More On Thawing Out

I just read over yesterday's post about our various low-power and no-power woes of the past few days. I realized that I sounded pretty whiny, especially when I consider that there were some unfortunate folks who were completely without power from Monday through at least yesterday. I heard from several sources that there were still whole neighborhoods in the western part of Ann Arbor that had been without power since the ice storm. And it's been cold here, well below freezing for a great part of that time.

I should point out that all of these troubles just re-affirm my contention that wires and cables are nothing but trouble.

Thawing Out

I mentioned before that we had low voltage power in the house after an ice-laden tree branch hit the power line coming into the house, and pulled it partially away from the pole. The line itself was hanging low over the back yard, maybe 7 feet off the ground, much lower than it should. We had what looked like low voltage. Every time we turned on anything with a sizable current draw, the lights would brighten and/or dim. If this went on for more than a few seconds, then the UPS on our main server would start honking out its low-voltage warning.

I reported this on Monday morning to DTE, our local power company. And again Monday evening. And again Tuesday morning. And again Tuesday evening. (Are you seeing a pattern?) And several times on Wednesday. They were always "unable to give an estimate at this time". Eventually, though, I began hearing that someone would look at our power by 6pm Wednesday. No-one came. Later that evening when I called, I was surprised to hear the automated system tell me that my problem should now be resolved. I quickly got hold of a customer service representative and disabused them of that notion. They allegedly made sure that my problem report was indeed still open, and that someone would be out to check on Thursday.

I called multiple times on Thursday, finally getting the promise that someone would come out around 4pm. Sure enough, a DTE tech did show up about then. She poked around for about twenty minutes measuring things, and determined that the problem was an 'open neutral'. The wires bringing the two phases of current into the house were intact, but the main tension cable, which is also the neutral conductor, had snapped up near the pole. This was an unsafe situation, so she completely cut our power, and said that she would report this. Since we now had no power, she said that we would be moved higher in the priority queue for problem resolution. Right. It must have really sucked to be low priority.

I kept calling every few hours, as the house got colder. Thursday evening, Mary, Tim and I went out for pizza, and came back to a cold, dark house. We sat around reading by candlelight in the living room. Finally, around 9:30 or so, another DTE tech came. He had the bright idea (actually, it seemed like a pretty good idea) to see if he could get us hooked back up by using a good ground in place of the neutral connection. He tried valiantly to make our ground connection work, but alas it just wouldn't for some reason. (There were some strange things about the way our house ground was set up, but fixing those didn't fix the grounding problem.) So, he left around 10pm. We were still very dark, and getting colder.

Thursday morning brought no change except slowly dropping temperatures in the house. I kept calling DTE. Finally, around 12:30pm a team of three workers from some electrical contractor in Detroit showed up. (They were not DTE employees.) They restrung the cable, reconnected the neutral, and turned our power back on. It was a good thing, too. The temperature inside had gotten down to 41° before they got us turned on again.

Joy of joys, we had power. I went around turning on computers and network gear, while Mary got a load of laundry going and reset all the clocks. The house ever so slowly warmed up. Some. Well, only a little. After a while, Mary pointed out that the heating zone which covered the living room and dining room was not getting heat. Sigh. I called our regular HVAC repair place, and they sent out one of their guys. He found the problem (apparently a pocket of air had formed in the problematic zone of our hot water heating system during the long inactivity) and fixed it. He left around 5:30pm. Right now it's 6:39pm and the house is up to 51°.

I just took a break for dinner. Mary's sister Karen is here visiting for her birthday. Now I see that the temperature is about 60°, although it is colder than that in the bedrooms still. Here in my office I turned on both my laptop and the big noisy desktop machine to help warm up the place. (I also had some picture editing to do on the big machine, so that wasn't a big waste.)

After we got power back this afternoon, Mary told me "Little House On The Prairie isn't all it's cracked up to be." I'm glad she is seeing it that way now. I've always thought that. My idea of a recreational vehicle is the Starship Enterprise. That's 1701-D (the Next Generation ship), mind you, a real home away from home. Come to think of it, though, at least 10% of their episodes involve losing power. Never mind. I would like a Honda home power generator, though.

