing, visitors to Microsoft's homepage see this teaser graphic:

On the one hand, I like the concept and the advertisement. I have never understood what people hated so much about Windows Vista. Sure, it has some problems. Sure, I would rather use my Mac. But Windows Vista really does not deserve its reputation as something to be avoided like the Bubonic Plague.

Part of me, though, objects to the ad, not because I don't think Windows Vista deserves a chance to dig itself out of the gutter, but rather because the advertisement reinforces the incorrect belief that not a soul in 15th century Europe thought the Earth was round. As a matter of fact, many, many people, prior to Dear Christopher believed the Earth was round. Those big thinkers in Ancient Greece, for one, developed reasonably accurate methods of estimating the size of this misshapen sphere we humans call home.

In my mind, the belief that everyone thought the world was flat represents just an egregious factual error as people believing the world was flat in the first place. Scholars have known the ancients knew of our planet's shape for many, many years. Yet, in our popular culture, we continue to reinforce this loony misconception that everyone thought the world was flat. And, those of us brave enough to point out the problem with that thinking usually face accusations of over thinking or being some kind of academic show-off.

The vulgarization of complicated ideas has a place. Not everyone needs to know how a submarine works down to the tinniest button or switch. In other matters, though, we owe it to ourselves to be faithful to the truth.

Every so often, I receive an invitation to join some Facebook group with a title like, "I dropped my phone in the toilet and I need your numbers!" Clearly, a demand exists for technologies that backup the contents of a phone to, say, a computer. Much to many peoples' surprise, a technology for doing just that exists, and has existed for almost seven years. Yet, few people realize this and even of those in-the-know, few people backup their phones. I blame poor human interface design.

Just about every phone sold in the last two years has a Bluetooth radio. This Bluetooth technology enables devices — such as a computer and a cell phone — within 30 feet of one another to talk, wirelessly. Thus, just about everyone who has purchased a cell phone in the last two years could backup their phone — names, addresses and phone numbers included — to ensure they needn't reenter their hundred zillion contacts using one of those painfully cramped numeric keypads.

But almost no one does. And, for the longest time, I could not figure out why. In the last five years I have gone through five cell phones. (Four of which have been iPhones. Apple keeps giving me duds, though they have replaced them all free of charge.) With each of those five phones I have never spent more than five minutes loading all my contact data onto the device, thanks to Bluetooth.

It occurred to me, however, as I restored my latest replacement iPhone yesterday afternoon, how much easier it is to load contact information onto the iPhone, and how much more difficult it was for me to coerce my old Nokia to do the same.

At that point I realized it all comes down to human interface design. First and foremost, most PC manufacturers do not include a Bluetooth radio in the computer by default. Thus, for the vast majority of the Windows-using world, it's technically impossible to backup its phones via Bluetooth!

This is a tremendous oversight. Many, many people want to backup their cell phone. Many, many people also own cell phones with a Bluetooth radio. Finally, a Bluetooth radio costs a computer manufacturer a whopping two dollars. That two dollar addition can make a person's computer a whole lot more useful.

Of course, the problems don't end there. On the Windows side, most cell phone manufacturers use proprietary software to sync their phones with users' computers. This proprietary software may, or may not, be included in the box with the cell phone. Either way, the user has to actively install the software from a mysterious CD in the box with his or her cell phone, or go online, hunt down and install a software package.

And, inevitably, those software packages do not make it easy for the phone and the computer to speak with one another.

On the Mac, it's a little easier. First and foremost, just about every Mac sold in the last four years comes with Bluetooth. Most cell phones also communicate with Apple's iSync software out of the box, without any additional drivers or downloads. But even on the Mac, for the mythical "average" computer user, setting up the sync is complicated. One has to first pair the phone, which, depending on the cell phone can be tricky, and then setup iSync, a program Apple says little about, thus reducing the chances the "average" user knows about it.

The only phone I know of that makes backup truly painless is, of course, the iPhone. I plug it in, iTunes opens and, voilà, synchronization.

But that begs the question, why doesn't everyone make syncing so simple?

If the technology companies decided to worked together, they could easily come up with some standard protocol for making cell phone sync painless.

Computer manufacturers could include a Bluetooth radio with every computer sold, and Microsoft and Apple could develop some kind of system, integrated with the operating system, that "listens" for nearby cell phones with Bluetooth. Then, when a user powers on their cell phone in proximity to their computer, it could prompt the user to setup sync.

