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Greatest Hits: Technology
Good - Bad - and Different
Backward Compatibility: A friend of mine tried to buy a book online. He uses a seven year-old computer and cannot do any further browser upgrades. He was unable to transact at Overstock.com and A-1 Books. I recommended Amazon.com; it always worked when I had an older computer. Success!
I've criticized some aspects of Amazon's business model, but they've certainly got it right when it comes to providing a shopping site which is user-friendly to older browsers. Too many people with websites assume that everyone has a new computer. They construct sites which have little 'backward compatibility.' This is incredibly stupid. Imagine building a carwash that can't clean cars more than five years old! Not everyone runs out and buys a new car every few years. Or a new computer. There are many good potential customers with substantial disposable incomes who operate on the principle, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." They drive older cars and run older browsers on aging but workable computers. Turn away these customers at your own risk. That's today's business lesson.
The Perfect Gift: You never get what you really want for Christmas or your birthday, do you? My unfulfilled wish - a car that washes itself.
You just know that car companies have the technology to do this. But the Motor Overlords been paid off by the insidious Car Wash Trust. The plans are locked in a large vault in Detroit, along with the gas-from-water formula, the rubber recipe to produce 100,000-mile tire treads and the blueprints for the 600-horsepower, 100 mpg engine. And Harley Earl's cryogenically frozen head.
Blue Light Special: I recently got a new cell phone. My old one, an Oki-made GTE model from 1994 - a dull black brick, was on its last legs, kept alive with parts scrounged from my daughter's old GTE. My new one is a small, sleek, rounded Motorola in silver and gray which emits an eerie blue light when activated.
 The blue light is identical to the light emitted by those germ-free toilet seats found in certain gas stations in the late 1940s-early '50s. The horseshoe-shaped seats were spring-loaded and retracted into a UFO-like, white-enameled sheetmetal cocoon when not in use - where they were exposed to a bright blue UV-lamp which "killed all germs." The light leaked out the corners of the shroud, emitting a scary, toilet seat-shaped, ghostly blue glow. I was quite frightened of these devices as a small child and would refuse to use the toilet to the great annoyance of my parents: "Well, you said you had to 'go' and we made a special stop for you. Now you won't go?! Well, mister, you can just suffer and hold it until we get home." Which was fine with me; there were no blue toilet-ghosts in our home bathroom. I was reminded of those toilet-ghosts every time I had to make copies of drawings on an Ozalid blueprinting machine when I was working as a mechanical engineer; a similar, strange blue light emitted from somewhere in the bowels of the copier.
The charger for my new phone is just a cord with a tiny little box at one end. My old phone had a docking station that looked like it was sized for jump-starting Soviet tanks. The phone company deactivated my old phone remotely (How the hell do they do that?!) and said that I should toss the old phone and charger - part of our throwaway culture. I didn't. Instead I gently committed their inert remains to the Special Drawer of Obsolete Electronic Items in my roll-top desk. The Drawer is starting to get full, however. Another useless collection which my wife will throw out after I'm dead. Shaking her head and muttering, "Why, in heaven's name, did he keep all this junk?"
Senseless Hybrids? Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said (in an address to the National Automobile Dealers Association) that building fuel-sipping hybrid vehicles makes little sense in today's world because of their high costs. "They make a nice story, but they're not a good business story yet because the value is lower than their costs." He also poured cold water on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles: "The cost to build one fuel cell car is about $800,000. Do the math and you figure out that we will have to reduce the cost of that car by more than 95 percent in order to gain widespread marketplace acceptance."
I have often felt that hybrid cars are some kind of dead-end transitional technology. Like fax machines. (We are becoming a paperless society - e-mail, JPEGs and FTPs have rendered fax machines unnecessary for transmitting text and graphics - and no one ever developed the technology to fax a hot, ready-to-eat pizza.)
My opinion is that future cars will not be diesel, hybrid or hydrogen. I think we will use internal combustion engines with improved efficiency via deactivated cylinders, improved transmission systems and other technology. Ten years from now, most cars will still use gasoline or a ethanol/gasoline mix.
