Because Social Media isn't Verbose, and CLL isn't as common in 1982.

 People have complained to me on more than one occasion that I am verbose. As far as I know, this is a completely undesirable trait most of the time. However, I am always found wanting more information and specificity when I ask about things, so I have attempted to learn how to (mostly) politely interrogate people so that I get the sort of answers that I'm looking for.

When I'm the person giving the answers, it's terrible, but mostly because I have given more answer than the other party wanted, and even sometimes to questions that the other party only wanted a meaningless superficial answer to. I have been told on more than one occasion that I talk too much or overexplain, and even once have been told in response that "people aren't going to read my @#$%^$%$$% novel" when I typed out a thorough answer to something.

Every once in a while, I see something that's a tiny bit underexplained, and it bugs me, but I usually have enough sense to not cause problems. What follows is a byproduct of me now fixing something that was a little bit under-explained (or oversimplified, you pick) and I finally bothered to sort it out myself.

So the first Rubik's cube official record was Minh Thai's 22.95. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJTZhgrbgt8&t=325s

And, thanks to reddit users /u/qqwref and /u/BrestCubing, a lot of important solves have been reconstructed - including this one - and we'll get to that.  Most of the modern solves are done with a method that everyone is more familiar with, what used to be called Fridrich and is now referred to as CFOP. But, Minh's solve is done with his own method, and it's even well documented. ("The Winning Solution", ISBN 0-440-09795-9, 1982.) 

Minh's book was a step ahead of many things that were available at the time because he had individual orientation algorithms for the second set of corners, when nearly every other solution book had some sort of incremental method for orienting the second set of corners. It was one of the first published cube books to explicitly detail and demonstrate the idea that if you had more algorithms at your disposal you could solve faster.  Interestingly enough, there were also a handful of extra algorithms in the examples that started to make me consider the idea that Minh had actually been able to orient and permute second layer corners in a single algorithm.

So, that leads me to the reconstruction. Michael Gottlieb's (qqwref) reconstruction is as follows:

U L2 D' B2 U' R2 B2 F2 D' F2 L2 R2 F R2 D L2 R2 B' L' D' R F' 


x2 y // inspection 
D' R u D R' y' D' R D R' // FL corners + 1 edge 
y D r' E' L // FL center + 2nd edge 
z2 U y l D R' z' R' x z' r' R2 U2 z D R2 D2 // CLL 
R' l' z M D2 M' // FL 3rd edge 
z2 y R z' M z R' // LL 1st edge 
z' r' L' z D R' E R // LL 2nd edge 
U' u' R E' R' // LL 3rd edge 
u R' E' R E2 R E R' // LSE 
R2 E E' r2 E M2 E' // centers

 

This is typical of modern reconstructions. The scramble is shown first, starting from a solved cube with white on top and green on front, moves are shown in standard Singmaster notation, including cube rotations, and double slashes at the end of a line to give a place to put comments.  So, at the end of line four there, it says "CLL". The implication there is that Minh solved both permutation and orientation in a single algorithm. However, that's not the case. Also, it's largely overlooked because it's typically more move-efficient to orient first before permuting. So, here's my marked-up version of the reconstruction. I added notes in one color and comments in another so I could keep track. The Stage/Section references are from Minh's solution guide.

 

U L2 D' B2 U' R2 B2 F2 D' F2 L2 R2 F R2 D L2 R2 B' L' D' R F'

x2 y // inspection  yellow top, red front 

D' R u D R' (y' D') R D R' // FL corners + 1 edge ends with orange corners on top but still yellow top red front 

(y D) r' E' L // FL center + 2nd edge ends with orange on front, red corners need diagonal swap 

 z2 U y l D R' z' R' x z' r' // corners in correct cycle, orange on bottom 

This is equivalent to the permutation algorithm in Stage 2, Section 1, C3, (LFUF’U’L’) with cube rotations and wide moves.  This is permutation only, so I wouldn’t exactly count this as CLL. 

 R2 U2 z D R2 D2 // CLL corners oriented, orange on left  

This is equivalent to the orientation algorithm in Stage 2, Section 2, T7, (R2 F2 R F2 R2) with one cube rotation. 

R' l' z M D2 M' // FL 3rd edge 

z2 y R z' M z R' // LL 1st edge 

z' r' L' z D R' E R // LL 2nd edge 

U' u' R E' R' // LL 3rd edge keyhole piece is at ‘dr’ for the LL edges 

u R' E' R E2 R E R' // LSE 

R2 E E' r2 E M2 E' // centers

Taking another look at this reconstruction solidified two things for me - one, the confirmation that he wasn't doing full CLL, and second, that he rarely performs any sort of F or F' moves despite how often they appear in his solution guide. I had already gotten a sense of that from some other video of him, but it was nice to have the confirmation from a good reconstruction.

So, that's not to say that _nobody_ was doing CLL in the 80's, it just wasn't Minh Thai. Mark Waterman has a well-documented (on the web, at least) corners first solution that has a CLL step.

The next time we take a swing at this, I will have to look at the "LSE" step.

Cubes and Lawyers Part 2: Countersuit!

This is just a followup to one of the items in a previous post about legal action by Rubik's Brand, Ltd.

In response to aggressive action by Rubik's, TheCubicle has put together a countersuit. Here's the explanation from Phil from TheCubicle, from his post on reddit.com/r/cubers :

Hi Everyone,

This is Phil from TheCubicle. I'm posting here to give everyone an update on the legal situation with Rubik's Brand Limited.

On Friday, February 2, Cubicle Enterprises LLC has filed a lawsuit against Rubik’s Brand Limited seeking cancellation of four of its trademarks on the basis of utilitarian functionality, genericness, and fraud, as well as treble damages for various antitrust violations related to trademark misuse and attempted and actual monopolization. The suit also requests a declaratory judgment that TheCubicle has not violated Rubik’s purported federal and state trademark rights.

This controversy first arose in October 2017, when Rubik’s sued TheCubicle for trademark infringement, threatening to shut down its business and strip away its assets, effectively destroying the livelihoods of our employees and their ability to serve the community. A line of dialogue with Rubik’s was quickly opened in hopes of resolving the dispute productively and amicably. However, the painstakingly frustrating negotiations that followed made it clear that Rubik’s legal claims were unsubstantiated and dealing with Rubik’s was impossible.

It has also become clear that Rubik’s wants complete control of speedcubing and is willing to resort to bullying, intimidation, abuse of intellectual property law, and monopolistic tactics, including illegal tying activities, in its attempt to get it. We will not allow this to happen.

Rubik’s fails to see that our community is built on the bonds of friendship, trust, and the spirit of fair play. We grow together as cubers and people, and this is what makes our community special.

Our world of sharing ideas, helping each other as friends, and competing at our best under fair rules with our favorite cube products from sources chosen by cubers is something that should never be tainted by Rubik’s voracious greed to control and dominate.

We will not allow Rubik’s to leverage its invalid intellectual property, monopolistic demands, and other threats against its competitors to oppress us or limit the opportunities for expanding cubing, both for competitors and fans. We will not allow its attempt at perpetuating a monopoly to be successful. And, we will not allow the shadow of Rubik’s to loom over us anymore.

