aubreyturner.org

I used to think that caffeine made me irritable.  What I came to understand was that the absence of caffeine was what did it.  But this was only after a long period of having none and then returning to the warm, aromatic ranks of coffee drinkers.

Since I haven’t been able to eat much without consequences, I’ve also had to forgo coffee, as I’m afraid that it would make things worse.  I thought things were better yesterday morning, so I tried to eat breakfast and have some coffee.  It took me about three hours to get over it. 

Anyhow, all this means that I haven’t had any caffeine since yesterday morning.  Now the beast is starting to show its full power and unsheath its claws.  I had the beginning of “the headache” (those of you who have forsaken caffeine in the past know what I’m talking about) yesterday, but I think the one cup managed to stave it off, and I’m hoping that it won’t be as bad.

I will have to be very careful now, as this is the critical time when the temptation becomes strong to deal with fools by removing their heads from their necks. 

Now where did I put that machete…

I’m still wary of eating much more than soup and crackers, but I’m not as bad as yesterday.  At least it’s just a bit of nausea and fatigue now, rather than cramps and other, less pleasant, symptoms.

But I’ve been thinking about something while I was laying about for the past few days.  Working from home makes it a bit harder to truly get away from work when you’re sick.  I felt a bit guilty about not being at my desk working.  But to be honest, I was pretty miserable.  Still, in between bouts I’d check email or even take a phone call or two. 

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but maybe I miss the old days a little.  When you were “out sick,” you were truly “out.”  It’s kind of hard to hear the phone when your office is 20 miles away, so you don’t worry about it as compared to how it is when it’s only in another room.

I guess I’m spoiling their attempt at humor, but sometimes there are valuable lessons in the “Weird News” section of the paper.

Paul Kuschel would have been better off naked – like many of the folks at Sunnier Palms Nudist Park. Instead, he was wearing a pair of nylon shorts Sunday when a generator he was working on backfired and sprayed him with starter fluid, setting him ablaze.

“I would have been better off wearing nothing on at all,” Kuschel told Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers. The fire seared his shorts to his backside.

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t wearing a shirt,” he said.

Kuschel, 43, suffered second-degree and third-degree burns.

There’s a reason firefighters’ duty uniforms are cotton or a treated cotton-blend, rather than 100% nylon or polyester.  Those synthetic fibers melt when they burn, which causes them to fuse to your skin, making for a worse burn.

Been sidelined by some kind of nasty bug for the past few days.  So far, the only thing I’ve been able to eat without hideous stomach cramps is crackers, and I didn’t have many of those, so I was forced to crawl out of my cave this morning to buy some more (and the biggest bottle of Pepto that the store had).

You’ll know I survived if I post again…

I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of wanting to be able to check email and go online from anywhere.  The current crop of devices like this seem a bit awkward to me, though.  Take the Palm Treo 700w as an example.  If you look at it as a PDA, it’s not too bad, in that it’s similar to many others in size and form.  However, as a phone, it’s really funky.  Everyone I’ve seen using a Treo as a phone looks slightly uncomfortable.

Now the idea of an all-in-one still has some appeal, but I think it needs to be better integrated with proper input/output devices, so you don’t have to hold a brick to your face to have a conversation.  This seems like something appropriate for a Personal Area Network.  Have a central “box” that manages the CPU, memory, and networking capabilities (i.e. cellular plus WiFi) and then connect the various devices with Bluetooth or something similar.  It’d be nice if it integrated iPod functionality as well (and you could have an integrated stereo headset with mike for listening to music and taking calls). 

I could also see this box being pluggable into a “base station” and usable as your personal computer, so you don’t have to have different systems for PDA vs. laptop/portable.  I guess this is getting into oQo territory, although maybe a bit smaller.

This still leaves some interface issues, though, as entering and viewing data is often difficult on these small screens.  All those people working on holographic interfaces need to get cracking. 

My neighbor across the street had his truck smashed in his driveway by a drunk driver at the end of November.  I just noticed that he got a new truck yesterday. 

The next time I see him I’m going to have to ask if he was getting jerked around by the insurance company.  It seems like a long time to have to wait to get things settled.  Although he was lucky in that the truck was still driveable (after yanking out the fender a bit and replacing the wheel, which got bent), so perhaps he was able to hold out until he got a better settlement.

Update.  Just talked to him and found that he’s had to eat all the costs, since the drunk driver didn’t have insurance.  Although he’s promised to pay, he hasn’t done so yet.  So my neighbor decided to just buy a new truck, rather than spending any more money on the old one.  Although he was driving it around, he said that the frame was bent, so it would have been very expensive to fix.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the young drunk was arrested again just last week right in front of his house (which is at the end of our block).  This was his third arrest for DWI.

Somehow it seems like Thursday has turned into “let’s have a meeting” day.  After 7 hours on the phone, I can’t help but wonder where I’m supposed to squeeze in any work.