Car Technology Runs Amok: I often exchange correspondence with car friends, mailing them magazine articles, etc. One of my car buddies sent me an article from the April 2004 issue of Automobile magazine. Jamie Kitman - a very knowledgeable writer who has appeared in other car buff mags - pens a column, 'Noise, Vibration and Harshness.' April's is titled 'Crapulent Luxury' and tells the tale of making an uneventful drive in an economy Mitsubishi from New York to Detroit in order to pick up a luxurious 2004 Jaguar XJ8 sedan. Then things got eventful. Warning lights flashed for no reason. After a tire blowout on the road, Kitman couldn't change the tire because the factory wrench stripped three of the "cheap, soft and unremovable aluminum glamorizing covers on the lug nuts." The $66,000 Jaguar was hauled away on a flatbed, with an $800 alloy wheel ruined and no replacement in-stock. So, Kitman switched to a BMW 745Li which was also suffered from electronic gremlins. Arriving back in New York, he had to take it to a BMW dealer for repairs.
Kitman's article arrived in the mail along with a separate package from Jaguar USA, urging me to buy a new 2004 XJ8. Dripping with unplanned irony, the package contained an 80-page special report on the technically sophisticated beast, prepared by - guess who? - the staff of Automobile. After reading Kitman's column about the horrors of the 2004 "advanced" Jaguar, I'm definitely keeping my aging but reliable 1996 XJ6 Vanden Plas. It has never left me stranded. My straight-six-engined Jag seems every bit as fast as a V-8 Jaguar sedan I test drove. When my Jag reaches 100,000 miles in a few years, I may get the front-end repainted (to eliminate many years of stone chip accumulation) but, at this point, I have no interest in replacing this fine-looking, trustworthy machine with the kind of techno-nightmare described by Kitman.
Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press has written about technological overkill: "Cadillac won global praise and international awards for innovative engineering when it introduced infrared night vision on its DeVille sedan a few years ago, but the feature isn't available on the new 2005 STS sedan, and it's not likely to show up on any future Cadillacs. The option, which projects a green image on the car's heads-up display, works just fine, but it turns out buyers just don't care enough about it to shell out an extra $2,250 to see a blurry silhouette of a possum in a roadside ditch."
101 Years Difference: In 2004, I visited a Toy Train Operating Society open house at the home of a private individual. On his layout was a 1903 loco - the only known 101 year-old Lionel train that still runs. Even the track is the original. It was obtained from the daughter of the original owner along with the 1903 bill of sale from the Emporium in San Francisco! On Tuesday, I related the story of a Lionel toy train locomotive, purchased in San Francisco in 1903. Lionel was, in those days, a start-up firm located in Lower Manhattan.
 It is difficult to imagine cross-country commerce in the very early 20th Century. Ordering was probably done strictly by mail; telephones were not in wide use and, in any case, there was no coast-to-coast long distance service. Bank wire transfers and credit cards were unheard-of. Mailed bank drafts and letters-of-credit were the primary means of money transfer. There would have been only two shipping options - rail shipment (expensive) or a slow cargo ship around Cape Horn (very slow). There was no Panama Canal yet. Offering, selling and delivering that little locomotive was a monumental effort by 2004 norms.
A few weeks later, I ordered a model train. First, I e-mailed the manufacturer in North Carolina with some product questions; I received answers within 24 hours. Then I e-mailed several retail hobby stores, requesting prices and delivery information on the item. A firm in Massachusetts responded with the best price, so I called their toll-free number and gave them my order. They checked availability on their computer database and gave me a shipping date. They asked only for my ZIP code; since I had purchased from them before, my address was already in their customer database. I paid with a Visa card; they entered the info into a terminal and got credit approval from Visa Merchant Services. I'm not in a hurry for the item but, if I was, it could easily be shipped by air and arrive within a day.
A 1903 purchaser would have been astounded by the details of my transaction. I wonder what things will be like 101 years from now?
It's a Little-Known Fact ... Google is great. When you type in a phrase, it immediately spits out just what you're looking for. But it also provides pages and pages of links to semi-related obscure trivia. It finally dawned on me that Google is a virtual Cliff Claven, sitting in some cyberspace Cheers! pub, being careful not to spill beer on his postman's uniform, while rattling off little known 'facts' to anyone within earshot. Best Cliff Claven quote: "Due to the shape of the North American elk's esophagus, even if it could speak, it could not pronounce the word lasagna." Runner-up: "It's a little-known fact that the smartest animal is the pig. Scientists say if pigs had thumbs and a language, they could be trained to do simple manual labor. They'd give you 20 to 30 years of loyal service and, at their retirement dinner, you could eat them!"
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