For these reasons, we took action in Federal court to stop Rubik’s from threatening our company and the survival of its business operations, our community, and the market.

We cannot thank our community enough for its support and understanding. The past few months have been extremely challenging, and we are beyond appreciative of the overwhelming support and expressions of solidarity from everyone around us.

We tried to settle this on reasonable terms with Rubik’s, but it became apparent that Rubik’s was not bargaining in good faith and that it was necessary to protect our community through this litigation. We are confident in the strength of our legal claims against Rubik’s, and will continue to do our best in this difficult situation. We look forward to representing the cubing community’s interests.

A copy of our complaint: https://thecubicle.us/Info/ECF1_Complaint.pdf Accompanying exhibits: https://thecubicle.us/Info/ECF1_Complaint_Exhibits.zip YouTube video: https://youtu.be/A11ggIu6n8E

Also just recently, the Rubik's Brand/Red Bull tournament has announced their first event. This tournament would be the first of its kind after Rubik's failed attempt to reach some sort of agreement with the WCA. Several other dates in other locations have been planned. Similarly to TheCubicle, the WCA was not amenable to what they perceived as strongarm tacticts to take over competitive cubing and chose not to work with Rubik's and Red Bull on these events.

Some Splatoon 2 reminders from RubbaChikin.

For those of you that might be playing Splatoon 2, I thought I would post a list of reminders from before, and a few new tips about the new parts of the game.

Here were the regular tips, changes are in red, photos are new.

1. Regular mode (Turf War) is just making sure you have inked more territory than the other team. Use your map to find out if there are places that really need ink. Now the map is accessed by the "X" button.

2. In the Ranked mode Splat Zone mode on maps that have two splat zones, have two people cover each one. This is less important now, as the new maps seem to either have one zone or put the two closer together.

3. In the Ranked mode Tower Control, it doesn’t do much good to just run around and paint stuff without a plan.Get the tower, hold the tower, make a path for the tower. Use the dotted line to figure out where the tower is headed. You can’t just run around the tower shooting at it – at some point someone on your team has to get on the tower. Blasters have become extremely effective at clearing the tower of enemies. Using the longer paths to go around the tower won't help. The tower now stops at checkpoints.

4. If you’re using any of the Nozzlenose weapons in Tower Control, you may find it rather difficult unless you’re extremely accurate. If you’re used to that weapon in regular mode, you may find it easier to use one of the Sloshers for Tower Control. The Nozzlenose now has better secondary weapons to make up for its minor problems. 

5. In Rainmaker mode – have the Rainmaker before you push forward through the map, and make sure the person with the Rainmaker is safe. If you have the Rainmaker and no teammates nearby, use the “C’mon” call by pressing up on the D-Pad to call them. The Rainmaker is much less destructive than before, making it that much more important to protect the team member with the Rainmaker.

6. In Rainmaker mode – No lounging around! You can only use the weapon for a limited time.

7. It's a team game, play it like one. Nobody cares how many frags you get if your team loses.

8. Don't let go of the objective during overtime! If you do, it's GAME OVER!

9. In all of the modes, don't place squid beacons near your base. You can already jump to it by opening the map with the X button, holding down on the D-Pad, and then pressing the "A" button.

10. Put down an ink mine or suction bomb on the tower if you're rushing it or defending it. Ink mines are no longer as powerful, but they do allow you to see where the enemy is. 

11. Sloshers are very good for covering the walls and ground. Use this to get your players with longer range weapons to higher ground.

12. Any weapon that you have to charge is SUPER slow when charging midair so don't try to start charging midair if there is an enemy below you. Fire off a shot or two so you can get to the ground safely and then worry about charging or attacking.

13. In all of the modes, if your weapon has seekers curling bombs and there are no enemies around it, swim right behind it. It is good stealth without losing much speed from the ninja squid ability. Seekers were removed in Splatoon 2. The new curling bombs do not home in any way but they do bounce off of walls. The ninja squid ability is slower than it used to be except when climbing walls.

14. Make sure before you super jump that you are not going to get killed right as you land. Hey - ever heard of "Look before you leap"? Also, the new ability allows you to roll once you land.

15. If you're playing one of the objective-based Ranked Mode matches, do not go off and paint stuff! Your super meter will fill plenty if you keep in the battle and watch for hazards. 

Cubing in public, and a super cuber in California.

My kids, my wife, my beach cube and I all went to the Deerfield Beach Surfers for Autism event a couple of days ago and we had a fair amount of fun, even though I only did maybe one in-depth cube demonstration for one of the vendors and only one waiting in line with participants. The most important things I learned were:

• If you have an extra Coke, share it.
• If the surf is rough, paddle harder.
• I really like chimichurri on french fries.

I have been doing cube demonstrations fairly often, probably a couple a week, just waiting in line at the grocery store or getting lunch. I did one today at a local sandwich place, where they wanted to see a full-on speedsolve while my sandwich contents were cooking, and I didn't bother with my usual round of explanations. Another patron filmed it, however I'm guessing that I won't see it despite my attempts because I'm always too flustered to say "No Spaces!" when I tell people that my youtube channel is SuperMonkeyCube. If you do a search for "super monkey cube" on youtube all you get is silly Super Monkey Ball results. I was even more psyched than usual because the person at the sandwich place that helped me and wanted to see the speedsolve was so jazzed to show me a prism that they carry around with them in order to demonstrate light dispersion when you look through two sides of it, creating funky rainbow effects. Since at heart, I'm just a person that's super-excited about their hobby, it warms my heart to see other science and math enthusiasts do their thing.

The other day at Publix I did my usual round of demonstrations, only to have a woman tell me "You should put this on Youtube." The one thing that I really want to have on Youtube that I really don't have on Youtube is exactly that thing. I want to have a person casually ask me about the cube, we have a little back-and-forth conversation about what their understanding is and I try to clear up their misconceptions, and I demonstrate what they want demonstrated, and do a solve or two to show them what they want to see. The problem for me is that I can't do that while filming it myself, and adding a cameraperson will likely ruin the spontaneity of the whole thing unless I'm constantly followed by a hidden camera crew (which I'm guessing might run me into trouble with the sorts of retail establishments that these interchanges normally take place in). However, maybe if I let it be known that I'd like a camera operator or two and a demonstration victim shemp fake shemp lovely assistant whatever you call the person you're doing the demonstration for, maybe I will be able to round up some volunteers.

Having had a birthday recently, I got a couple of cube-related things, but those will have to wait until another post. Another bit of cube news is too timely, and takes precedence.

Max Park - shown here at the OCSEF Open 2017 in Costa Mesa,CA - breaks the world record average by .06 seconds. Prior to this event, Max was ranked 6th in the world for average time at 6.92 seconds, with a personal best of 5.92 ranking him at 29th in the world for single solve. Also, prior to this event, Feliks Zemdegs held the Ao5 average record for the previous seven years.

