Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Wisconsin’s a “battleground state” so everyone with a political axe to grind is swinging it my way. In the last 24 hours I’ve been called 15 times by political phone banks, from the Sierra Club to Right to Life. Along the way I’ve developed a few techniques for maintaining my sanity I’d like to share.

1) Keep a list of candidates near the phone. As pollsters call to ask you who you’ll vote for, go down the list, ticking off each candidate you say you’re voting for in turn. See how many complete cycles of the list you can make before the election comes.

2) Claim to be a relative of one of the candidates. Doesn’t matter which, just pick one.

3) Second use for the list: Every time someone calls with a push poll or other means of urging you to vote against a candidate, place an “X” beside the name. Before voting, total up the “X”’s. The candidate with the most X’s has certainly offended more people with money (otherwise how could they afford so many phone banks) so that makes one more reason to vote for that candidate.

Currently I answer the phone with “Walker’s Political Research. And which candidate do you want me to vote against?” This throws them off long enough for to speak without interrupting them, and tell them politely I have no interest whatsoever in anything they have to say, and hang up. (I wonder how many divergent political opinions the callers have of me, now that I’ve told both sides of the health care issue, tort reform issue, environmental issues, and the abortion issue to go take a long walk off a short pier? About the only lobbies I haven’t told off are the NRA and the NAB, but that’s only because they haven’t called — yet!)

For those keeping score, I was called three times by phone banks while typing this entry.

Over on Electrolite, there’s a storm of outrage a-brewing. I have to admit, opening the blog up and seeing the address of my old high school rival was a bit of a gigglesnort, but the misinformation that was abounding within it and the comment thread started out by offending me, then left me laughing helplessly. I really needed that laugh, but I wish you weren’t so quick to judge us uncivilized bumpkins.

OK, just what is going on? George W Bush had a rally there on the high school campus, and students were supposedly threatened with expulsion if they dared to wear Kerry props. Part one is true, part two isn’t. Book both of those as fact, children.

How do I know? Richland Center is the county seat of Richland County. I grew up (and still spend a lot of time in) Lone Rock, which, as of the 1990 census anyway, is the second largest town in Richland County, with a population of less than 1000 (I’m being charitable, it was more like 600 but it’s grown lately). I spend more time annually in Richland Center than the entire thread of commenters have in their lifetime. I’ve worked there; I went to college there. I know those people. I spoke to my mother this morning, who still lives (and holds office) in Lone Rock and she was as bemused at the “controversy” being manufactured out on the ‘net as I was.

Have I a political axe to grind? Well, I’m considering voting for Kerry this year, and the only reason I could possibly bring myself to that position is that to do otherwise would risk letting Bush back in for another four. I think Kerry’s definitely not the right man for the times, but compared to the alternative, I’ll probably hold my nose and “take one for the country,” and pray that next time out one of the parties decides to send a real candidate for a change.

So I’m no Bushie. I just know the place and the people for the last half-century. RC is a firm republican town. Most folks there are what you’d call “yellow dog” republicans, meaning they’d vote for a yellow dog if it ran as a republican. I’d be willing to bet that well over half, possibly as many as 90% of the students that might have considered wearing Kerry badges (a total itself that wouldn’t be very large) would have done so primarily as an act of rebellion against their parents, not out of any real affinity for his cause.

The princpal’s own words are that he “asked” the students not wear Kerry stuff. I’m sure he thinks so, but I’m equally sure the students heard that as a command. And (now I’m specualting, based on experience) one or two from that point said they’d be expelled if they dared disobey, and so the stone started rolling downhill. They’re probaby getting a bigger chuckle out of the gullibility of ‘netheads than I am right now.

Let’s get to facts:
1) The HS Gym is the standard meeting place in the town. There’s a couple of dance halls that will be close in size, and maybe one spot on the college campus, but if you’re doing something big, you need to talk to the HS. And the HS knows you’ll need to, so they’ll always be willing to rent, regardless of political view.

2) Yes, the demographics are mainly white. The commenter with this bright idea obviously thinks this means something more than just that there are few industries in town that would attract minorities. If you weren’t born in the area, the odds are real high you aren’t working there, either. It’s opportunity, not bigotry, that drives the demographics.

