What the World Needs Now

What the World Needs Now

Camera based rear view and wing "mirrors" on cars - cuts wind resistance, gives a better view, should be cheaper to repair.

Phone holders in cars. My car has 8 cup holders, but nowhere to put my phone. (Magnetic phone holders work well. Until the steel disk that is stuck to your phone falls off. In the middle of a trip across the country. Hardware store double sided tape fails quickly. I had to buy a complete new phone holder to get a sticky back steel disk - $20.)

Soundproof stalls for bathroom airflow hand dryers. Seriously - I would just ban the things or place strict noise limits on them.

In internet browsers - the option to suppress hover actions - stop covering up what I'm reading just because I left the cursor on a hover point - I was just getting the cursor out of my view.

All smart speakers should accept the command "pause for one minute".

All dental floss should have a no flavor option.

All soaps, detergents, lotions for clothes, dishes, hair, hands, shower should have a no scent option.

All salt dispensers used in restaurant kitchens should have chef proof caps.

Overhead lights above ceiling fans should be illegal.

Laws against unnecessary blinking lights - cursors, OPEN signs, colons on digital clocks, warning lights on devices where the time has not been set, wait icons, phone app ads. They are ANNOYING and distracting. And very low frequency "operating" lights on smoke alarms - so annoying in the dark and you have stare at them interminably to see if the device is working.

Bathroom stall doors should swing OUT, NOT in.

And aloo gobi should be required on all Indian buffets. (That's cauliflower and potato - I only eat the cauliflower).

(Plus a lot of stuff from previous posts.)

Lighting

Lighting

I wrote most of this eighteen months ago. I'm not sure why I decided not to post it then. I think maybe I thought I was being too negative. Or maybe I thought it was boring. As I read it now, six months into the covid-19 crisis, it seems odd complaining - most of the issues are resolved by not leaving home.

Cracker Barrel has spotlights along the edges of the ceiling that, in general, point down at the wall. Occasional seating has direct views of the spotlights at an angle - not good, but not terrible. But a few days ago, I sat (before moving to a different seat) at a table that was beside a mirror on the wall. The spotlight reflected by the mirror was blinding. Wouldn't it make sense that if you run a restaurant that you test sit in every seat to check for annoyance problems? (I don't go to Cracker Barrel much lately, my favorite food there has gone downhill badly).

A local restaurant here has nice stained glass (maybe stained plastic, I haven't investigated) overhead light shades. Good light control. Until a bulb burned out. It was replaced with a bulb that is maybe an inch longer. A small glass cover at the bottom was removed and the new bulb sticks out of the shade. I can no longer sit at or glance at that table.

Horizontal plexiglass covers self-serve condiments at Newk's. You can't see the condiments, just the reflection of the overhead lights.

Our former contra dance hall was sometimes used as an art gallery, sometimes as an auditorium. Spotlights ring the floor. Fine if they are pointed at the wall. Not fine if they are pointed at the stage and left for the dance.

At our new dance hall, fluorescent light ballasts buzz so loudly that some people leave (they finally replaced the lights with LEDs - much better. Same fix for my kitchen lights.)

The gas discharge light ballast outside my window at a former apartment was so loud I had to disable the light.

Direct views of the sun occur regularly in automobiles. Have windshield sun shades improved in my lifetime? Not that I can tell. Why not have a pull down shade that completely covers the top of the windshield at a user chosen height. An array of little black dots or a (not very dark) blue tint does not get the job done.

My automobile instrument panel is often totally washed out by sunlight. This is sometimes due to reflection off the plastic cover and sometimes due to insufficient brightness on the new digital displays.

Reading books on my phone is good enough to be my chosen vehicle for books. But some overhead lighting makes it very difficult, needing a very narrow viewing angle. I don't blame this on the overhead lighting. Phones should offer a non reflective screen. This would be far more useful that most of the new features that are being foisted on us. There are matte screen covers for phones, but they wreck the edge sharpness of text - the matte texture needs to be finer. Or a 1/4 wavelength coating like that used for eyeglasses might help (or it might scratch too easily to be useful).

And finally, daytime driving lights. Why don't they include some rear end lighting to help people that are behind you see you in rain and fog? Or "automatic" lights could turn on the back end in fog or rain, but I've never owned a car that does this.