If you check out the analysis by BrestCubing on reddit, you can see that Max doesn't really solve like Feliks does.

Feliks tends towards a variety of a lot of very advanced techniques - XCross (eXtended Cross - solving one or more of the four corner-edge pairs while solving the first four edge pieces that are typically referred to as the Cross.) ZBLL (Zborowski-Bruchem Last Layer which has algorithms for all possible last layer cases where the edges are already oriented) and some other freestyle block-building methods borrowed from the Roux and Petrus methods. This means that Feliks is trying to optimize what he's doing for many different kinds of initial positions and find something that's the most turn-efficient for what he sees. Felix's best competition solve of 4.73 seconds was only 43 moves.

When you review Max's solves, what you see is that the only solve where he tries to do something fancy (solve 2 where he does a partial cross before bringing in the first corner edge pair) is his slowest solve (7.26 sec) and second highest move count (68). His other solves are very straightforward, and just plain fast. Max's fastest solve, a competition best for him, was a 5.60 with 62 moves - just over 11 turns per second.

This does make me wonder about the number of algorithms that someone can have memorized and be able to execute them solidly. It's not necessarily worthwhile to have a multitude of algorithms under your belt if a few of them are going to be a little slower than the other ones, and the more different things you have algorithms for mean more cases that you have to be able to recognize. One of the reasons that there are more CFOP solvers than other methods is because it's less abstract to explain and easier to identify cases.

Well, maybe I'm going to have to practice with a metronome more. (Bass and cubing.)

"What's the secret?" they ask...

...and more often than not, I respond with "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

It's not a question that I get all the time, but if I'm out walking around with my Rubik's cube and a bystander asks me that question, it's the question that's the most likely to get me to stop.

I think the most common misconception about the Rubik's Cube is that people think there's more going on that what there is. Visually, there are 54 stickers (or colored tiles). It usually takes me showing a person specifically what an edge and what a corner is to get them to realize what they're looking at. More or less, this is the rundown that I give them.

Ok, so the first thing that you want to see is that the center pieces don't move relative to each other. On this cube, red is always opposite orange, white is always opposite yellow, and blue is always opposite green. These six pieces are on a center spindle like a U-Joint in your car, and can't go anywhere. The next thing is that you want to notice is that each edge piece and each corner piece is unique. For example there's only one orange and white piece, and there's a one-to-one correspondence between the colors on the piece and where it has to go when the cube is solved.

At this point I would turn the cube so that the orange and white piece is in the right place.

When I was using older cubes, I often took one of the edge pieces out at this point to show that you can't really change the pieces and that it really was a matter of getting the selected piece in the right place.


So now, you can see that the place that the orange and white piece has to go is that spot between the orange center and the white center. That piece goes at the intersection of those two faces.

While I turn the cube to show the position of the piece, I'm looking for one of the two adjacent corner pieces.


Here's the corner piece that goes next to it. Orange, white, and green. 

That piece has to go at the corner that corresponds to the orange, white, and green centers. There are twelve edge pieces with two colors each, and eight corner pieces with three colors each. So now, for every piece on the cube, you can say: Is the piece in the right place, and is it turned around the right way?

If I think that I've lost them, I pick a different piece and place it in an incorrect orientation in the correct location, and if I haven't lost them I try to extrapolate a little more.

So this now means that if you do one side, like most people try to figure out first, it's not going to just be that side. If you have one side done correctly, it's going to be an entire layer solved.

From here it's usually dependent on the person and how we're doing and what follow-up questions that they're asking.

Another nice version of this interchange is that every once in a while (and it's becoming more frequent) I get to watch someone else solve a cube, and I'm able to offer some pointers, or recommend what to work on next or what to look up. The majority of the time is still me trying to demonstrate and explain as much as is requested to people that are unfamiliar.

Sometimes it's hard to know when we're done, but sometimes it's really easy. Once in a while after a solve demonstration, especially since I'm not as fast as whatever they may have seen on the internet or TV, they say things like "Did you see that there are some kids that can do it really fast, but they're doing it mathematically?" The last time that someone did that, I just walked off.

Had you seen it yourself, you might have thought that I assumed that it was the two people talking to each other and I was no longer in the conversation, since I didn't have a polite response prepared. And then you go - Hey, wait a minute, isn't there math here? What's your problem with the question? So, maybe I should explain.

1) Practically nobody successfully solves a cube without a plan. Even if you don't start with a plan, you're going to need one by the time you finish.

2) Nobody solves a cube fast without a plan, and having memorized algorithms beforehand and putting time into executing those algorithms as efficiently as possible.

3) Nobody solves a cube really fast without a plan, memorized algorithms, and lots of practice at piece tracking - looking ahead at finding the pieces you're going to need for the next algorithm by the time you finish the one you're doing.

So the question you have to ask yourself, is that math? I would say that it's just pattern recognition and execution of specific operators that have some basis in set theory or group theory, but you're not doing any set theory while you're solving the cube (unless you're working it out slowly from scratch like case #1 above.) Considering how infrequently set theory and group theory come up in casual conversation, I don't even have a good feel for what people would say is or is not math. Perhaps that can be left as an exercise for the reader to determine what is, or is not math here. (I'm not suggesting that set or group theory isn't math, I'm suggesting that those are the sort of things about which a layperson might be inclined to say, "No, I mean like real math.")

It would also appear that I really need to watch that movie about Edward Snowden. I was disappointed to find out he doesn't have a WCA ID.

Information is symmetrically asymmetrical.

Recently where I worked, we had the thumb turn fall off of a relatively new door lock. (The thumb turn is the part on the inside of the door so you can lock a deadbolt from inside without the key.) My first thought was that since it just unthreaded it shouldn't be that hard for me to thread it back in, but it turned out to not be obvious. I was able to get it threaded back in, but I couldn't get the lock mechanism to do what it was supposed to. I felt like that I could have done it given enough time, but it wasn't the sort of thing that I could spent more than ten minutes on without feeling like I had something more important to do.

Later, after we had finished with customers for the day, one of the technicians that work for our locksmith came by to fix the door. He met me at my desk at the counter, noting that I have a few Rubik's cubes there to harass customers with. I assume that he's around my age, since he identified the cubes readily, although he was a little surprised at how shiny the new plastic tile cubes are. We headed over to the offending door, and I handed him a plastic bin with all of the carefully sorted thumb turn pieces. It took him relatively little time to correctly line up all of the pieces of the lock and get it back together. Even though I really tried to watch him, whatever he did was so natural and effortless I didn't really see what he did that was different from what I had done. I tried to ask him what he did differently, but he wasn't able to explain it. While he was looking at the rest of the door to see what might have caused the thumb turn mechanism to come loose, he says "Did you see that thing..." and I stupidly assume he's going to ask "Did you see that thing on America's Got Talent with that guy that does magic tricks with a Rubik's Cube?"

He tells me no, finishes the piece he was screwing back in, and then says "Did you see that thing where a middle school kid took apart a Rubik's Cube and figured out the mathematical formula for it and the Rubik's cube company paid him a whole lot of money to keep it a secret?"