There are some rather obvious problems with such a simple solution — I can easily see myself sitting in an airport terminal and going insane as hundreds of prompts to "Sync with Bob Smith's Cell Phone?" crowd my screen. Perhaps cell phone manufacturers could include a prominent "Sync" button either in the phone's interface, or on the phone itself to put the phone in its discoverable mode.

Collectively, people waste thousands of hours reentering millions of phone numbers, simply because technology companies cannot make phone sync simple. At this point, I say everyone should just buy an iPhone. Which is a great reason for everyone else to think about making the synchronization system simpler. As for the toilets, waterproof phones would just be too bulky and clumsy.

When my upgrade to Movable Type 4.1 broke every piece of my custom tempting scheme, I figured it would be more exciting to just start over and come up with a new, if similar, design.

The process is coming along well, especially now I ostensibly have nothing to do (it's not as fun as most people imagine), though, as is apparent, the look is still rough around the edges. Still, this, unlike the mangled mess Movable Type generated after the upgrade, can at least be read without too much eyestrain.

For most of my life, I have either used a plain vanilla text editor or Macromedia's Dreamweaver to cook up my HTML. But, as much as I have come to know and love those two tools, they have their shortcomings.

Creating markup with a text editor can be unbearably tedious. It's nice to have software that does syntax highlighting, magically indents in the right places and completes certain strings. Without a doubt, Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editing environment is easy and quick. The markup it spews out, however, often fails to pass muster in multiple browsers, and the software limps slowly along like an overweight tortoise.

Then I discovered Coda. While I will admit the folks at Panic have a few wrinkles to iron out, the software still manages to best every other piece of web development software I have used.

The text editing component has everything I want and then some. Syntax highlighting makes deciphering gigantic amorphous blobs of HTML a snap and the built-in syntax-aware autocompletion feature saves my poor fingers from typing more than they must. It also saves me from those pesky problems that result from missing a letter or forgetting the closing tag, since Coda just drops the text in place.

Coda replaces Dreamweaver's cumbersome preview system, which involves switching to an entirely different application, with instant, beautifully rendered WebKit previews, thanks to Apple's WebKit framework. It just works. And it works well.

The clips heads-up-display (or "HUD"), while not a headline-grabbing, awe-inspiring feature, has also proved surprisingly useful. On the surface, it's really nothing more than a glorified copy and paste system, but it still manages to save me a great deal of time. I just drop a blob of code into the HUD, name it and I can quickly add it to any other page.

Even the FTP system has blown me away. I have never used Panic's acclaimed Transmit, but, if it uses the same underlying technology and has the same beautiful interface, its fans have good reason to love it. Unlike, say, the FTP component haphazardly attached to Dreamweaver, Coda's remote site access is fast, effortless and unobtrusive. I can continue to code away while I wait for an image to upload without the constant annoyance of Dreamweaver's petulant FTP status window.

Just in case someone from Panic actually reads this, I will air a few grievances. With large files, the syntax highlighting tends to slow down, to the point I crashed Coda opening an enormous JavaScript file. On a similar note, the ability to collapse code would be wonderful when working on long CSS or JavaScript files. It might also be nice if I could have some way to make Coda automatically complete Movable Type template tags.

Still, Coda is, far and away, the best web development tool on the market. It offers just the right combination of tools in a beautiful, simple package. And, at $80 — less than a quarter of Dreamweaver's astronomical price tag — it's a bargain too.

I will take a moment to break from my frenetic studying to write a word or two about the Cantor Diagonal Method, which one might use to prove there cannot be a bijection between the reals and the naturals.

To this point everything in my five-day-a-week, 5-hour-a-day mathematics course, while not always intuitive, has at least been proven or presented with elegant mathematics. The Cantor Method, though, lacks that elegance. I cannot deny its usefulness, or even indispensableness, however, a proof written with his method, rather than flowing elegantly from one statement to another, relies upon a hideous morass of numbers in an equally hideous table.

I can only hope some other mathematician comes up with a more deft way to do what George managed.

One need not look further than France to realize that language is fluid and malleable. While a lexicographer might scoff at a word like "obeausity" or "splendiferous," people will, if the word sticks, call someone obeause or something splendiferous. The Académie française can insist French speakers use the "correct" term for email, "courriel," but, as the French have shown, such mandates can be blissfully ignored.

There is, however, one word whose usage has spiraled out of control recently and that has absolutely no function whatsoever in improving the English language. That malicious word is none other than "oftentimes."