3) The principal knows the law. He isn’t going to threaten to expel students over something that trivial, and he wouldn’t, even if the law permitted it. I know you folks like to think of us as bumpkins, but spend some time reading history, for pete’s sake. Wisconsin came up with both “Fightin’ Bob” Lafollette and Joe McCarthy. the posse comitatus and Progressive magazine. You want more recent examples, OK, how about Tommy Thompson and Russ Feingold? How do you think that happens if we’re so eager to stifle free speech?

My stepfather was Richland county chairman of the Democratic party. What went on in that thread makes me ashamed of my family’s connection with the Democrats. Patrick, you oughta know better than to spread crap like that.

Addition: Now I find in the comments to the original post, that the one who first started to spread this male bovine excrement couldn’t be bothered to fact check himself. “At least my motivation was to protect kids from the poor decisions of the adults in charge of their education,” was the exact phrasing he used (comment from him datestamped Thu Oct 28th, 2004 at 22:56:46 GMT). More interested in protecting the kids from the poor decisions than he was in finding out if poor decisions were, in fact, actually being made in the first place? Meow.

<Deep Sigh> Ran in to an old familiar-but-forgotten bug today. Caused by tables, currently inserted into the design unnecessarily by the OSCMS I was using. It has been so long since I’d worked with table-based designs I’d completely forgotten that when you style a table as width: 100% IE/Win decides that you mean more than just 100% of the available content area if you have a floated box. (Technical description for the curious: within a screen-width box a box 275px wide is floated left. The screen-width box also contains another box with a left margin set at 300px. A table within this second box, styled at width:100%, will wait until the floated box has ended before displaying, even though there is no overlap between the display areas of the floated box and the table and even though other content in the box before the table will display correctly.)

So I wasted time trying to figure out what was happening. It wasn’t until I stopped looking at the code I was writing and started looking at the code the CMS was writing that I realized what was happening.

The default in IE for a table is to take all the room it needs, up to the limit prescribed by the bounds of the box it’s in. Dropping the width attribute and settling for the default fixed the problem.

That’s the problem with the argument that claims table-based design is simpler. It’s simpler only because we already know the bugs and workarounds for it. When we don’t know (or when we’ve forgotten) it’s at least as difficult as standards-compliant design.

My favorite oversimplifier, Jakob Nielsen is At It Again. This time it’s computer security.

As usual, there’s some meat in the soup. Computer security should be easier for normal people to set up. He uses the analogy of locking a car. That level of security for a computer should be trivially easy for a user to set up. And while it’s not enough to keep out a crack team of agents, neither is locking your car. He should carry the analogy further.

Why is it that simply locking the car door is considered sufficient security, when any determined thief can still steal the car if it’s locked? Because insurance will replace what’s lost, and because your loss is limited to the car itself and what was in it.

So, following the analogy through to the end, if we want lock-the-car-door security on our computers, we should so arrange our computers that anyone breaking in to them will only be able to damage the computer itself, and we should be insured against the loss of whatever can be gained by breaking in. If those two factors hold, then computer security on the level of a locked car door is a realistic step to take.

On the other hand, if what you’re wanting to do is store the minutia of your life in the box, you should treat the box as if that is indeed what it’s holding. If you’re the type who would leave every dolloar you possess in an open shopping bag sitting on the seat of the car in plain sight, then yes, I suppose once again you should use the locked car door level of security. If you wouldn’t, then why are you doing even less than that to protect it simply because it’s on your computer?

And user education does factor into the equation. If a man walked up to you on the street and said he needed your banking information in order to transfer 85 gazillion dollars from point A to point B, how many of you would instantly hand over the information? I thought not. Yet a surprising number of people do so in the computer equivalent; they have this knee-jerk reaction to believe every single thing that floats into their mailbox.

If you received a letter that had the return address of someone you knew, yet contained an ad for viagra and breast enhancing pills, would you automatically assume your friend had sent the information to you? Or would you check the postmark to see if it came from a place your friend would be sending from? Yet how many people always believe the “From” field on an email, which is no harder to fake than the return address on a letter?

