Dear Santa

Got an extra $3.5 million on hand to spend on that special someone? How about--and this does not seem to be a joke--a flying car? Yes, new from Neiman-Marcus (whom you immediately think of when you think transportation): the Skycar. Check it out:

The M400 Skycar is the world's first personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, designed to elevate individual drivers above the headaches of commuting and the dangers of highway travel.

"Dangers of highway travel." How about the dangers of crashing into the ground at 350 mph? Great; the same idiots who drive while talking on cellphones can now be tooling about in flying cars. Ah, but first, read the fine print:

Certain regulatory requirements must be met for purchase of the prototype, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations and Federal Aviation Administration authorization.

Ya think?

I Should Write Their Ads

So I'm walking through the Holyoke, MA, mall this morning, and I've got my cellphone clipped to my belt like a dork (I don't have enough pockets until jacket season). I walk past the T-Mobile kiosk and the guy behind the counter beckons me over and asks, "What cellphone service do you use?"
"Verizon Wireless," I reply.
"How much are you paying a month?" he asks.
"Too much," I reply.
"Did you know that you can save a lot if you switch to T-Mobile?" he says.
"Actually," I say, "I can save a lot more by switching to Skype and Voice Over Internet Protocol and avoid cellular entirely." (I don't add that the quality is a whole lot better, too.)
He seemed quite disappointed.

Plugging In

I read about the idea of delivering Internet and other access via electrical wiring--through sockets that are in every room, usually placed in the most inconvenient of places. But in Japan it is becoming a reality--and it's faster than Ethernet. I like the idea--though whether I pay NiMo or Time-Warner for Internet access seems like a case of six of one, half dozen of the other. But I am sanguine about the idea of consolidating a variety of functions into a single device or connection. And I suppose it would be less of a hassle than delivering Internet access through the plumbing.

Gotta Love the Germans

Until the renewable liver thing comes to fruition (see below), we will have to content ourselves with this cool invention out of Germany: a beer mat that knows when a glass is nearly empty and automatically asks for a refill. The possibilities for interactive rich media abound. And you have to love a story that refers to someone as "an expert pub goer." Uh-huh.

Say What?

I don't claim to be an expert on religion (any religion), but it seems to me that there is some inherent contradiction in designating someone the "patron saint of nuclear-armed, long-distance Russian bombers." Cool outfit, though. I'm thinking of conducting my next printing industry seminar dressed like that. (It would beat the Grim Reaper outfit I usually wear....)

I Wanna Be Your Liver, Baby

Hmmm...genetically engineered mice can regrow organs, perhaps paving the way for the ability to be applied to humans. Drinkers rejoice!

And you gotta love the wonderfully convoluted conference name, "Strategies for Negligible Senescence."

Just Don't Use Corrugated Paperboard

Woonsocket, RI's own Debbie Papineau, the World's Greatest Virtual Office Assistant, pointed me to a, shall we say, unique application for digital print-on-demand technology: print-on-demand toilet paper.

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution

As always, The Onion is covering those stories everyone else misses.

WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.

Squid Pro Quo

It may surprise many to know that one of the largest animals on earth--the giant squid (Architeuthis dux)--has never been seen alive in its natural habitat. Until now.

The first ever pictures of a live giant squid in its natural environment have been snapped in deep water off Japan. Working with a cheap camera and a fishing boat, the two Japanese researchers have succeeded where millions of dollars and international film crews have failed.

Here's my question, though: A. dux is known as the Atlantic giant squid--what the heck was it doing off Japan? Going out for sushi?

Danger, Will Robinson!

As a public service, I offer this advice: never never never, under any circumstances, attempt to buy anything--much less a house--from a lawyer. Bad bad bad idea.

Oh, and if you are a lawyer, I would advise, for your own safety, to make sure you are never in front of my car.