There was an awkward silence while I tried to regain my composure. Meanwhile he found one of the holes at the top of the door where the top bolt was rubbing in a way that it wasn't supposed to and reamed it back out so that the door could lock more smoothly. While he was doing that, my internal dialogue was going full blast.

What was so bad about that? He's just asking a question. Did you see that or not?  Were you listening to the question? Disassembly doesn't inform you about the cube's regular solution, using the phrase "mathematical formula" in this context is nearly meaningless, and the notion of a conspiracy to keep the solution of the world's largest selling and probably most pirated toy a secret is laughable since most of the cubes sold in the last 20 years come with a solution pamphlet right in the package and you can get a solution method from the company's own website.  How would he know? He's busy doing actual work.

When I returned to reality, I explained about how that there had been cube competitions since the 80's, and no conspiracy like that existed that I was aware of. He came back to my desk to write up the bill for his office, and I grabbed a mostly unsolved cube, finished it, and then showed him how a short sequence of moves can move a small predetermined number of cubes around. My go-to routines for this are usually R2 U' S' U2 S U' R2 that moves three U layer edges around, and R' D' R D' R' D2 R D2 that twists some D layer corners and moves some D layer edges around.  The reason for those two particular moves is that I know their inverses as well as the regular moves. I also showed him what happens with the cube mechanism itself, about how better cubes are better able to realign when one face is turned before another face is completely aligned. I thought this concept might appeal to the part of his brain where all of his locksmith information already resided. While he seemed receptive to the idea since I was able to easily show him what I was talking about, I didn't feel sure that I had dissuaded him of his original notion despite being able to solve a cube in front of him. At that point I grabbed my boss since the bill was ready to be signed off and he was done and we said our goodbyes.

The first time that I ran across this sort of thinking was my stepfather, when he rambled on one day at lunch about how the car companies had colluded with the oil companies to keep high MPG engines out of production. This theory didn't really hold any water with me at the time, since my father is a mechanical engineer and was very involved with engine design and I had at least some sense of the math involved. (You can find a much better version of the math here.) But, if you're a person that's sure there's a conspiracy, and there's no obvious way to falsify your hypothesis, and you don't understand the problems of making regular gasoline do what it does, then the thought remains unchecked.

At least for our Rubik's cube conspiracy, I was able to easily falsify part of the hypothesis - I was able to show that it can be solved. (I was going to say that it could be solved by a normal person, but many of you reading this will want to refute this non-trivial assertion.) That might not be enough to prove to the locksmith that there never was a conspiracy, so perhaps that thought will still remain as well.

I wasn't surprised about the idea that people exist that have never seen a Rubik's cube solved in person. I carry a cube around with me every day, and I'm always going to meet someone every once in a while that hasn't seen a cube solved.  What I was surprised about was the harboring of the idea that there was a conspiracy to keep the solution a secret, and what believing in a thing like that does to a person's trust in humanity itself. I can't place the same amount of importance on the solution to the Rubik's Cube, or the details of a magical carburetor that doesn't actually exist, or the nature of how to unlock something that's supposed to stay locked.

I was left with the feeling that maybe me showing people a Rubik's Cube can be solved is more important than I thought. Not just for the thing itself, but to show people the idea that even learning something (anything?) complicated is just part of a process that we go through gradually and that through reflection and observation we refine our abilities. Luckily, this morning in traffic I solved a cube at a stoplight and the person next to us rolled down their window to tell me that it was amazing to watch and that they've been working on cubing for a month and that they were learning. It restored my faith in people again.

Oh, yeah. I was left with a second feeling - if I want to be able to put locks back together I need more practice.

An odd bit of computing.

On my Ubuntu desktop machine I had finally gotten over the fact that every time a semi-large update comes across I have to type:

Make 

sudo make install 

sudo modprobe 8812au

to reinstall my wifi driver, because I picked a Wifi device that isn't well supported. 

 

If the update is _really_ big, I have to type:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

to clean up the OS because the /boot partition is just that - a partition with limited space. 

 

If it really bothered me, I could just save all my documents and wipe the drive and reinstall the 16.04.1 LTR from scratch, and I don't think the boot sector nonsense would be as much of a problem, but then the OS wouldn't ever properly clean up after itself and would slowly grow larger over time unchecked.

What really fries my bacon is that the Espon printer driver quietly failed while I'm busy doing the other stuff. So, I will have to hijack one of my kids' Windows 7 machines to print something. And, no I didn't make them upgrade to Windows 10 even though it was free.

(I suspect that a portion of my readers aren't laughing or amused because printing stuff is like, so ten years ago.)

In defense of New Year's Resolutions

I know that lately all of the self-help gurus have been writing articles about how New Year's resolutions don't work, or how we're just setting ourselves up to fail, or how if we need to make change in our lives, we shouldn't wait for an arbitrary date. These may all be true to a degree, but I think that abandoning the concept of a New Year's resolution entirely robs us of a chance to check in with ourselves in a way that we don't necessarily do any other time.

Each holiday, in its own way, can get us to focus on a part of our life that we may just need a little tune-up on. Valentine's Day and wedding anniversaries get us to focus on our romantic life with our spouse. The Fourth of July and Veteran's Day get us to focus on what we can do for our country. Halloween gets us to think a little bit about our self-image, but usually it's a ridiculous fantasy self-image that doesn't have sugar issues. Sometimes we think about ourselves on our birthdays, but more often than not you're focusing on age and being older, and frankly you can't do anything about that one way or the other. Thanksgiving and Christmas get us to focus on our family and friends. New Year's Eve may tend to be about going out for beverages and fireworks, but as a result, New Year's Day presents us with an opportunity to evaluate ourselves that maybe we don't get the rest of the year (providing you're not too hung over.)

Those two weeks at the end of December are likely to be a blur - between parties and end-of-the-year recaps and Christmas and family and dinners and presents and making cookies and stuffing and vegetables and various sizes of poultry and what-the-heck-happened-to-my-living-room-and-how-did-I-get-glitter-there it's bound to be a little crazy. If you're in wholesale or working at a factory, work itself might be slow but everything else may not be. If you're in retail or the service industry, it's going to be non-stop for those two weeks at work, and probably still crazy at home too.

When do you get a break?

Sometime around New Year's Day.

Check in with yourself. Review what you've accomplished, look at what you want to accomplish, and make a plan or two.

Maybe you got a weight bench for Christmas, or that computer or window desk that you've always wanted and you're busy setting it up.

Figure out if your goal is to add ten pounds of muscle, or lose twenty pounds of fat, learn to code, mix some music, or just move some stuff around in your house so that you can more efficiently get the things done that you need or want to do.

Maybe you're looking over your end-of year figures or reviewing your projects.

Figure out if your goal is to pick up some new customers, work on some new strategies with the customers you have, or find some new products that you can implement with with all of your customers new and existing.

Figure out if you're doing the things for yourself that make you happy.

Now, once you've figured all of this out, don't be afraid to do it again.

(Maybe it won't take a year this time.)