Ordinary people with loads of common sense suddenly lose touch with all that sense when reading an email or a web page. They wouldn’t believe it if someone said it to their face, but This Is On A Computer, So It Must Be True?

Computer security should be easier, at least for moderate levels of security. It can’t be made simple to lock a computer down to the point of impenetrability; the only computer impossible to break into is turned off, unplugged, encased in concrete and buried at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. And even then I’m not 100% sure it’s safe.

Following all of Nielsen’s suggestions doesn’t get you to safe, either. Encryption can be broken, and is being broken every day. Digital signatures can be faked or fooled (remember the company that obtained a specious MS signature?) so are not foolproof. It’s not possible to open a hole to get trusted things done without at the same time opening a hole for exploits. If you let one kind of traffic through, anyone who successfully pretends to be that sort of traffic can also come through. And let’s face it, fooling computers really isn’t hard; fooling people is much harder. A human shop clerk would never accept that this 6′8″ 300-lb body building he-man in front of her is actually Hermoine Havealot; a computer would, and does every day.

And automatic updating? Yep, that’s really a foolproof system. All an attacker needs to do is compromise one domain resolver, and you’re automatically downloading and installing a fake update. A simple redirection of your access. Oh, you thought the Internet’s domain system was foolproof?

Sure I’m paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?

Bottom line: you, not Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs, not even Linus Torvalds, are responsible for what is happening in your own computer. Act like it. Stop believing that everything you see on a computer is true. No computer ever created is better at knowing how much you want to risk, and what you want to protect, than the one between your ears. Turn it on, feed it good information, and use it. Those silicon counterfeits laying around on desks can’t hold a candle to it.

…when you have a child. Jeff Zeldman is finding that out.

I remember well the first day I met my oldest child. I was prepared, I’d had more than 9 months to think about the idea, get used to it, plan for it — but it didn’t matter. The man who picked up those seven pounds 12 ounces of wiggle disappeared never to be heard from again after one look into her wondrous clear eyes. I am not him. That man could not do, and would not have done, what I have done voluntarily, even cheerfully, in the last 26 years.

And I would not have missed it for the world. Welcome to the club, Mr Z. You may have your doubts now, especially in the dead of night, at the Hour Of The Wolf, but you’ll do. It’s the men who don’t change we have to worry about.

OK, so you already know I’m not extremely happy with the state of the CMS arena currently, and I promised you an update.

Andrew Eddie of the Mambo team and I have been exchanging some emails, each of us educating the other. I find that part of my previous rant was being addressed almost as I was ranting. There’s a style code that will load modules without the table wrappers. It wasn’t in the version of the docs that I was working from but the lastest set has it (dated mid-September).

So that solves everything, right? Wrong. I’m moving along towards being able to do what I wanted to do, but it’s still more often done over the tool’s objections than supported by it.

Part of the problem is philosophical, and part of it is technical. I’ve been head down in technical details too long (but I have managed to convince Mambo to let me place a “module” — Mambo-ese for a logical chunk of the web page, remember — floated to the right edge of a main content item, so it wasn’t a total loss) so as a break let me wax philosophical about it.

Each of the chunks of the web page are self-contained. The main content doesn’t wander around through the navigation, the ad banners keep to themselves, and the list of recent changes is way too snobby to be caught dead mixing with the synication links. That’s as it should be.

But where do the “lines of demarcation” get drawn? If I ask my CMS to upchuck some content, should it hand it to me packaged neatly with a bow, or should it just fill my waiting arms with a string of loose text? I would prefer the latter, but even while preferring it I can see why others would prefer the other.

Where do you want the work to be done? Most of today’s templating systems act like they’re working a loading dock. Boxes arrive, they check the manifest and stack the boxes in the appropriate piles. All neat and tidy. What could be better?

But what if you want a stack in a shape other than rectilinear? What if you want to “readjust” the contents of some of the boxes, so that what was in 5 boxes now fits in two slightly larger ones? As someone else remarked, why should a website have columns?