Train of Thought

Dear Amtrak,

If you're going to suddenly make all Albany to New York City trains all-reserved (rather than "catch whatever one is available when I'm done with what I went down there for"), you may want to alert people to this fact in advance like, say, oh, mentioning it on your Web site, so that if folks download the current schedule a day before taking such a trip, they might be aware of it? Oh, and you also might want to tell your ticket agents to not treat people like war criminals if they don't pop into the Albany-Rensselaer train station periodically to see if flyers have been posted.

Thank you.

Safe at Home

Researchers have found that during the Red Sox-Yankees playoff game last year, emergency room visits in the Boston area fell by 15%, compared to another inconsequential Red Sox game when ER visits rose by 15%. People putting off doing anything about that heart attack until the game is over? Or are folks safer when they're at home, watching TV? Or are many ER vists just not that urgent?

Uh, No

"Best of' lists are always trouble, and it's hard to really take them seriously. Still...Boston magazine does their "Top 50 Science-Fiction Shows of All Time." Some of these are a reach. " While I like The Wild, Wild West a lot, I'm not sure I would classify it as "science fiction." (Same with Man From U.N.C.L.E.) But if that's the case, why not The Prisoner? And why no Farscape, which is decidedly science-fiction--and one of the best sci-fi series of the past 20 years? And I'm sorry, but I dispute the placing of Third Rock From the Sun on any list of the greatest anything of all time--and if sitcoms are allowed, why not Mork and Mindy, for crying out loud? And Xena: Warrior Princess is higher than The Outer Limits? Oh, come now. I have no disputes with the top 5, although I have not seen the new Battlestar Galactica (but I've heard good things about it). Some obscure things made the list--but then why not Quark, the short-lived Richard Benjamin sitcom (I think Buck Henry wrote it) about a space garbageman. It ran briefly in 1977, but was very funny, from what I recall.

Sorry About That, Chief

Sigh.

Don Adams, the wry-voiced comedian who starred as the fumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s television spoof of James Bond movies, "Get Smart," has died. He was 82.

More on VoIP

From today's CNet, about the move to enable Voice Over Internet protocol to mobile devices. Say what you want about the printing industry, but it could be worse: it could be the telephone industry. While it's a tad premature to say that the writing is on the wall for telephone companies, I think it's only a matter of time before per-call or per-minute costs are a thing of the past.

A New Marketing Medium?

Believe it or not, it is called Bumvertising:

[T]he use of sign holding vagrants to advertise, is a development of PokerFaceBook.com's most recent advertising campaign. Homeless men are able to provide a valuable and tangible service to a company, while receiving an additional revenue stream in combination with their normal donations from begging.

How's that for a new wrinkle to "multichannel marketing"? I can't wait for the next version of Adobe InDesign to include an "Export to Vagrant" feature.

The Original White Meat

Nothing especially remarkable in this story about bird/plane collisions, except one particular passage amused me to no end:

Jet engines must now be able to withstand the ingestion of an 8-pound waterfowl without failing (this is tested in the lab by firing a chicken from a cannon at point-blank range).

I think a chicken cannon would be very effective in conventional warfare--or would the enemy cry fowl? (Yes, that's a poultry excuse for a pun...)(doh!)

As Sure as Eggs is Eggs

Today (September 22) is the day of the Autumnal Equinox. Many of you may have heard the urban legend that you can balance an egg on its end on the equinox and only on the equinox. Those eager to prove it, can try today--either all day or at 6:23 p.m., EDT, the precise moment of the equinox. Good luck.

The "theory," such as it is, has it that "the sun's equidistant position between the poles of the Earth on the equinox causes special gravitational forces that apparently manifest themsleves in egg-balancing." Uh-huh.

There are those who say that the egg balancing trick can only be done on the vernal equinox. Why it should make any difference is beyond me, but since you can't balance an egg on its end on either equinox--or ever--I guess the point is kind of moot.