The stuff is dead! Long live the new old stuff!

I made my semiannual trip to Best Buy the other day as part of Christmas shopping. PS4 controllers were on sale, my older son and I saw the trailer for the new Ratchet & Clank.




We were excited to see it, but we know that that also means that there's another game coming out. It's a game, based on the movie, based on the game.



We do find that kind of funny - the last time we got a game based on a movie based on a game, we got JCVD, Kylie Minogue, and my favorite S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Ming-Na Wen in the video game "Street Fighter:The Movie".



 Maybe if this becomes a more popular trend, we'll finally get a Resident Evil game starring Milla Jovovich.

In other news, it looks like Best Buy is only selling music as impulse purchases now.  When stores like Target and Walmart still have an aisle full of CD's, Best Buy's shelf space for CD's is shrinking. Even worse, the majority of what was there at Best Buy was either 1) specifically Christmas music or 2) albums so popular that they couldn't be ignored.  So, Adele, The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Metallica, One Direction, and a dwindling quantity of stuff towards the end of the alphabet. (I was looking for Bjork while I was there, and it was even difficult to find Beyonce or Bon Jovi.)

Barnes & Noble has a big music selection these days, but thanks to all of those hipsters out there that brought vinyl back, that's all they have. Not one CD.  Shelves and shelves of DVD's and Blu-Ray movies, and a big island in the middle full of vinyl.

I know, a bunch of you are probably saying "What about iTunes?", but I'm not entrenched in Apple culture, and I'm not looking to be dependent on it. I like how well iTunes works for me for podcasts, and that's as far as I'm willing to go.

It's a little late this year for me to change plans, but I think that in the future I'm going to have to make my default music buying plan to get something directly from the artist, since it seems you get better choices on what format you want it in that way.

In that vein, check out bjork.com - it's changed a lot since I've been there last and it's been redecorated in the style of her new album. If you haven't heard her new work, perhaps you should - how does the expression go - get it straight from the horse's mouth?

Things you should know about Splatoon if you're playing it.

While I am terrified at the prospect of sending my oldest to high school this fall, he doesn't seem too freaked out about it. He spent a fair amount of time playing Splatoon this summer, including participating in all three Splatfests so far. I haven't played the game as much as he has, so the gameplay tips are all his.

I asked him what people should know about playing in Ranked Mode, which is where I usually find him complaining about the gameplay of his opponents. So, here's his list!

1. Have at least two people guard a Splat Zone.
2. If nobody is on the tower, GET ON IT!
3. Overtime means CAPTURE THE THING!!!!
4. In all of the modes, don't place squid beacons near your base. You can already jump to it by tapping the spawn location on the GamePad.
5. Put down an ink mine or suction bomb on the tower if you're rushing it or defending it.
6. Sloshers are very good for covering the walls and ground. Use this to get your players with longer range weapons to higher ground.
7. Any weapon that you have to charge is SUPER slow when charging midair so don't try to start charging midair if there is an enemy below you. Fire off a shot or two so you can get to the ground safely and then worry about charging or attacking.
8. In all of the modes, if your weapon has seekers and there are no enemies around it, swim right behind it. It is good stealth without losing speed from the ninja squid ability.
9. Make sure before you super jump that you make sure that you are not going to get killed right as you land.
10. Do not go off and paint stuff! Your super meter will fill plenty if you keep in the battle and watch for hazards.

Hopefully this helps a few people. I would add another item to this list for people used to other shooters - for each of the various game modes, make sure that you're paying attention to the primary goal for each mode. Regular versus mode means painting a lot of ground your color, Tower Control means maintaining control of the tower, Splat Zones means controlling specific zones of the board. While taking out your opponents is often helpful, racking up a big kill count doesn't win the match.

Two good examples of the Second Habit.

I typed this weeks and weeks ago thinking I would use it nearer to when "Splatoon" comes out for WiiU, but it's taken longer than I originally thought for the game to be finished and I'm uncomfortable with a post lingering in the backlog for too long.

I was sent to a few productivity seminars at my last job, and while a few day-to-day things stuck, one really apparent thing stuck with me and resonated with the way that I want to be able to do things: The Second Habit from the Seven Habits that they teach at the Franklin-Covey classes.

Basically stated, the Second Habit is : Begin with the End in Mind.

If you know what it is that you're trying to accomplish, it's easier to attain that goal. More importantly, the more specific a goal you're trying to attain, the more specific you can be about how to go about achieving that goal. You'll have to pardon me for with starting with an electrical construction example, but it may turn out to be useful information for a lot of you regardless.

The recessed light can may not seem important, because it just looks like a metal cylinder to hold a light bulb in the ceiling, but it typically dictates what trim and what light source you use. The trim is the part of the light fixture that you can see once it's installed in the ceiling, usually just a decorative ring around the light source. Sometimes the trim is a shiny reflector, sometimes it's just a baffle to disperse the light around, or perhaps it's a fancy piece of art glass, or an adjustable bracket and housing that allows the light to be aimed a certain way. There are a lot of brands of recessed light out there, and quite a number of available sizes, and at least as many different trims as can fill ten catalogs the size of a phone book. The majority of the trims out there are designed for a specific light source type and go in a specific brand and type of recessed can. The cans are by no means universal, and most manufacturers can't be bothered with getting all of their different trims tested and UL listed for use in other manufacturer's fixtures. Only a few of the most generic trims may get approved for use in other fixtures. These days the light source could be incandescent, fluorescent, LED, metal halide, some sort of low voltage reflector lamp, and a lot of variation exists even among those categories. In addition, the sorts of light sources that would go in a smaller 3" or 4" fixture would seem lost in a larger recessed can, so the trims you might easily find in a smaller can are nowhere to be found in the catalog for the larger fixtures or vice versa.

With the great variety of lamps and trims available, and not to mention the hundreds of other light fixture types that may go into a commercial project, often a lighting designer or an engineer or an architect is involved in the process of selecting the exact fixtures to be used for the job. Knowing what the customer is looking for as an end result is key to making a good selection of light fixture. That end result could be anything from keeping the price of the lighting as low as possible, to achieving a specific light color, to creating a specific mood in a space. There are always tradeoffs, of course. The cheapest fixture may not have a trim available that meets the aesthetic requirements, the most adjustable fixture may the most expensive, certain colors of light sources may only be readily available in certain sizes, and so on.

Back to the recessed can, now we look at the fixture in the context of a project to be completed. When a general contractor comes on to the job, his primary concern is usually time, since there is a lot to do and coordinate and his costs for a job typically go up in proportion with the amount of time taken. While many light fixtures are merely mounted to a junction box, and the box is a simple, inexpensive, industry standard item that can be put in quickly before drywall goes in, the recessed light has to go in before the drywall does. If a wall light shows up late to the job, it can be mounted after everything else happens. Wiring can go in and be ready at the box and it's a simple matter to install the fixture once it arrives. Recessed lights really should go in before the drywall in the ceiling is done. It's the sort of thing that can hold up a project - but it's also the sort of thing that can't afford to be done twice. I've seen contractors panic and tell the electrician that they need to put in a more readily available light fixture, and have them go pick something up that's on a shelf somewhere. So, if it turns out you can't get the trim or the light source for that recessed can that the designer had originally picked out, what have you saved? Alternately, if you cancel an order with a vendor because they can't produce fixtures fast enough for your schedule and have to start a redesign with an alternate vendor, how much time have you really saved?