Are we approaching the idea with blinders? In one sense we’re used to the idea of stackable blocks, in terms both of programming and design. Programmers think about chunks of code as “objects,” they break tasks down into increments, and they view code that doesn’t respect boundaries as sloppy. And the grid model has been hanging around design studios for more years than I can count. It gave birth to the table-based design model, and current CSS-based design, while a step forward, still cannot handle grid design logic as well as I’d like.

As I was speculating, I considered what it was, precisely, I was asking for. A piece of content should know everything about what support functions it will be needing when it arrives on the page, but nothing at all about the location of those functions. A template shouldn’t know if any particular piece of content exists, but it should know precisely what to do with it when it comes knocking.

I idly wondered: create the page structure in xml. Each page could have a unique structure, each logical content chunk identified and given attributes identifying what support functions it would require. There would be no required order in which the chunks would be listed. Then the output engine takes those chunks and assembles them based on a set of rules provided by the designer: if this chunk is present, put it here, if not, let the space be filled by this other chunk. Somehow this output processor sounded familiar.

And shortly after that, it struck me. Am I describing XSLT?

The next stop on my journey through Dame Agatha’s land was Hickory Dickory Death.

Another of the “nursery rhyme” mysteries, this one is not one of her best. Oh, its a good puzzle (when does she not make one?) but in this book her palming of the critical clues is not quite up to her usual standards. You can see her hands move, and her misdirection isn’t as good as usual. An astute reader should arrive at the correct conclusion before All Is Revealed.

The book begins when the incomparable Miss Lemon makes three (count ‘em 3!) errors in a letter she is typing for Poirot. The plot revolves around some silly thefts at a youth hostel, which is managed by her sister and so family feeling is the cause of her mental lapses, and builds from there through three murders to a conclusion. It builds well, Poirot is, well, Poirot. If you’re coming here from the TV series, be aware that the TV writers have rewritten a lot of Dame Agatha’s work in order to include the supporting characters of Inspector Japp and Captain Hastings, neither of whom appear in this.

This entry from Candace Robb’s series about the medieval one-eyed Captain, Owen Archer, is a bit of a departure from previous entries. When the series started, Owen began to serve the Archbishop of York, and he used his brain and his experience to solve murders.

As the series went on, the deductive skills were emphasized less and less, until we reach this volume, in which they are barely needed at all. This book is more suspense than mystery, which is a bit of a disappointment to me, as I enjoy matching wits with a good puzzle.

The Redeemer of the title isn’t a churchman, but is rather the Welch prince, and we’re supposed to wonder for a while if Owen will leave his post to join him and fight to free Wales. The book is fairly well done, with enough plot complications and crises to keep me in suspense to the end. But it left me a little unsatisfied. It’s been too long since I picked up a book and was swept away off on an adventure that fully occupied me. I need to find another one that will; I need the adrenaline shot that only a book can deliver.

Sounds like an old joke, but you gotta see this: a Technology Review article about using micro jet engines to generate the electricity needed to run a portable device. Claims 10 hours of power generation off a diesel fuel pack the size of a D-cell.

I don’t know, but it just seems so wrong to me to be looking for new ways to burn something that is already causing a problem because it’s being burned in such large quantities. How long, I wonder, before laptops come with Surgeon General’s warning labels?

Then again, maybe it’s for the best. The quicker we burn all the oil we can find, the quicker we can get on with moving to a better energy source.

(Hat tip: Tomalak’s Realm)

A while ago Jeff Veen posted a rant about open sourced Content Management Systems. It took a while to get around to finding it (OK, so I was a little busy over the past weeks, sue me) but it resonated enough with my own experiences from playing around with several that I felt compelled to add another voice to the chorus.

As usual, Jeff, you’re spot on. (Sorry it took so long to get here.) I’ve looked at drupal, but never tried to install it. Tried and failed to install Xaraya (this despite over three decades of experience in programming; I’m sure I eventually could have made it work, but since there were more CMS options available to try than I had time available to poke around in the code, I moved on). I have installed and used Mambo, PostNuke, Xoops, WordPress and a couple others.

I currently use Mambo and WordPress regularly (this blog is WordPress, for example) depending upon the site, though I have to admit the best design samples I’ve seen for a CMS were out of Xaraya. Most of the designs are so depressingly similar it’s hard to see they came from different systems.

