Travelin’ Man

I’m off to San Diego today for a long trade show. I get back early Friday morning. While this traveling is starting to wear a bit, this is the last trip I’m making for a month.

It’ll be nice to see San Diego again, though many of the friends I had there are there no longer. My old ship doesn’t grace the waterfront anymore, having become an artifical reef.

Lots of memories remain, however. Good times.

Jim Black Must Go

Let me add my voice to the growing crowd saying Jim Black must go. More and more it looks like he’s had some, uh, serious “ethical lapses” if not downright broken the law.

Black should step aside and the rest of our representatives should own up to any of their own shady dealings. We need – no demand – clean politics. The days of the good ‘ol boy network are over.

Story Of The Year: Foja Mountains

I loved the Lord of the Rings movies because I loved the illusion they presented of another world. While the Rings were fiction, news broke last week that is almost too good to be true. Astounding, even. Scientists have discovered a place on Earth heretofore untouched by man, where exotic, previously unseen plants thrive and animals have no fear of humans. That place is the Foja Mountains area of western New Guinea. It’s like discovering the Garden of Eden.

This discovery fascinates me. Of course I’d love to go, but then the area would cease to be pristine, wouldn’t it? 🙁 While nothing compares to seeing it myself, hopefully the expedition’s documentation will satisfy my fix.

It’s only February and we’ve already had the story of 2006.

Les Yeux Sans Visage

I was fascinated to read about the success of the face transplant performed on Isabelle Dinoires, the French mother of two. Science has done what most thought was impossible, or at least thought somewhat out of bounds. Dinoires has a new face and can feel like a human again.

I hope she lives a long life now that she’s been given some semblance of a normal one, thanks to her doctors and the donor, Maryline Saint Aubert. Even so, I don’t expect this to happen. Dinoires’s face was ripped off by her dog after she passed out from a drug overdose. Some descriptions of the “attack” make it sound like the dog was vicious, but I don’t think that was the case.

Her dog was in fact a Labrador, a breed about as menacing as a bag of donuts. Dinoires had overdosed on sleeping pills in what some allege may have been a suicide attempt. Instead of attacking her, I believe the dog was only trying to save her life (the dog was later euthanized).

That was just seven months ago. If Dinoires was indeed attempting to end her life, I wonder if this ordeal has changed her mind, showing her the value of life. Then again, if ever she had the motivation to end her life, those seven months spent without a face provided her ample opportunity.

I’d be willing to give her the benefit of the doubt if she hadn’t resumed her chain-smoking habit against her doctors’ orders. Smoking restricts blood flow to the tissues, which can trigger rejection of her new face. On the other hand, one doctor pointed out the tremendous stress she’s been going through.

Will she be able to handle the tremendous stress? Will she successfully avoid becoming some sort of oddity? If she was at one time trying to end her life, how have those seven months changed her mind?

I really, really hope I’m wrong, but I can’t help but wonder if we’ll be seeing that face again.

Training

I’m training 30+ people this week in the product I sell as a sales engineer. It’s added up to long days, especially considering how frequently I’ve been on the road lately.

Blogging has to take a back seat until I can come up for air. In the meantime, help yourself to some woo.

Why I Hate Computer Mice

I was a little groggy when I waited in line for breakfast at the Orange County Airport’s McDonald’s. I noticed the cash registers at Mickey D’s have become far more sophisticated than they used to be; indeed, they are more or less commodity PCs. The only thing different is there is no mouse.

I began thinking about how a cashier would fare having to line up and push a mouse around the screen every time she entered orders. It would take twice as long to take an order, at least! Computer mice aren’t as easy to use from a standing position as they are from a seated one (in my opinion, anyway).

This brings me further into my longstanding issues with a lot of computer interfaces. For all the marketing that went into them, the mouse-and-menu model is spectacularly clumsy. There is little intuitive in steering a mouse around to get what you want. A substantial amount of movement and thought must go into translating those hand movements into a place on the screen.

That’s when I realized how efficient touch screens are. Tablet PCs and PDAs use touch screens. Most use them to an advantage, though not all. My Sharp Zaurus has a brain-dead, menu-driven interface which likely played a role in killing it as a product. Good touch screen interfaces eliminate the translation step of hand movements-equate-to-pointer. The user might not be consciously aware of this mouse-work, but it nevertheless is there, potentially adding stress to her work.

There is little thought wasted in poking a button on a screen to make something happen. Over eons humans have learned that poking something is a good way to provoke a reaction. Interfaces designed to take advantage of this let users get right to the point (no pun intended). Such users spend their time doing their work rather than fighting a mouse.

To summarize: The computer mouse beats typing, but still isn’t as easy as a touch-screen. Interfaces overflowing with menus are bad. Let out the caveman in your users by making your interface caveman easy.