I will admit that there are instances where a job is ridiculously overdesigned and the contractor and the electrician do manage to save the day (not to mention the job schedule) with a smart redesign. Usually that tends to happen when the designers aren't really listening to the owner.

If it's your project, and maybe you're just talking about fixing up one room, you still have to ask yourself a few questions about what you want and how you're going to accomplish it. The first question should always be "What do I want this project to look like when I'm done"? All the other questions and answers lead from the answer to the first question.

So, now to the other side of this. Console video game systems are about what kind of game you want to play. Certainly, there are many games these days made for multiple platforms these days.  When the basic game experiences - visuals, sound, controls, content - are the same between multiple platforms that doesn't mean you will enjoy the same experience. Sometimes the network or the community differences between versions of a game can make a big difference.  (Do I have to pay extra to play online? Does one of the versions of the game allow you to spend real money to get in-game advantages in multiplayer? Which of my friends are playing this game and on what system? Was the networking code for one of the versions of the game written by monkeys randomly operating computer terminals?)

Where the systems are more different, it takes more consideration to figure out how one wants to play the same game on different systems. Do I want to use an updated version of a comfortable controller? Do I want to take a chance on a new controller because I think that having a touchscreen will help with the kinds of games  I want to play?

At the extreme ends of the disparity, it comes down to things like which system exclusive series you want to play. If you really like the Zelda or Mario series, then you're probably already sticking with the Nintendo machines because there really isn't anything comparable to those experiences on other platforms. But, if you're amenable to some alternate suggestions, many have found the Darksiders games a bit like the Zelda series in terms of the combination of overworld action and item-specific dungeon areas. Honestly, I don't think there is anything on any other platform that is like the Mario games, so I don't think we can find an alternate choice for that game

If you're a racing fan, you may like Gran Turismo, a Sony exclusive series which leans very heavy toward simulation, but there are other similarly featured racing games like Forza for the Microsoft systems. That's not to say that there's no racing on Nintendo systems, but lets just say that if you don't like the word cart with a "K" in it, maybe that won't work for you.

If you've been a big fan of shooters or sandbox games, then it's more likely you're playing on a Microsoft or Sony machine. While it would be interesting to see what Nintendo could do with Mario and company in an open-world game, it's not usually the sort of narrative that they craft. Traveler's Tales has done a fantastic job with Lego City Undercover in that regard, and the WiiU version of Batman:Arkham City (called Batman:Arkham City Armored Edition) is another great choice. If you are playing WiiU now and you're mad that there aren't a lot of shooters, remember Nintendo's intended demographic and have an open-minded look at Splatoon.



At a certain point, it no longer matters which hardware is 'better' than which. If the end result is playing games that are enjoyable to you, then the decisions made on hardware need to support that. While I have thrown out a handful of cases where you can find suitable alternate games for certain genres even with the least favorable hardware choice, note that these are largely the exceptions that I'm pointing out.

Of course, if you can't manage the perfect combination of hardware and software, or the right combination of fixture and light source and you feel like you're just doing the best you can manage - just wait a few years, technology will improve, and you can carry your gathered wisdom with you to the next challenge.

Why Comic Books and Coffee Mugs Prove I Don't Understand Feminism or Marketing.

I want to be able to say that I'm not sexist. I'd like to think so. Every once in a while, something will set me off and I tailspin into some remarkable rabbit hole of self-loathing that makes me think that either I'm some sort of naive idiot or some evil monster.

This time it was a coffee cup.

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy a few weekends ago, and I really liked it. That's not really noteworthy, since it would seem that lots of people went out to see a movie that most people would have laughed at the premise of ten years ago. In fact, it's so many people that it's the number grossing summer film in the United States. In an effort to be additionally supportive, and to give me a frequent reminder of the film, I purchased a coffee mug that has four of the characters from the film on it.

So now I hear Peter Falk's voice in the back of my head going "Sorry to bother you, but there's one thing that I don't understand there. Aren't there five members of the team in Guardians of the Galaxy?" (For those of you too young to get the Columbo reference, just have a look on youtube.)

Who's on the coffee mug? Well, Star Lord has to be on the mug. It's practically his movie from start to finish. The bounty is on him, it's his spaceship, and it's his mixtape. Rocket and Groot are on the mug because they carry a lot of the jokes in the film. Drax is on the mug because he's awesome and nothing goes over his head. (Side note: Drax is so awesome that they also have a mug that's just him. I presume that the marketing department thinks that coffee drinkers identify with Drax.) I ask my wife while we're in the store - "Why isn't Gamora on the coffee mug?" - to which she wittily replies, "Gamora doesn't need coffee." She's not a fluff character in the film, by any means. She gets lots of screen time and several awesome action sequences.

So, then I start considering possibilities and the rabbit hole starts opening up on me. First, I think that they really did leave Gamora off of the mug because she's a girl, but then that would imply that the marketers think that comic books fans, especially ones that drink their own coffee but go the movies won't be accepting of her. Then I think - but I noticed that she was missing, and aren't I part of the intended demographic of both the movie and the coffee mug? So then that means I must feel guilty that a woman wasn't included, when women wouldn't actually want her to be on there to be objectified, so I'm bad for trying to introduce gender into a discussion that it shouldn't even have been in in the first place? It's not like the marketers can be wrong - after all, any time I don't get a commercial it's not because it's a bad commercial, it's because I'm not the intended demographic.

Don't comic books play into male adolescent fantasy a little too often for women to not be included, even if they're present for obstensibly the wrong purpose?

Then I think about it some more - Gamora is being played by the same actress that plays Lt. Uhura in the new Star Trek Films, and the lead Na'vi character Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar. Is there a coffee-drinking man or woman that watches science fiction films that would decline to buy a coffee mug if she was on it? I think not. At a certain point, I have to abandon trying second-guess a feminist viewpoint and go back to trying to see the fan viewpoint. They're a team, she's on it, she should be on the coffee mug.

There's contact information on the bottom of the mug for the company that made them. Since it's here in America, I guess I will try to talk to them.

Let's try this in the contact form and see what happens:

I recently picked up one of the Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy coffee mugs from my local Wal-Mart retailer and opted for the "Character" mug over the "Drax" mug just to have more of the characters but I was still a little disappointed that Gamora was not included. I have been often reminded that I don't really understand marketing.  In those cases where I don't understand the marketing it's often the case that I'm not the intended demographic anyway. I don't actually drink coffee, but I got it for my wife who does. We're both over 40 and have a couple of kids and we all enjoyed the movie.  So - is it because I'm not the standard demographic for this product, or is it because of some marketing reason that I'm unlikely to understand that Gamora's not on the "Character" mug? (Or is there some simple explanation that I've entirely overlooked?)