To add a bit to Jeff’s context, Mambo installs easily, divorces admin from user login, and doesn’t insist on login boxes if you don’t want to offer them. It also supports multiple page templates. Downside: it’s a dickens of a learning curve and the docs are below par.

I think it was a drupal developer in the comments on Jeff’s blog who claimed you needed to pre-wrap things in lots of divs to give designers the opportunity for drop shadows, rounded corners, etc. That’s incorrect, but it highlights a problem with most CMS’s.

As a site designer, I come from the hand-coding tradition (I still use BBEdit more than any other tool in the box). I develop “templates” (for lack of a better term) for the types of pages in the site I’m working on, and when I’m coding a new page, I start from one of those templates and add content to it. Virtually no CMS behaves this way. Instead they insist on not only retrieving the content, but when they do they’ve already attached all the surrounding code they think I need to it as well, without having the first clue about what precisely I’m wanting to do with the content.

I’ll lapse into Mambo jargon here, but I’ll define as I go, to more fully illustrate the point. Every module (simply put, a module is a logical section of a webpage, such as a menu, a login box, a news item, etc.) is associated with a position code, which the designer uses when building the page template, telling the system to put modules with this position code here, those with that position code there, etc.

Now if that actually described what Mambo was doing it would be quite acceptable. But, alas, Mambo (and every other CMS I’ve tried) is doing more, and that’s what causes designers to tear out huge chunks of hair.

Specific example: there’s a position code in Mambo called “inset.” I tried to use this to position a small box, floated right and bordered like a sidebar, on a page, letting the page’s “normal” content flow around it. Alas, the main content came pre-wrapped in a table by Mambo (note please the same problem derives from it being pre-wrapped in a div, so table-based design is not the issue here) which meant that it didn’t wrap around the sidebar like it should, but instead left this big void below the sidebar.

If a piece of content needs to be wrapped in a table/div or three to achieve an effect I want it to have, for pete’s sake let me do the wrapping. I know how many divs I need and why I need them, so just get the bleeping bleep out of my way and let me do my job. I’ll only need to do it once in each template. How many divs I use, and why, is dependent upon the template, not upon the content, so don’t marry the design structure to the content!

What about the casual user who may not know that you need an extra div to achieve some effect? First, every CMS ships with a few templates which can be used as is, modified, or learned from by this class of user. Second, if they truly don’t know why the extra div is needed, just what makes you think they’ll know which of the divs you’ve provided is the correct one to style? Move the code required by the design out of the content and into the supplied templates. That’s not too much to ask, is it? To put the design into the templates and keep the content items limited to content?

I mean, the job of the CMS is to manage content. Content isn’t divs and design tables, it’s words and pictures. (I can hear the standard programmer comeback, “everything’s content” right now. If you truly believe that’s a useful statement when made about web design, then you should stick to programming and stay away from web design.)

Another bad example from Mambo is the calendar. Rather than use the same CSS file as the rest of the site, or even allowing me to specifiy which one I want it to use, it has its own, hard-coded CSS file reference. Which means either I have to rewrite the included CSS file (which would then be subject to being overwritten if I ever update or reinstall the calendar module) or I have to override the included styles, which is made harder than it should be because the Calendar insists on loading its style sheet after the template’s stylesheet, hence I have to work “uphill” (against the cascade).

Please note that while I’ve been picking on Mambo here, I don’t mean to say it’s worse than the others. In fact, I think it’s one of the better systems. The point I’m making is not that it’s bad, but rather that it shouldn’t be reckoned to be any sort of great achievement to be one of the best of that lot.

Freedom’s Gate by Naomi Krivitz is the next up. It was part of the recent WorldCon swag, and while it was above-average for the books that get handed out there for free, I’m not sure I’ll continue with the series.