A common story has it that Christopher Columbus won a bet involving egg-balancing (no doubt the result of a long, boring sea voyage). According to which version of the story you read, he won the bet either by sprinkling salt on the table (on which to prop the egg up) or he cracked the bottom of the egg lightly so it would stand up. The story of Columbus' egg is often used in business and/or computer programming circles to point out that seemingly insoluble problems can often be solved by breaking the rules--if not the eggs.

My Kingdom for a Decent Office Suite

After spending some time experimenting with a couple of alternatives to Microsoft Office, I'm afraid none seem to meet my needs. On the Mac, the situation is dire; MS Office always crashes. Always has, no matter what version of OS X I've ever used. (Office X has hated the entire line of "cats" since Day One.) I once made the mistake of downloading the upgrade to Office; after that, none of the programs would even launch at all. Word on the Mac is fine if I save every five seconds, and never add images or cut and paste anything. Excel is less cranky and I can even be productive in it, although lacks some of the math skills of the PC version. (The Mac version inexplicably refuses to let me paste both cell values and number formats at the same time, which annoys me to no end. Oh, and since upgrading to OS 10.4, the Ctrl-click contextual menu items don't work anymore.) To add insult to injury, charts created in Excel for the Mac are not 100% compatible with Excel for the PC and vice versa, which makes collaboration a problem. Same deal with charts pasted into Word. It was this problem that led me to buy a PC in the first place.

So I avoid Word on the Mac.

I was a little excited when Apple released its own Pages word processing application. It handles graphics very well, exports to Word format reasonably OK, but lacks auto caption numbering, caption field updating, and cross-referencing, which are very important to what I usually use a WP program for. But for simple, text-only things, like fiction or text destined for a real page layout program like InDesign, Pages works fine.

I tried a free word processing application called AbiWord. Biggest problem: it does not allow me to paste charts from Excel, nor does it give me the ability (as far as I can tell) to create charts and graphs from within it. So AbiWord is outta here.

Finally, OpenOffice. I have not tried the Mac version yet (though I downloaded it), but I have been playing occasionally with the PC version. Y'know, the same things that annoy me about Word annoy me about OpenOffice: style sheets work as flakily, and it even has the same irritating habit of slipping into Overstrike mode at random, which is the bane of my existence. There is a spreadsheet application which is more user-hostile than Excel, and it does a worse job of formatting charts and graphs. (Am I the only one who ever wants to format y-axis labels on bar graphs? Oh, and OpenOffice doesn't seem to know the difference between an x-axis--which it thinks is the vertical one--and a y-axis--which it thinks is the horizontal one.) And although you can paste charts into the Writer application (a la Word), it is extremely limited in how captions can be added--which is a dealbreaker for me. It has cross-referencing, but it's extremely complex and impenetrable. And figuring out how to create a ToC automastically requires a degree in advanced hyperbolic topology. (It look less time to learn Photoshop.) The only advantage to OpenOffice I've yet encountered is that it is really easy to export to PDF. It's just getting to the point where there is anything to export that's the problem... (I can think of one person who is going to take issue with my assessment of OpenOffice!)

Dare I experiment with another for-pay office suite--like StarOffice or WordPerfect? Perhaps...

Then again, maybe my entire workflow has just adapted to MS Office over the years and I get frustrated by trying to replicate the experience elsewhere. Don't know.

If anyone knows of a decent application that will let me create charts and graphs from Excel data and give me extensive typographic control over axis and data labels, and will let me export them to a vector format like EPS, I would be most appreciative. I use Adobe Illustrator and its Chart Creator for my high-end chart work, but it requires so many workarounds that it can be a production bottleneck. A combination of Excel and Illustrator would be perfect!

Oh, This Is Good

The perils of device intercompatibility:

A Trojan virus that attempts to spread from smart phones to users' PCs was discovered Wednesday, marking one of the first cases of virus "cross-sharing" between the two devices, according to security firm F-Secure.

Hmmm...maybe I should think of my inability to sync my mobile phone to my PC as a security feature rather than a major nuisance.