I'll follow up on this post when I get some sort of a response from the mug manufacturer.

Change happens -OR- When lefty is not right.

Getting a new game console has seemed like an upheaval every time it's happened. For a long time, I was only concerned with Nintendo consoles, so it was simple enough to tell when it was time to get the newer console.  At a certain point, they stop making the games you want for the console you have, and the effort goes into making the games you want for the console you don't have yet. However, near the end of a console cycle, it's very easy to amass some of the titles you hadn't played for a quarter of the price you might have paid otherwise. In the Nintendo and Super Nintendo era, that usually meant pawn shops and yard sales, but in subsequent generations that also meant clearance bins and record stores and game stores. So, the end of each console cycle meant weighing your amassed collection against how much you wanted to play the new games.

Now if there's only one specific game series that you play, then it's usually child's play to make the determination, since you just play your old system until the game you want comes out for the new system. This is especially true for system exclusives like Nintendo's Mario, Zelda and Metroid series games, Sony's Gran Turismo games, or the Halo series on XBox. At the other far end of the spectrum, if you have more money and time than everyone else, it's also very easy since you can just get each console when it comes out and pick up whatever you find interesting at the time. If you fall somewhere in the middle (which most of us do) and play a variety of games but aren't in a position to get or even have time to play everything, then usually the decision to get a new console and which console to get is tied to the point at which you can afford a new console but you can no longer afford to be left behind on a particular game series. For example, I played a lot of Street Fighter on the Super Nintendo, but when the next generation of consoles came out Capcom made no effort to make them for the Nintendo 64 since it was a style of game not well-suited to the N64's controllers or hardware. So, the other systems got Street Fighter versions but not the N64, and I eventually got my hands on a Playstation so that I could continue on in that series. When Street Fighter continued on to the Dreamcast, however, I was not compelled to get a Dreamcast since there weren't enough of the other games that I was playing available for that system. The Playstation 2 had a lot to offer at that point, it played all my existing Playstation games, and it also doubled as a DVD player so I couldn't find a way for the Dreamcast to outweigh the PS2's benefits.

My Wii tanked completely at Christmas of last year, months after having done a laser module replacement myself. There were a lot of things my kids were still playing on it, even though I had started getting all of the new LEGO games for my Sony Playstation 3 instead of for Wii. I couldn't have regrouped fast enough to pick up a WiiU at that point, and we still had plenty of things to play on PS3. So, I started figuring out when I could get one.

My tipping point for the WiiU was Pikmin 3. The Pikmin series is fundamentally about managing a group of entities, the bipedal but flower-like Pikmin, to complete tasks on your behalf. Different Pikmin types are able to perform different types of tasks and some tasks can be performed by all of the Pikmin. These tasks include finding parts to repair your ship, collecting treasure, and collecting sustenance.

I really enjoyed Pikmin 1 and 2, and I still like to go back and play the challenge mode boards on Pikmin 1. As both Pikmin 1 and 2 were on the GameCube and largely overlooked by mainstream gaming since the words "Theft", "Duty" and "War" were not in the title, I was a little surprised that Pikmin 3 made it to the WiiU. As it turned out, Pikmin was relatively well-received among people who were already buying other Nintendo first-party titles. I suppose that Captain Olimar's inclusion in Super Smash Brothers Brawl allowed him to be introduced to a few more people, and Nintendo followed up with revised Wii versions of Pikmin 1 and 2 to take advantage of the Wii's control scheme.

On the WiiU, there's even an interesting control scheme that takes good advantage of the Game Pad controller and its touchscreen controls.

If you're right handed.

They worked out a control scheme that involves the two left triggers, the left analog stick, and the d-pad, used in conjunction with the stylus in the right hand. It has a lot of functionality, but no option to mirror the controls to the other side. If you still have your Wii controllers, which I did, you can use a Wiimote and a Nunchuck controller and control the game identically to the Wii Play Control versions of Pikmin 1 and Pikmin 2.

The map on the Game Pad works better if you don't need glasses at all, or if you need glasses for everything. I don't really need glasses to read with, but I need glasses for distance. It's not like I could just push my glasses down my nose and look down at the Game Pad. However, once I started using the Wiimote + Nunchuck controls, I put the Game Pad back in its cradle so I could look down at the map and have it be approximately the same distance away from me as the TV is.

I'm going to have a hard time explaining this to my ophthalmologist.

I guess this can't count as an overlooked PS3 game...

...unless you count the idea that Americans overlooked the Sengoku Basara series and made it so they wouldn't make an American version.

We finally picked up our first import game, Sengoku Basara Utage. It's a companion game to the Capcom hack and slash set in the Sengoku period,  Sengoku Basara 3. While it's not the only game of this style using historical characters with fantastic abilities (Sengoku Basara is basically a clone of Konami's Dynasty Warriors series), it's not really a common or popular game style in the west. You can read some of my rambling about it here.

It's been out for a while but it had been $80 or so on amazon every time we thought to look for it. We were looking for some other things and saw that there was a copy that went down under $40, so we picked it up. The game controls the same as the American version of Sengoku Basara 3, but the menus are a little bit different because Utage3 has some additional game modes, and we don't read any Japanese yet so we're winging it a little bit. This isn't like trying to play a game in Spanish or Italian where we understand the alphabet and some of the Latin root words. This is only working because the language of the gameplay itself is familiar to us. I think my older son has unlocked all of the new characters, but he has a long way to go to get all the weapons and allies unlocked.

The most amusing thing about the game so far is which words do end up in English. The combo counter is in Arabic numerals, and the combo descriptors that show above the combo count are in English. I'm sure that there are other funny parts of the game, but we're losing all of the story and character comments.

The biggest difference in this game is that most of the new playable characters in the game were all the non-playable major opponents from the last game, and all of the other playable characters return. It uses your game data from Sengoku Basara 3 and uses it to establish what level and what skills your old playable characters have available to them. It was nice that even though the primary bad guy (Nobunaga Oda) is rather time-consuming to unlock and difficult to defeat in Sengoku Basara 3, he unlocks fairly soon in Utage even if you hadn't unlocked him in the other version. There are some new areas, but I haven't seen anything spectacular yet. There is one additional character that didn't show up in the original version of 3, and it's the character most prominently featured on the cover of the game, but I'm not 100% sure about his name. I think it's Hisahide Matsunaga. (Yay! I got it right - thank goodness for the Wiki.)

Sengoku Basara 4 came out in Japan in January, so I presume that's why the price dropped on Utage. I also presume that Sengoku Basara 4 will not be localized for any other countries, so I can only guess that we'll be trying to muddle our way through in Japanese again if everybody decides that we want to play it.

Part of me hopes that my younger son gets into the game enough to start learning some Japanese.

Why stuff has to work seamlessly.

For a while, I was starting to get the impression that the idea that things have to work correctly nearly 100% of the time with respect to computing was a ridiculous standard. I thought it was some sort of outcropping of the behavior of spoiled kids.  The first times I really heard it mentioned specifically were Jobs talking about the new macs, about how they needed to 'just work', and in Zuckerberg's comments about how facebook needed to be up all the time or that people wouldn't come back to it.