I can’t really say why, either, which bothers me. Usually if a book leaves me cold (or luke-warm, in this case) I can easily point to a reason. For whatever reason, I just found it hard to care about this lead. Maybe it’s the new geographical hotspot (is it just me or are there suddenly a huge number of fantasies based in the myths of Kazakhs and their immadiate neighbors?) that just doesn’t reach me. Consciously, the biggest fault I can see with the book is that I felt smarter than the lead. Since the story was really unfinished (it’s part one of a cycle) I can’t be sure I truly am, but that’s the way I felt.

And maybe that is part of the problem. It’s Yet Another Epic. I declare, is there some sort of publishing conspiracy that forces writers to pad out their stories to make multi-book epics? I suppose it’s an easier sell than simply tripling the price of a single, well-crafted book, but I’ve [tried to] read too many novellas masquerading as novels int he last few years. I’ve decided it’s time to go back to the magazines. At least there I can get real short fiction, instead of artificially lengthened stories.

This complaint doesn’t apply to all writers in Science Fiction today, but to a depressingly large proportion of them.

Third debate is now history. From the appearance of the two debaters, it certainly looked like GW thought his back was up against the wall. He looked and sounded desperate when not answering some of the questions. JFK, on the other hand, for the most part looked calm and reasonable while not answering the questions.

I lost count of the number of times either candidate lurched away from the real question in order to answer one they thought they were better prepared to answer. They both raised the art of reinterpreting the question to be about something else to a new high for this campaign. Probably because the moderator was asking tougher questions of both than the marshmallows served up so far. Didn’t someone explain the rules to Bob before starting, that he wasn’t supposed to ask questions that anyone really wanted to hear the answers to?

Best spinmeister? Senator Frist who called Senator Kerry a liar and then couldn’t get his own story straight (was it 10 years, 20 years, or in the time you’ve been Majority Leader?). The way he was falling over his own tongue made me wonder how he ever could string together a coherent sentence. I know he can, for I’ve heard him do it, and do it well. But just not last night.

Best moment? I think this goes to Senator Kerry, during the “what have you learned from being married to a strong woman” question, though President Bush runs him a close second, for his answer to the same question. The President: “To listen to them.” Agreed, GW. You should listen to her, because she’s got her head on straight and is probably the only advisor you have who’s willing to tell you the truth, in every circumstance. The Senator’s winning answer: “We’re probably all examples of lucky men who can be said to have ‘married up.’ Some would say me more than the rest [of you].” A man who’s willing to get into a contest not over who has the best wife, that’s common, but specifically over who’s wife farther outpaces her husband? Now that’s a treasure.

Most interesting observation? That while Senator Kerry occasionally praised President Bush’s decisions and actions, the praise was never returned. To me, that says someone’s so afraid his opponent may actually be going to win that he thinks he’d better not take the chance of pointing out any good in him. Point goes to the Senator for style. Nobody gets points for substance in this debacle.

Who won? Who cares. The people lost. There was less substance in this debate than the others, and this one was the one that was supposed to talk about issues that matter to more people. A pox on both their houses.

OK, this time I’ll give URL’s, because the sites promise to be helpful, they just apparently hate the equipment I’m using. I’m having repairs done to my car, at the moment, which will take it out of action for a couple of weeks. So I need to look for a temporary, and perhaps permanent, replacement.

Dollar Rent A Car has a front page that apparently lets you select the day you want to pick up your rental car. Unless, of course, you’re using Safari. Click on the little calendar image which pops up the current month’s calendar to choose the date, and you’ll see only the first week, no more. If you don’t want to pick the car up until the 14th of the month, you’re out of luck.

Oh, wait, there’s a field containing the date. But don’t be silly and expect to be able type anything into the field. Sorry Charlie, you have to use the little calendar widget. Sorry Dollar, I’m renting from someone else.

Did I want to repair or replace the car? Well, let’s see. I pull up the website for Don Jacobs Subaru to see if I can afford a new Outback. Right there in front of me is a button saying “Build Your Vehicle, Name Your Price”. Ooooh, that sounds tasty. Click. A new window opens with a pretty lady telling me to click the start button, and she’ll come back when I’m ready to talk about price. Click. Nothing. Click harder. Still nothing.

The click/no response continues whether I use Safari or IE5. I know, I’ll fire up Firefox. Click. Crash! Another incident report for Talkback. Sorry, Don, old thing. I’m off to another dealer, one with a website that might actually work (novel concept, that).