Frankly, I find it astounding just how much the use of oftentimes has exploded. As an extremely corse and mostly unscientific measurement of oftentimes' use, I observed that a Google search for the string, "oftentimes 2008" garnered just over 2 million hits, whereas "oftentimes 2002" produced just over 1 million. Even taking into consideration the fact that, in all likelihood, more writing was published online in 2008 than 2002, the statistic astounds. The year 2008 has not even hit the halfway point in its march to December 31.

Of course, just because more people use a word does not necessarily mean it has no linguistic value. In most cases, a words' increased usage would tend to indicate it had more, not less value, as I implied. But, from my perspective, the word "oftentimes" has, in and of itself, no linguistic merit.

Oftentimes and its linguistic parent, often, have the exact same meaning: frequently. In fact, my dictionary defines oftentimes as often. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to introduce an extra syllable if it adds no extra depth or meaning. It serves only to add extra and entirely superfluous weight to a sentence.

I suspect people use oftentimes for the same reason they employ utilize, rather than use: to sound academic, pretentious and authoritative. It is somewhat ironic, then, to learn that utilize and oftentimes actually have newer etymologies than their more "formal" counterparts. Use comes from the Old French verb user, whereas utilize comes from the much younger French verb, utiliser, which, as it happens is still used today. Often has its roots in Middle English, a derivative of oft, while the painfully long oftentimes comes from what my dictionary calls, "late Middle English," making it at least a few years younger its parent. So much for deriving authority from the ancients.

Even Thomas Jefferson, not someone with a reputation for penning concise or straightforward prose, kept his writing free of oftentimes' infectious presence. A search of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive turned up exactly zero documents with the string "oftentimes." (Often, by contrast produced 21.) If Jefferson managed to live without that extra pretentious syllable, the rest of us can too.

While I have something of an affinity for the English language, I do not have an affinity for the "art" that is literary criticism. Nothing, save perhaps the handful of utterly idiotic errors I made on my second mathematics exam, in my one semester of tertiary education has caused me more grief than my French literature class. To be sure, I feel much more intelligent having read such big names as Baudelaire and Appolinaire in their original unfiltered French. Analyzing their poetry, however, has caused me a great deal of mental pain, albeit mental pain for the better.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is perhaps the most pragmatic subject around. It is, for the most part, utterly useless by itself, but, when coupled with a real world problem — particle physics or microeconomics — mathematics manages to solve big problems without messy ambiguity.

As such, when my French literature course turned its attention to Oulipo, I was intrigued. For Oulipo — whose name constitutes a shortened form of "ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or "the workshop of literary potential" — strives to bridge the divide between literature and mathematics.

Of all the avant-garde literary movements producing bizarre, conceptual writing, Oulipo is, without question, the least insane. The writing created using the various Oulipo constraints, while often entirely nonsensical, is at least founded in good mathematics. Moreover, much of the more nonsensical pieces are hilarious, and the more serious pieces are technically breathtaking.

Georges Perec — one of the more well-known "Oulipiens" — penned La Disparition without using a single "e." But, while one might imagine, out of sheer necessity, a 300 page novel without a single "e" would be a meaningless blob of jibber-jabber, French book critics failed to notice the lack of "e" on first glance. Frankly, I found skimming La Disparition a tad frightening. Had I not known Perec omitted the letter "e," I would never have noticed its absence.

One of the more amusing Oulipo works for the mathematically inclined is Cent mille milliards de poèmes or One hundred thousand billion poems. The printed book itself is no larger than a standard hardcover, which, when first I saw it, made me cast doubt on the whole Oulipo movement. I figured the title was nothing more than superfluous literary hyperbole.

Inside, however, the book contains a series of manipulable strips, each printed with a line of poetic verse. I liken it to magnetic poetry. Granted, unlike those absurd magnetic poetry kits, which manage to combine my hatred of refrigerator magnets and completely ambiguous poetry, any permutation of the lines in Cent mille milliards de poèmes actually makes sense. More importantly, it is actually possible to produce about one hundred thousand billion poems, given the number of interchangeable lines in the book.

Whether Oulipo manages to truly bridge the realms of literature and mathematics, I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, Oulipo is easily my favorite way to play with words in a way founded entirely in mathematics.

(For the French-speakers out there, a visit to the Oulipo website at oulipo.net cannot go amiss.)

This will be a brief entry. I should have more time to write and, more importantly, focus next week as I return to the West coast for Bates' somewhat haphazard February break.

It only took four months, but Apple finally addressed my sole remaining Leopard-related complaint. The Mac OS X 10.5.2 update, released yesterday, adds the "Transparent Menu Bar" checkbox to the Desktop and Screensaver preference pane. At long last, the menu bar need not be a hard-to-read, mildly unsightly blemish atop my screen.