I later realized that this is not a progression of vanity or of unreasonable expectations, but merely an expression of trying to keep up with an existing standard.

Clay tablets and stone chiseling might have been unforgiving media, perhaps. They did give us a media where data could be archived for far longer than a human lifetime. We have learned substantial things about languages no longer spoken and mathematical systems no longer used merely from clay tablets and chiseled stone.  They are a bummer to carry around, but that's why you invent the library, and then thousands of years later you invent the steel-toed shoe.

We've had paper and pencil for a decent amount of time, and it's still a functional system. If the power goes out, you can still read it. If they make a new kind of paper, you can still read the old paper. You have a visual indication if a pencil is about to fail. You can feel if a piece of paper is about to rip when you're writing on it. Large amounts of paper can be bound together to make books, holding more information than tons of stone and clay tablets can.  If somebody found something interesting, you can make notes in the margins, or perhaps scrawl an idea or reference between the lines of text. If you mess something up, you can erase it and then recheck your work.

In the early days of computing, input was done via mechanical means. At that time, that mechanical input usually ended up being punch cards, since those were used for automated machines from the previous era.

The next step in local computing was the keyboard, an outgrowth of the existing typewriter. With the keyboard, we also got what we commonly refer to as the command line. It's just a prompt for us to type something into the computer, and the computer can act on that single command, or the command can ask it to start a larger program with hundreds and thousands of commands in it. If a single command failed, our feedback was immediate, and usually the failure was located somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. The syntax - the organized system of how a computer expects input in this case - can be tricky to memorize, but if needed we can also ask the computer what the syntax it expects is.  

My personal all-time most common ones were "fdisk /? and chkdsk /?" since you didn't want a catastrophic failure or a gigantic waste of time after messing up the syntax. Never hurts to check. 

As computing got larger, the need for standard libraries became apparent, since nobody wanted to reinvent the wheel every time they built a program, and there are lots of functions that people wanted that you weren't just going to build into the hardware or rewrite into the program every time - but this is where a lot of computing starts getting difficult for the users - and this was about the time we had a big influx of people using computers that weren't programmers of any sort. Having a library interfere with the program running or the operating system because of an unforeseen interaction is what caused the infamous "Blue Screen of Death" in Windows versions 3.1/95/98 most of the time, leaving a using wondering when the Feds were going to come get them for performing an 'illegal operation'.  While the information provided on those error screens were of great use to people familiar with troubleshooting Windows problems, it left the average user feeling frustrated a lot of the time because you don't know if it's because there's something wrong with the program, the data, or the hardware (or any combination thereof).   Apple has done a good job historically in mitigating a lot of these problems by allowing fewer hardware configurations, but it can't protect them from the problems that happen subsequently.

Once you get to large scale distributed computing, you've almost separated the user interface from the program. The user interface is a little tiny part of the program that the user's machine deals with, and it gets data from and sends data to the actual program, wherever that may be. For most of us, a lot of the web is this experience. Facebook, Amazon, Google, Mapquest, eBay, and the list goes on and on. For some of us, the programs we use at work are like this. In larger companies, all of the ordering and inventory management are done on offsite computers that local offices just call in to. Your printer in your office can let someone halfway across the country that's in charge of your company's office supplies know that it's out of toner, and place an order that's automatically routed onto a delivery truck and email you a tracking number so you know when it's going to show up. Your checkout terminals at a store can tell a corporate warehouse when you've sold the last copy of the new Beyonce album or the last piece of furniture from the collection that you're no longer going to carry.

When these things fail, however, it usually goes back on the people. Nobody waiting at the customer service desk wants to hear "Well, the computer said we had one..." when it would be easy enough to go out to the shelf and check, and no manager wants the employees having to rush around and personally check every inquiry when they're spending big bucks on a presumably good inventory management system. Nobody wants to show up to an establishment with cash in their hand and the product there available and get told "Well, we can't sell it to you, all the computers are down. Not only can we not record the sale, but we can't be 100% sure how much to charge you for the item."  It's not because they don't understand anything about computing, since computing has infiltrated the lives of a large portion of the world, but it's because the old way used to work just fine and didn't have a failure mode like this. If the customer has cash, you can ring him up. If you weren't sure how much to charge, you could open up your ledger and either check the previous sales, or figure out a fair price from the cost of the item when it was purchased.

Now, though, we have 'middleware'. It's not the input, and it's not the output - it's all the stuff happening under the hood on the way from A to Z. That makes it the stage where you really don't want to have problems, and can't afford to have problems, because it's the sort of thing that can turn a customer away from a product or service fairly quickly. Customers are far more likely to be forgiving with an inexperienced employee standing in front of them than they are to be forgiving when a computer error makes a simple transaction for a couple of items take half an hour.

On a related note, I had a chance to try out a wireless mouse/keyboard combo from digital innovations just recently. The keyboard works well enough, even if I didn't entirely like the feel of the keys. The mouse had an odd habit where left clicks were not registering all the time. How many times can you left click with a mouse on a computer (oh, I'm sorry Apple users - just ignore the word 'left'...) to no effect and put up with it? Since it's a wireless device, you wonder if there's an issue with where the receiver is placed, but then you remember that you were typing just fine a second ago, and rolling the scroll wheel and moving the pointer just worked. You think, could it be the batteries?  But there again, the other things were working. Maybe you hadn't pressed firmly enough? If you felt the 'click', you would think that you had. I wasn't even going to address the issue of drivers, since I'm not sure that it had asked me to install them in the first place and Windows rarely asks for them for basic functionality any more. (A left click counts as basic functionality, right?) Each of the kids had tried it on their machines (one XP, one Win7) with similar issues with the left click and no other issues. I thought it would do better or fail entirely on my Ubuntu machine if it really were a driver issue, but it exhibited pretty much the same behavior. Everything worked find except the left click. So, it's probably a mechanical failure and we'll have to tear it down and see if we can fix it. It's not going to get much use in the meantime, though. I don't actually remember having this sort of a failure with a mouse before.

After switching keyboard/mouse setups around a bunch of times in the house to get everyone to try it out, I ended up short on the Linux machine again so I found something that I really like that was only $30 (and I'm using it right now.) It's the Logitech K400r, which is a wireless keyboard that has a trackpad where the number pad would usually be. Ubuntu didn't have any issue with it at all. The track pad is smart enough to know if you're using two fingers, so you move the pointer with a single finger, but scroll with two fingers, similar to other multi-touch devices. It also had no problem doing the 'zoom' in the browser gesturally. My only actual complaint seems rather petty in that the right Shift key is located in a strange spot and I've hit the up arrow by mistake quite a number of times. 

One of the other unusual features is that in addition to tapping on the track pad and using the dedicated left button on the bottom of the track pad, there is a button at the top left hand corner of the keyboard above the escape key that also functions as the left mouse button.

I guess somebody realized how important it was for that to work.