Basic site testing should have uncovered both of those glitches, but apparently they didn’t bother with something as silly as checking their work. My mother always uses the same word to describe people who consistently refuse to check their work. “Slipshod.”

Test, my children. Don’t put a whiz-bang in the design until you know it works.

Went looking for a light bulb. Oh, not just any light bulb, but a dimmable compact flourescent. Yes, they exist, despite the fact that everyone up to and including Home Depot tells me they don’t. I know they exist, because I have one, and I want more.

So I find that GE makes one, and I get their list of possible places to buy them. I’ve already tried the over-the-counter places, so I check the web vendors they list.

ARRRGH! It’s really not possible for me to find out. I’m looking for “GE Soft White Dimmable Light Bulb”, which is the only description GE’s website gives for the bulb. So I go to Bulb Man, Bulb Direct and Specialty Bulb. (No links for you, crappy websites all!) All the bulbs are listed only by part number! No description, not even a manufacturer name. Just part numbers! I don’t have a part number, you moronic website! I just know the name of the bulb I want!!

All three of these vendors have lost my business, simply because they didn’t have a clue about how to deal with a customer. I would have purchased a case of those bulbs, at least, considering I can’t find them in any store within 50 miles of my house. But their websites were too stupid to help me find what I was after.

The Storal of my mory is this, my children: When you’re building a website that expects to sell things to people who are not experts in the field, give them more than one way of locating your wares. Had any of those sites allowed me to find the bulb by name, they would have had my credit card number within seconds. Heck, if they’d even included a single sentence of description of the bulbs, without making me click individually on eleventy-one part numbers in a vain hope of finding what I wanted, it would have made the sale. But noooo. It’s just part numbers for you; if you want more, you’re going to have to beg and wait. I’m in the middle of a basement redesign, and I don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for light bulbs; I want them now.

As it is, I’ll go on back to one of the local suppliers and special order a case or two (so that I can have replacements when these burn out, considering how hard they are to find). Am I likely to go back to those web sites? Not very. Their URL’s are indelibly associated with the frustration I felt, so why would I want to go back for another helping of it?

It only takes a little ignorance to lose a customer for life.

As Douglas Adams once said, “I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Sorry about the absence. Had my head down for a while.

At least that’s what it seems. Hercule Poirot is called in when a chance remark at a funeral may have resulted in a murder.

This is from the period where Christie decided to abandon all pretense of examining clues. Poirot solves it by apparently sitting in a room and listening to people talk. This book contains one of my favorite observations by Poirot: people cannot stand silence; they will talk, and the more they talk the more likely they are to give themselves away. How many real-life crimes are solved simply because the guilty person talked about the deed too much?

It’s amusing sometimes, to see what lengths people go to in order to attack things they don’t believe in. In the case of Christianity, they often use strange interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You remember them? They were found near the ruins of Qumran, and there has been a project going since the late 40’s attempting to date them and translate them.

Anyway, the usual tactic I’ve run into is to assert they say things which they don’t, or to make other, similarly unsupported, speculations about the community of Essenes (for example, I’ve run into folks who proudly assert the Essenes were Christians, or were a sect which followed “True Christianity” — the intent of the last assertion is, of course, to support a claim that all current Christian sects are therefore false). Those who make arguments based upon these assertions manage to shut up their targets, not through the force of Truth, but in the main because the average Christian is notoriously uninformed about Christian history, often accepting rather bizarre revisions of history as fact simply through ignorance. (My daughter’s Advanced Placement European History teacher once stated baldly that the major difference of opinion between Martin Luther and John Calvin was that Martin Luther believed in free will while Calvin didn’t. We went out and bought my daughter an independent study guide for the AP European History exam, so the teacher’s ignorance didn’t hurt her. We’d both learned quite a bit earlier that pointing out errors to this teacher led only to reprisals, not truth, so there was no point in trying to educate the teacher.)