In other news, Quidditch teams have begun sprouting up at colleges in the Northeast. Given that Vassar and Middlebury have formed teams, I cannot help but think Bates will soon follow. The lack of flying broomsticks, enchanted bludgers and winged snitches makes the phenomenon somewhat nonsensical. But whatever technical or logical problems are easily trumped by the college Quidditch scene's wonderful whimsy. The YouTube video of the Vassar team practicing is particularly charming.

Pure Genius
It's no iPhone, but it is quite clever.

While my effort a year ago — to save trees by posting this list online — failed, in the sense that it did not do what I hoped it would. That said, apparently people like knowing what I want.

So, here it is, for 2007.

$25 & Under

Books, books and more books. Perhaps ironically, I have a particularly strong desire to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

• How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (Pierre Bayard)
• Beethoven's Anvil (William Benzon)
• Made to Stick (Chip and Dan Heath)
• Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames)

$50 & Under

• Kitchen Chemistry (Ted Lister with Heston Blumenthal)

$75 & Under

• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2-Volume Set; W. W. Norton and Company)

$100 & Under

No, that's not a typo. I still want (and still do not own) an infrared thermometer.

• Reveal Watch (Daniel Will-Harris)
• Aromatic Milk Frother (Nespresso)
• Tall Electric Tea Kettle (Breville)
• IR Gun Industrial Infrared Thermometer (Thermoworks)

$200 & Under

Spending more than $70 for a tie would, under normal circumstances, constitute an act of insane, irrational behavior. Hermès, though, has produced a tie so incredibly clever, it more or less embodies the word. From afar, one sees a dotted purple tie. But, on closer inspection, it is revealed that the small dots are really cartoon octopuses. Pure genius.

• Cashmere Scarves (Paul Smith)
• AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED (Nikon)
• Clever Octopus Tie (Hermès)

$200 & Up

• Agatha Christie 24-Volume Hardcover Set (Agatha Christie)

For the developing world, aid and debt forgiveness are good. But empowerment and education are great. Nicolas Negroponte's one laptop per child, or "OLPC," initiative has the potential to change the world, despite the various setbacks and budget overruns, by empowering children in the developing world through technology and the power of the Internet.

It has been possible to donate an XO laptop computer, for $200, or help fund the project's development and deployment through one-off donations for quite a while. Now, however, people can participate in the OLPC project's new "give 1 get 1" program. For $400, purchasers receive an XO laptop of their own and provide the funds to give a child one of the XO laptops too. While the XO has less processing power than my iPhone, it is still a pretty neat computer. It uses so little power that the battery can be charged by hand-crank: something very important for those people without access to electricity and rather novel for those of us who do.

Check out the OLPC project at laptop.org.

My advertising campaign on Facebook has produced some very interesting results. I say interesting because neither my Facebook nor my Google AdWords campaigns have, in their short lifetimes, failed to bring me any additional business. The Facebook advertising, though, has given me an interesting look into the way the human mind functions, or rather does not function.

As I mentioned on Friday, Facebook does not allow advertisers to locally target their "flyers" to specific geographic locations when paid for on a per-click basis, rather than on a per-impression basis. So, my advertisements have been displayed to Facebook users across the United States, despite the fact that my business operates locally in the Portland area. To compensate for this unfortunate fact, I made sure to specify where my business operated in the advertisement by noting that I offer, "…computer consulting services in the Portland, OR area…" (emphasis added).

One would think, especially given the number of college graduates and students using Facebook, that this would deter someone in Iowa from clicking on the ad. Logic and intelligent thought, however, collapse when confronted with a dose of unfiltered human behavior. According to my fancy Google Analytics — which provides me with an almost Orwellian amount of detail about every one of my visitors — my business' website received several referrals from Facebook users in the states of California, Iowa and Kentucky

It appears that people either blindly click on my advertisements out of sheer boredom, or they read its title, "Computer Support" and click through without a full perusal. Otherwise, I fail to see how anyone could possibly mistake Portland, Oregon with Fort Dodge, Iowa.

While I generally try to think positively and adopt a sanguine outlook, this information depresses me. Either the average Facebook user has absolutely no intelligence and cannot distinguish one discrete name from another, or the average Facebook user displays absolutely no prudence whatsoever in reading advertisements and further compounds consumer ignorance.

But this is only day four of the campaign. Knowing as little as I do about online advertising, it may well take a full week to really start delivering on its promise of fantastic ROI.