Low Power Blues

The nasty ice storm that trashed its way across the middle of the continent has made its way to Michigan. It left about a quarter of an inch of ice on all the tree branches. In particular, it weighed down the branches of a tall white pine tree in our back yard so much that all of them bent way down and some of them broke off. Unfortunately, the tree has grown into the path of the power line and two phone lines that come from the pole in the corner of the yard all the way to our house. So a lot of the bent and broken branches ended up on these lines.

Although none of the lines broke, it was obvious that something was wrong. My first clue was when I turned on the toaster oven in the kitchen early this morning, and all of the lights dimmed to half intensity. A few other experiments confirmed that we were facing a low-voltage situation. Mary and I went around turning off and disconnecting what we could. I powered down Tex, the new server that I'm setting up as our new cavnar.com host. I also turned off several other bits of always-on hardware. I left Tesla, our old server, up, since it provides some services to people besides me. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to draw very much power.

Our power supplier, DTE, is swamped with calls from all over the area. When I called the trouble reporting line this morning, I was informed by a cheerful automated voice that I had to wait approximately 167 minutes to talk to a customer representative. I went back down to the dark workshop in the basement where Tesla lives to see if I could eke out enough bandwidth to contact DTE's web-based trouble reporting. I was successful, I guess. The choices for the kind of problem I was experiencing seemed inadequate. The line wasn't down, so I had to settle for checking the box that indicated that our power was intermittent. I've gone back to the site a few times to look at our status, but their system is still unable "at this time" to give an estimate of when they can look at the problem.

I called the phone company, but they won't come out unless a phone line is actually down. I finally managed to call the tree trimming service that did a bunch of work for us about a year and half ago. One of their guys came out about an hour ago. He was able to get all the branches off the wires using just his long pruning pole. However, once all of the branches were out of the way, I was able to see the real problem: the power line, although not broken, has pulled partially away from the pole. I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing we've lost one of the two incoming phases for our power. So, we're still stuck until DTE graces us with an on-site presence.

Mary and Tim seem to be taking this a lot more cheerfully than I am. Mary has always been much more prepared to go low-tech. (My old joke is that I don't really know how we got together in the first place, because she wants to live in the 19th century, and I'm still mad because it's not already the 24th.) Our son Tim, who spends a lot of time practicing on his electric and acoustic guitars, is off from school because of Martin Luther King Day. When I told him, he immediately replied "I guess this means it's an acoustic sort of day". He knows what to do and isn't whining about it (yet). But old geek that I am, I feel significantly disoriented. It took some soothing talk from my wife and a bit of creative re-prioritizing with her to find a way to use the day effectively without being online continuously. Even so, here I am, sitting in the dark, typing on an old keyboard by candle light (seriously!) just so I can get my blogging fix. In a way, it might have been easier (or at least simpler) if it had been a complete outage.

I hope it is warm, dry and well-powered where you are.

'Contra Ancoralia Redux' Redux

Doubtless you remember how I complained in a Nov. 1 posting about the nastiness of dealing with the loosely tied Gordian knot of cables behind my desk. Then I wrote again on the same subject, this time about a supposed 'wireless extension cord' sold by ThinkGeek. Well, just now, I found myself somewhat chagrined when I went back to ThinkGeek to add this item to my wishlist. This gadget is an April Fool's joke! The description was so well done, and the technology mentioned so plausible, that I and everyone I know who looked at it were completely taken in. Or were some of you aware of its false nature, and just let me stumble on to embarrassment?

It seems that increasingly one has to double-check everything! For urban legends, there's Snopes and such. But has it gotten to the point that one has to try ordering a product to find out if it is real? How far can a joke like this go? After they take your credit card number? What other kinds of pseudo-information are out there that one has to be careful of?