This is a rather long way round to introducing one of my current study topics, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is The Meaning Of The Dead Sea Scrolls by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint. It’s an excellent introduction to the scrolls themselves (the current “official” translation of the scrolls runs to 39 volumes; the nasty part of me thinks this is why they’re such fertile ground for fabrication — it’s not likely anyone you’re talking to has read them all). But more importantly, from my standpoint, is they tell the history of the project to translate the scrolls, and debunk a lot of the myths that have arisen around them.

The myths grew in part because of the speed (lack thereof) of publication. Many things slowed the pace of the scholarship, but to speculators outside the only real reason was that there must be something in the scrolls that would completely destroy the orthodoxy of the day, either Christian or Jewish (speculation on the latter rose sharply when Israel wrested control of the scrolls from Jordan after the Six-Day War). I mean it’s obvious that must be the reason for the delay — it can’t be because the work is difficult, or because there are so many things exploding around the scholars that it’s hard to remain there on the job, or any one of a hundred other, more innocuous reasons. It’s human nature to leap to the most malignant reason behind someone’s behavior.

This is a highly recommended read for anyone wanting to know something more (or just something, even) about the discoveries in Qumran. The authors have written a very approachable introduction to a very complex and important subject.

I’ve just finished Forge Of Heaven by C J Cherryh. It was a rough beginning, as witness my spelling rant earlier, but after the editors got their act together, it settled down into the usual fine read I’ve come to expect from her.

Before going on, I should note that I have met and talked with the lady before; we shared the GoH stage (she was GoH, I was Gaming GoH) in Omaha more years ago than a gentleman should remind a lady of. She is a delightful and intelligent lady, one with whom I would gladly spend an afternoon or evening talking about nearly any subject. (And the only reason I didn’t go farther than that is that I am quite happily married.) It’s wonderful to spend time with an active mind, especially when wrapped with such charm and grace.

Interestingly, I’d sworn off Cherryh before that time, having been disappointed by the first serialization of the Faded Sun series. Later, when I returned to her writings after a friend insisted, I realized I was Just Being Stupid. Since then I’ve been backtracking to catch up on what I missed.

In some ways we have a formula story, with the Honest Man Trying To His Best, while beset by The Troubled Little Sister and of course The Parents Who Don’t Understand. All the while surrounded by Political Intrique and watched closely by The Unimaginable Power No One Understands And Everyone Fears.

But don’t take this as a criticism of the story. I never mind traveling even the most familiar road as long as I’m in good company. The tale is well-spun and complex, with more than enough entertaining diversions to make the trip immensely enjoyable. Cherryh is a master (mistress?) of this sort of tale, and it shows. The main characters are ones I wouldn’t mind having to my home for dinner; spending time with them is fun.

The story is a sequel to Hammerfall, and takes place a long time after the events in that novel. It’s always a question whether a sequel can be read without reading the first, but in this case it’s possible, as she includes a Reference section which will fill in the important backstory. (I would have preferred the backstory to be filled in within the story itself, but failing that, this will do.

There’s not enough detail of the planet itself to satisfy me, but then I’m a world-building geek; She supplies everything you need to know about it before you need to know it in order to make sense of the story, which is all that is required of her.

If you’re after Hard Science Fiction I’m not so sure you’ll be satisfied. Cherryh’s favorite “science” is the science of species interaction. She builds wondrous civilizations, solid and believable, and turns them loose on each other, with at least one “wild card” that tries to be the bridge between the different societies. She is at her best using an individual to explore the range of conflicts between completely (or nearly so) different social mindsets. Anthropology, rather than Physics, is her metier. If you’re after the nuts and bolts of the station’s operation, you’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.

There is science fiction and then there is science fiction. Cherryh is one of the finest writers currently practicing the craft of the latter. Enter her domain and enjoy.

Leo Laporte says Cheryl Tiegs is 57!

Don’t worry, Cheryl. To every man of my generation, you’ll always beautifully fill out that white net Sports Illustrated swimsuit. Brains and beauty, a killer combination! May your reign be long and sweet.

It appears my earlier rant about the spelling in Forge of Heaven was premature. After a shaky 50 pages or so, it’s settled down, and I haven’t been jarred out of the story by language issues since. More on Cherryh in general and this book in particular later (probably tomorrow).