But at least they left me an hour to scarf down some lunch and didn’t overlap meetings.  Tomorrow morning is fun in that I have four overlapping meetings between 9:00am and 11:30am.

It looks like Mother Nature’s calendar got flipped to July instead of March today:

Oh well… still have to go walk the dog.  Neither snow, nor ice, nor cold, nor heat stays this canine from her appointed rounds (or from bugging me to take her on them).

It seems that some animals think they’re more equal than others and their arrogance might end up getting someone killed one of these days.

You might want to think twice the next time you’re tempted to make a call from your cell phone during an airplane flight. Or flip on your portable game player. Or work a spreadsheet on your laptop.

Besides possibly annoying fellow travelers and breaking federal regulations, you might be endangering the airplane, according to a Carnegie Mellon University study that quietly monitored transmissions on board a number of flights in the Northeast.

The study, by CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, found that the use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices can interfere with the normal operation of critical airline components, even more so than previously believed.

Now we’ve all heard the announcements to turn off and put away “all portable electronic devices” during takeoff and landing.  And we’ve all seen people who can’t be arsed to follow the rules.  The majority of the time they get away with it.  And from the article, it seems to happen quite a bit:

And despite the ban on cell phone use during flights, the researchers discovered that on average one to four cell phone calls are made from every commercial flight in the northeast United States.

Some are even made during critical flight times, such as the climb after takeoff or the final approach.

The Slashdot discussion had an interesting link to an EMI study that attempted to analyze the reasons for interference.  Unfortunately, there is not good data available, and the incidents are hard to reproduce.  But while the article above talks about GPS, GPS isn’t really the main concern.  There are a lot of more important systems on board that could potentially be affected, as this quote shows:

April 30, 1997. B737-400: During level cruise, the AP pitched up and down with ROC/ROD of 400 fpm indicated. Other AP was selected: no change. Cabin was checked for PC’s and other electronic devices: nothing was found. Requested passengers to verify that their mobile phone (GSM) was switched OFF. Soon after this request all pitch oscillations stopped.

The problem here is that all these devices haven’t been tested on airplanes and to do so would be a monumental undertaking, as it’s not just intentional radiators, like cell phones, but other devices that are unintentional radiators that must be tested.  Further, it’s nearly impossible to guarantee that any particular instance of a class of device still complies to standards after it’s been dropped, kicked, bitten, stepped on, and otherwise abused by its owner.  While we expect airplanes to be resistant to EMI/RF, and they are tested for this, there are still many situations that could lead to sensitivity.  An example given in the above study is that connectors are especially susceptible to RF leakage, especially after repeated maintenance.  Further, since the skin and framework of the aircraft are metal, they could act as an amplifier for an ill-behaved device (or even a well-behaved one in unforseen circumstances).  Heck, even devices that have been certified according to the existing standards can sometimes interfere with each other unintentionally (i.e. through harmonics of internal oscillators, etc). 

It seems to me that we’d have to engineer airplanes with a whole new level of RF interference standards before we allow cell phones to be used onboard.  I’d consider any existing design to be unready for the challenge.

In the meantime, I have an idea for a way to protect airplanes from this sort of problem.  It might prove too expensive, but I can envision a set of RF detectors stationed strategically throughout the aircraft cabin and wired into a central control system.  Using relative signal strengths, the system could determine the location of any RF radiator in the cabin down to a small section of the cabin (perhaps two or three rows, or even one row if you have enough sensors).  If the system were sufficiently foolproof, it could even activate a small light above the offending row or rows.  Or if you wanted to make it unpleasant to ignore the rules, have the system sound an alarm and flash a light over the row in question.  It would then immediately become obvious who was trying to use a cell phone (or even some other RF-emitting device).

If the above is too much, then one could perhaps implement a rule that if a passenger is observed using any sort of transmitter (cell phone, FRS, Gameboy, etc) and there is interference observed with the plane’s systems on that flight, then that passenger must stay behind and cooperate with troubleshooting activities with the flight and maintenance crews.  I suspect after a few of these self-important bastards are made to spend several hours “cooperating,” they might think twice about breaking the rules (as these types of people always regard their time as more important than that of others).

Anyhow, it seems to me that there isn’t anything so urgent that it can’t keep until the plane lands, except for emergencies, in which case the rules are out the window (as we saw on 9/11 with people calling from cell phones).  But frankly, airplanes are so damned cramped (at least back in steerage where I usually travel), that it’d be intolerable to have to listen to someone babbling on a cell phone.  I like the idea of the Amtrak Quiet Car that one Slashdot commenter mentioned.  Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the view!

You’d have to put a gun to my head to get me to watch Entertainment Tonight, but simply watching the news on WFAA it’s impossible to miss the damn previews.  Today they were touting their exclusive feature of Tonya Harding returning to the ice (Exclusive!). 

Tonya Harding!?  WTF?  Why is she even still around? 

Jeeze, can you get any lower?  She’s like school on Saturday…  No Class!

Anyhow, her 15 minutes were over a long time ago, and she deserves to rot in obscurity.