Audiospam

I know without asking that anybody who would be reading this blog (or maybe any blog) is sick to death of automated junk political phone calls. Here in Michigan these calls all have a certain frantic tone to them that is pathetic. I've heard from both Democrats and Republicans, and even one Socialist. I say 'heard from' although I never listen to the whole thing. I can usually tell that it's a junk call before I answer it, because it has an 800 or 888 area code. If I can get to the phone on time, I can answer and then hang up without having to hear a word. Otherwise, it goes on to our answering machine, and the offending ad echoes through the house from the loudspeaker. It's all intrusive and offensive.

It occurred to me that these messages must be like spam email. Everyone hates them, supposedly. No-one ever listens to any of them if they can help it. So where is the benefit to the parties and candidates? There must be at least some unfortunate souls who are so bereft of sense and decency that they actually listen to these ads and are influenced by them. I figure that these are the same folks that spammers are trying to reach, that tiny fraction of 1% of email recipients who will buy the advertised questionable products and thus justify the cost of sending the spam to huge numbers of other uninterested recipients.

We haven't been able to legislate spam email away. But we were able to get the National Do Not Call Registry to prevent commercial solicitors from calling us. Unfortunately, political parties and other non-profit organizations were able to lobby their way past this, so they are not bound by the NDNCR. Hmmm. Do you think that might be because the congresspersons who wrote the legislation might have an interest in being able to use phone soliciting for their own purposes? No, couldn't be.

Do you know the worst part about automated phone advertising? You can yell, and scream, and curse all you want, and nobody hears you. And there is no-one to whom you can demand "Take me off of your phone list. I never want to get another call from you."

Contra Ancoralia

Around the turn of the Millennium, it was common to hear complaints about why the future wasn't here already. As one friend put it, "I desire rockets. Why aren't there rockets?" Those of us who grew up on 50s and 60s TV shows had a clear idea of what the future was supposed to look like. For the most part, we aren't anywhere close to that stream-lined high-design vision. True, there have been some astounding and largely unanticipated developments, but almost none of them moved us to a Buck Rogers future.

Instead, we are surrounded by technology that may work, but which is clunky, ugly, boring, and unpleasant to use. That pretty well describes most of the devices we have to work with in our daily lives. The most extreme example of this problem we typically encounter is a desktop computer. Such a machine usually has the following:

• a box containing the processor, memory, disk drives, and various interface cards
• a monitor
• a keyboard
• a mouse
• a set of speakers
• a printer
• lots and lots of cables, including power cables for the processor, monitor, speakers and printer; data/signal cables connecting the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and printer to the processor box; a network cable connecting the processor to some sort network port
  

The result is a setup that is hard to move or change, and which has an incredibly ugly and awkward rat's nest of cables strung behind and under it. It is no wonder we prefer so-called "tower" configurations, since those usually let you leave most of the cabling on the floor and out of sight.

One solution to the rat's nest problem is to put as much as possible into one box. Apple went that way with some of its designs and really worked at minimizing the number of cables. This is one of the reasons that Apple computers are considered to be more attractive than the typical PC. However even the admittedly classier Apple machines still have some cables. Laptop and palm computers represent other attempts to put everything into one package. However, they too reveal substantial shortcomings of one kind or another due to their small size and limited battery life.

Cables and wires make computers ugly, but they make other things ugly and awkward as well. For instance, go to a gym and watch someone trying not to drop a CD player as they struggle with the headphones while they are madly pedalling away on an elliptical trainer. (That problem has been slightly alleviated by the smaller and lighter Ipod, but even it has a wire to get tangled up in.) Also, you have doubtless seen someone fighting with a microphone cable on a stage, or perhaps have yourself cursed at the electric cord of your vacuum as it once again flops into your path while you are sweeping. Interestingly, the creators of the Star Trek: The Next Generation science fiction television series depicted the Borg (who are the primary villains in the series) as having cables and tubes connecting various parts of their own bodies. Cables, wires, and tubes represent the very soul of technological ugliness.

By contrast, one of the reasons that wireless household phones and cellphones are so wildly popular is simply because they have no wires. Likewise, coffee shops and bookstores have attracted a whole new clientele by providing cheap or free wireless Internet connnections. One of the oldest wireless technologies is the lowly pager, which is now essential in many professions such as medicine.