These are such easy problems to fix. Why don't we fix them?

How Chase Bank Lost a Customer

How Chase Bank Lost a Customer

I drove to Utah (from my home in Kentucky) recently. I had my (seldom used) laptop computer with me and did a transfer of funds to an outside account that I had transferred money to several times over the past few years. Since Chase didn't recognize my computer they flagged it as fraud (without contacting me) and sent an email saying that I had a secure message and to log in to my account to read it. However by the time I got to reading the secure email, they had locked my internet access, so I could not read it.

Upon calling Chase I learned that to unlock my internet account, I had to present two IDs in person to a Chase bank. That would be 200 mile trip, there and back from Cleveland, Utah.

So I called the Chase fraud department and waited for a representative for 40 minutes. Upon connecting to one, I was immediately disconnected. I tried again, and 30 minutes later got to talk to a representative. I immediately requested that they call me back if I was disconnected and gave them my phone number, which matched the phone number on my account (unchanged for at least 20 years). "No, we can't call you back".

Okay let's get this done quickly. They needed two IDs - first they would send a code via text to me. That went quickly. Then they must call me on my account phone number. Okay, I will hang up and you can call me. "No, we can't drop this line - we must hold it until we are finished. You can use call waiting to answer." No, whenever I try to answer a call wait, my line gets dropped. "Then we can't identify you and can't unlock your account." Okay, lets try it. Will you call me back if the line drops. "No." What other options do I have? "Call us on a different line and start over." No. Let's try it. I got the call. I answered. Both calls were dropped.

I called Chase (not the fraud department) and explained the situation. "We can't do anything - only the fraud department can handle it." I would like to speak to a manager in the fraud department. "I will make the request - it usually takes two to four weeks. Do you want to try them again?" Once more, I will wait ten minutes. No one answered.

I called my usual branch to see what they could do. Nothing.

I will be switching banks as soon as I get home.

UPDATE - August 8

Just to be clear - I was not upset that Chase declared my transfer to be fraud without contacting me first. I was not upset that they locked my internet account. My issue is that they made it unreasonably difficult for me to correct the situation from my temporary location. And when I explained that I could not get through their procedure, they offered no way for me to correct the situation or talk to someone in management to explain why their procedure was unreasonable.

So I have switched to an online bank - no walk in banking, but 2% interest on savings accounts (vs less than .25% at Chase). 

Decisions, Mistakes, Regrets, The Unchanging Past - a Dark and Dreary Post

Decisions, Mistakes, Regrets, The Unchanging Past - a Dark and Dreary Post

In response to a request for a blog post about COVID-19, and trying very hard to keep out of politics - here goes -

People make decisions every day. They are based on the current situation, as seen by the person, past experiences, projections of the future, goals. In many situations, once a decision is made and implemented, it can't be undone.

A side note, one thing that I like about writing computer software - if I don't like the way I did something, I can, and often do, change it.

The past doesn't change - it doesn't matter how much you want it to. And we have very little input into the future government actions. So I do my best to not obsess on our current situation.

I think back on a couple of bad decisions by people in leadership positions. The first is how we handled exiting the 1970s gas crisis. As gasoline shortages became a problem, the corporate average fuel economy law was implemented, cars shrunk. But as is typical, Congress screwed it up. Instead of requiring that passenger vehicles get a minimum miles per gallon, they allowed heavier vehicles to get less mpgs. And "trucks", now known as SUVs, could get even lower mpgs. So when gasoline prices dropped, people switched to bigger, heavier, less efficient vehicles. Huge missed opportunity to cut our dependence on foreign oil. This I watched in horror, thinking - forget CAFE, just increase the gasoline tax by 25 cents a gallon every year for ten years.

(This information is from Wikipedia.) On 2001, September 11, 8:46:40am, a plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There was much confusion about what was behind this crash. At 8:55 in the South Tower - "The building is secure, please return to your desks." 9:02:57, a plane crashed into the South Tower. What a stupid decision - they lost 8 minutes of evacuation time. It makes me feel sick.

People make bad decisions. It can cost lives, likely the ones that made the decision. Once it happens, it can't be changed. Many bad decisions have been made by intelligent, well meaning people.