To me, the greatest contributor to the whole problem is the very notion of the cable. Somehow we have fixated on the idea that to get power or signal from one point to another we have to have a wire between the two points. What would a proper replacement to wires and cables look like? We have various wireless technologies to use for the signal portion of this problem, and a few of those (such as Bluetooth and 802.11*) are starting to make real in-roads in some applications. Still, it is not at all common to use those technologies within a computer. We still have printer cables, video cables, speaker cables, etc., to connect the various components. There is a considerable ways to go on that front.

Even if we are making progress on handling the wireless transmission of signals, we continue to neglect the other part of the problem, namely power transmission. At this point we really only ever see two solutions for powering our devices: batteries and power cables. This continues to baffle me. Nikola Tesla had working wireless power systems in use in his laboratories in the 1890s to power appliances on his workbenches. Have we really made no progress at all in this area in the intervening 110+ years? It would seem to me that one could do a great deal with inductive coupling. Tesla's system used this idea, with a coil running around the perimeter of a room's ceiling, and every appliance having an antenna coil to pick up the radiated power.

If you are uncomfortable living inside such a coil there are other possibiities. Imagine, for example, this power system:

• The basis of the system is a floor consisting of interconnecting squares.
• Each square has AC power connections to its four edges, so that power can flow freely among all the squares in the floor.
• Each square has a large, flat induction coil built into it, with the axis of the coil perpendicular to the square.
• Each square has a small bit of circuitry to control whether power is applied to the inductive coil. This circuit would be similar to the loop sensor embedded in streets to detect the passage of vehicles.
• Any appliance needing power, such as a floor lamp, has a foot or pad that contains another coil similar to the ones in the floor squares.
• When you place such an appliance on a floor square, the square's detection circuit senses that there is an inductive load above the square, and applies full power to the coil. This in turn induces an AC current in the coil in the foot, which then powers the device.
• You may move the device anywhere in the room, being limited only to placing it so as to adequately intersect a floor square.

Once you see this basic idea, other implementations suggest themselves. For example, it would seem pretty straightforward to use the new flexible circuit technologies to create similar power transmission flooring materials that you can unroll and lay like linoleum. You can also extend this idea to the table level, by having a table or desk whose surface is constructed in a similar way with a set of power squares. To power your keyboard or monitor, you simply set it on a powered surface wherever you like. You can also extended it to handheld devices such as electric mixers, flashlights, cordless drills, cellphones, etc. Such gadgets would have to have small batteries to power them while they are in use, but once you set them back down on the table, they would start to recharge themselves automatically without having to be plugged into any special socket.

I'm not sure that the above scheme is the best one, but I'm certain that some scheme like this could work. More importantly, just using this idea in a thought experiment helps free one from the literal shackle of the power cable. I might point out that the Latin word for cable in the title of this posting (ancoralia) comes from the same root as the word for anchor. A cable is an anchor and keeps you fastened to one spot. If you want to live like Buck Rogers, you must be free to move, and cannot afford any kind of anchor.

Updated 1/20/2007:
Other posts related to this topic:

• Relocating The Hard Way
• Contra Ancoralia Redux
• More On Wireless Power
• 'Contra Ancoralia Redux' Redux
• Low Power Blues
• Thawing Out
• More On Thawing Out
  

The Journey Metaphor Doesn't Go Anywhere

Everyone has heard the journey metaphor. Sooner or later, every political or religious leader facing the necessity of taking an unpopular course of action always tells his faithful "Remember, we are all on a journey together, and we have to be ready to act accordingly." Somehow this is supposed to help people tighten their belts, gird up their loins, and brace themselves as they go back out into the storm. Having heard variations of this line all of my life, I'm afraid I now take a rather jaundiced view of it.