So back to COVID-19. I don't know what happened in China, but I suspect that a lot of bad decisions were made. Around the world, various people made various decisions on how to handle it. A lot of people have criticized how it has been handled in the United States. I wish things had been handled differently. If we had recognized the threat earlier, started manufacturing good masks, and giving away masks, requesting that people wear them and avoid unnecessary contact and closeness, then I suspect that we could have avoided the need for shelter in place and shutting down business.

But is that what I would have done? Well, in mid February, it was obvious that it was just a matter of time before the stock market took a big hit. I guess I thought - well maybe it won't be too bad, I will leave my retirement investments alone. Now I wish I had pulled a big chunk of it out of stocks. So how can I say the politicians made bad choices?

Look around the world. Did we do any worse than other countries? The news keeps reporting number of deaths. But I can't remember them reporting it as a fraction of population. So I looked it up. As of May 2 -

  Germany  83m      7k  .008%
  France      67m    25k  .037%
  Spain        47m    25k  .053%
  UK           68m    28k  .041%
  US            331m  68k  .021%

When this is all over, I suspect that beyond a few outliers where politicians were smart or lucky or the reverse, it will turn out that the United States response was close to typical. I have a hard time suggesting that anyone would have done any better.

But the big thing that I take away from this is confirmation of my belief that the human race has built a house of cards that can collapse for many reasons - computer virus, antibiotics becoming ineffective through overuse, government or private debt causing economic collapse, global warming effects, attacks on fragile infrastructure (EMPs), computer software that is so complex that software becomes bug ridden and completely unusable, to name a few. And my best guess - mass insanity caused by yearly changes in smartphone user interfaces.

Novels

Novels

At any point in my life, I am reading a novel. It amazes me that so much of this material turns me away in the first encounter.

Describing a character/landscape in detail that I have no reason to be interested in - why don't you first tell me why I should care?

Distorting the timeline or character interactions so that it is clear that a huge part of the story is me figuring out what is going on - these are puzzles, not stories.

Chapter one should make me care about the rest of the story and the characters and landscape. This is where ebook sample downloads come in very handy. I have read many free samples that led me cross the book off of my list.

Then there are the characters. There must be someone that I care about. Otherwise I don't care what happens. They don't have to be heroes or even good people. But there must be some spark in the character that makes me care.

I don't want to see another story of murder, drugs, disease. I don't want to be grossed out. And I don't want to be preached to about social justice.

In fantasy novels - don't spend pages describing a system of magic. The magic is clearly fantasy - keep it simple so I can accept it and get on with the story.

Faster than light travel qualifies as magic, so don't waste my time trying to justify it.

Backward time travel - first, special relativity does not predict that faster than light travel reverses time. It predicts that faster than light travel makes time an imaginary number - the square root of a negative number. And if you could travel backward in time, how would you travel in space to match? Everything in the universe is moving in space. If you traveled back in time six months, you would be on the opposite side of the sun from the earth, IF you tracked the motion of the solar system.

Red Moon, by the author of Red Mars, Green Mars, etc. is a novel about the life on the moon? After the initial incidents on the moon, it moves to China. And becomes BORING. I don't know how it ends or if it ends - I suspect that the last half of the book is a lot like moving half the distance to the finish line in each sitting - you never get there. I gave up.

Murder mysteries - when are the people who solve murders going to realize that they are causing the murders? How else can you explain how many they have to deal with.

Dreams - there is nothing more boring than reading about (or listening to) people's dreams. Dreams can't be accurately described in our language because they are not real and are not internally consistent. And they don't mean anything.

Game of Thrones - book one 1996, book five 2011, was at the top of my list of fantasy series. No more. Stop in the middle, put the whole thing, including an ending, on television. Why should I read the last two books? Or maybe there won't be any more - it's been eight years.

The Kingkiller Chronicle - book one 2007 and two 2011 are done, book three has now passed eight years in development. The Slow Regard of Silent Things 2014, a side story, is possibly the most boring book that I have ever tried to read, and contributes nothing to the trilogy's story.

Christopher Moore's latest book, Noir, is awful, as far into it as I could read. Read the Amazon 1 star reviews.

Terry Pratchet, Michael Crichton, David Gemmell gone. Sigh.

Oh well, I usually find something.