There are some problems with the journey metaphor. For example, you may realize that rather than being on a journey, i.e., going from one point to another, in reality you are just going in circles. An example of this came up a couple of months ago when I was talking with a friend about cancer and the impact it has on a family's life. We talked about my bout with multiple myeloma and her father's struggle with some other kind of cancer. I no longer remember exactly what brought it up, but somewhere in the middle of the conversation I remarked "I really hate the journey metaphor", and she vigorously agreed. She mentioned how when her father was first diagnosed, he was in a lot of distress, as were she and the other family members trying to care for him. Some social worker at the hospital, in trying to be helpful, told her "Now, remember, you are all on a journey together ... ". Before the social worker could finish, my friend interrupted her and said "This is no journey! It's a nightmare!" Certainly my own experience with cancer seems very far from being journey-like. Yes, there were constant changes, but they were cyclic, or even chaotic, to the point that it seemed at times I was making progress more on the basis of Brownian motion than because I was actually going anywhere. (Happily, I eventually did start improving, and am now in much better shape.)

Another problem with the journey metaphor is that it encourages the wrong set of priorities. If you are on a journey, then you won't be coming back to the point again. So you have no incentive whatsoever for cleaning up your messes. It's easier just to pack up and move on, leaving your trash behind. Even figuratively this is not a good idea. Unresolved problems left behind can certainly come back and bite you, especially if it turns out that you are not journeying, but going in circles.

A much better metaphor, it would seem to me, is construction. You are trying to build something, whether it is a healthy body or a new organization. With construction, you have to pay attention to the details. You have to make sure that you have the tools and materials you need, and you have to take care of the trash.

A grimmer but more apt metaphor sometimes is war or battle. If you are facing a genuine obstacle, perhaps other people or even the perversity of nature, you might well find yourself conducting metaphorical military operations. However, don't get carried away with this. The war metaphor is way over-used, too.

Nevertheless, if you are facing a problem and are responsible for getting a group of people to deal with it, for heaven's sake, don't tell them they are on a journey. Be honest with them, and tell them that they have a problem, and they have to deal with it, perhaps by fighting something or building something. Going on a journey is just running away.

Another Marketing-Created Term I Hate

I have come to thoroughly detest the term 'user experience', as in 'these new features will enhance the user experience'. I'm sorry, but I don't want to experience your software at all. I may want to use it, but that's all. I'll keep my experiences to myself.

Problems with Google's AdSense

I just spent some interesting but ultimately fruitless minutes looking for a particular blog entry I saw somewhere a few weeks ago. It was on a scientifically-oriented blog of some sort (like The Bad Astronomer) that had Google AdSense ads on it. What struck me at the time was the irony of the fact that the particular posting on that page was a rant against some pseudo-science while AdSense provided an ad for a service based on exactly that pseudo-science. That got me wondering how often it happened that an ad was diametrically opposed to the content of the page it appeared on. So I tried a very small experiment. I got onto my Gmail account, and sent myself a message containing the one line:

This is a rant against water dousing and water witching.

When I read the message in Gmail (which also shows AdSense ads), it showed these four ads over on the right side of the page:

New Winner Every Day
Win 5 Pet Peeves Characters(tm) Enter the Free daily Contest here.

Pendulum of Pendulums
Dowsing results you can trust -free shipping

Spiritual Dowsing
Beautiful Pendulums & Great L-rods Dowsing Books & Dowsing Services

Innovative health product
Preventive, non-invasize technology Subtle Energy Technologies

As you can see, two of the ads are exactly for services based on the pseudo-science I mentioned in my mini-rant. I tried the same thing again using different text and, as I expected, got essentially the same outcome. Google searches (upon which AdSense is based) are very effective for finding matches for words and phrases such as those that occur in a blog page or an email message. The problem is that AdSense cannot distinguish between positive and negative mentions of these terms. (BTW, I have no explanation for the 'Pet Peeves' or 'Subtle Energy' ads.) So, the moral of the story is:

If your page uses AdSense, and it is showing ads you don't like, try changing the wording of the problematic phrase, or try rendering it in some clever way that human readers can easily read but which AdSense will not pick up on. For example, space the p r o b l e m w o r d s out.