James's Weblog

Two-week old news:
ACiD recently released their final artpack, and to commemorate the event, ACiD is making their artpacks archive available on DVD. The DVD includes artpacks from other groups too, so some of my old (and sucktacular) ANSI art is actually on it. Wow.

(For anyone who doesn’t know what ANSI art is, see History of the Underground Scene.)

John Langdon’s ambigram site inspired me to try to make ambigrams of my name and of some of my friends’ names.

• James
• Karen Cheng
• Jennifer
• Michael
• Corrie
• Mitchell

Most of those could be refined quite a bit more.

I’ve seen numerous people suggest purchasing a PDA over a physical graphing calculator. After all, a PDA can do everything a calculator can do (there are graphing calculator emulators that run on PDAs!), and it can do so much more. A PDA must be better, right?

I’ve spent the past three years in the PDA industry. I also own a physical graphing calculator. There are no doubts in my mind that a PDA is adequate for occasional use, such as for calculating sales tax or tips, but a physical calculator is superior for any extensive calculations, such as for math, science, or engineering work.

A physical calculator wins handily in the following key areas:

• Physical buttons with good tactile feedback. You want to be able to use the calculator to a reasonable degree without looking at it. You want to be able to feel for the button you want, and you want to be confident that the calculator registered the button press. Why do people prefer bulky physical keyboards to those flat, touchpad-like ones?
• Ease of use. People avoid touching PDAs directly for fear of getting fingerprints on the screen, and pulling out the stylus to tap on virtual buttons is clumsy. If you’re writing results out on paper, switching between a pen and stylus can be tedious.
• Battery life. My physical calculator lasts for years on a single set of batteries. PDAs need to be recharged frequently.
• Durability. PDAs are fragile. Physical calculators are rugged. A physical calculator can be thrown into a knapsack and jostled around without worry. Even if something breaks, a calculator is much cheaper to replace.
• Dependability. I trust the results from calculators of established manufacturers such as Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard. Their calculators are thoroughly tested and have been used by engineers for ages. PDA software packages are made by less mature vendors who don’t have the same track record.

Plus, if you’re in high school, you really don’t have a choice, because PDAs aren’t allowed on standardized tests.

Some cool font/typography/letterform pages I’ve come across recently:

• Fontifier: turn your handwriting into your very own TrueType font!
• WhatTheFont?!: automatic font identification
• John Langdon’s Ambigrams
• The Scourge of Arial
• Ligature Schmigature

I know these things save lives and all, but I really hate the ones we have in our home.

When their batteries get sufficiently drained, they emit a short, annoying, loud chirp once a minute. It seems to me that whoever thought this up never lived in a home with a smoke detector in every room. It takes around 10-15 minutes to track down which smoke detector is complaining, because:

• We have a lot of smoke detectors.
• The chirp is too short to get a good fix on the location immediately.
• Funny acoustics can play tricks.
• I have to wait a full minute to refine each guess.

Ten to fifteen minutes isn’t a long time, but it’s longer than it ought to be. Listening to the shrill, piercing chirp doesn’t make the time spent any more enjoyable. (And why do these chirps always seem to start in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping?) The chirps seem to go on forever; just how low on power can the batteries possibly be? At my old apartment complex in Berkeley, I listened to one go on for weeks.

What I don’t understand is that the smoke detectors are wired to get power from the house. The batteries are supposed to be used only as a backup. How are they getting depleted so quickly?

Of course, a good high-tech solution would be to connect all the smoke detectors to a network and to have a central monitoring system.

Better low-tech solutions:

• Use a rechargeable battery; signal a warning only when the battery can no longer retain a sufficient charge.
• Use visual cues instead of (or in addition to) the chirps for battery warnings. For example, a smoke detector could turn off its power LED when battery power is low (and thereby save electricity too); it could release a short, brightly colored ribbon and let it hang; or it slide open a hatch that reveals some brightly-colored material underneath.
• Use less annoying chirps and chirp more frequently. It’s silly to design a smoke detector that can signal a low-battery warning for several weeks. Even two chirps in quick succession would be a huge improvement.
• Get a dog.

From today’s San José Mercury News:

At the Web site of the ring tone company Modtones (www.modtones.com), you can dress your cell phone up for the holidays by downloading “Silent Night.” Or if you prefer, you can simply download silence.

Customers started asking for a silent ring tone a while back, said Jeremy Xavier, the marketing manager of Modtones, although at first he did not understand this oxymoronic request. When he did, he set his developers to work.

…

The user simply assigns the silent tone to any numbers in the cell phone’s address book. It seems to callers at those numbers that the cell phone is ringing, but the call is sent to voice mail.

Xavier said the un-tone has been getting “a pretty significant amount of downloads.” He declined to specify how many, but said it was beating out certain popular music.

Awesome.

Is it wrong for me to lust after this keyboard?

I am such a geek.

Don’t you hate it when you’re having a face-to-face conversation with someone, and then the other person gets interrupted by a phone call? Don’t you hate it when you get a call in the middle of a meeting or a class, and the person keeps calling you back, wondering why you don’t answer?

Forget built-in cameras. Forget about doubling as a portable gaming console. Forget Bluetooth and web-browsing.

What I really want is a button on my cell phone that, when pressed, answers an incoming call and responds with a pre-recorded message saying something like: “I’m here, but I can’t talk right now. Leave a message, or call back in ten minutes.”

Wow. It’s been two months since I left Sony.

(For anyone unaware, I had spent the past three years working at Sony Electronics in San José as a developer technical support engineer for their CLIÉ handheld line of PDAs. My duty was to answer—rather, to try to answer—programming questions from third-party software developers.)

Some people probably are still wondering exactly why I left a well-paying job and—for lack of a better term—pulled a Karen, especially in today’s harsh U.S. job market.

I don’t think I can express fully my three years of frustration there, but here’s a sampling:

I joined Sony because I wanted to avoid the fledgling, volatile, ultimately-doomed dot-coms. I wanted to work at a large, stable, proven company. (If you know me, you probably know that I don’t like change; I’m an ardent supporter of the status quo. Slow and steady wins the race.)

Although I spent three years hating my job, I don’t regret working at Sony. My job had its share of good moments, it was overall an interesting experience, and indeed Sony was large, stable, and proven. My main problem was that I had underestimated the morass of corporate bureaucracy.

1. Sony is a world-wide corporate giant but at its heart is still Japanese. Any decision worth making is made in Tokyo. Most of the hardware and software is designed and developed there. The rest of the world often gets table scraps: uninteresting, unimportant projects. Busy-work. The best moments of my job were during the slow periods where I was free to work on my own stuff. The worst moments were when I was working on someone else’s useless project that never got to see the light of day. Through it all, I didn’t have the responsibility nor the access to information and tools to do my job properly.

Meanwhile, the designers and engineers in Tokyo did their own thing without listening to anyone else. To its credit, this strategy had worked for Sony in the past, where Sony created new markets not by listening to what people wanted but by telling people what they’re supposed to want. This is fine for revolutionary products, but for the past couple of years most of the CLIÉ handheld models have been only evolutionary, and for those cases it’s just stupid not to listen to your customers.

Watching a company throw away perfectly good opportunities is just sad. I didn’t like where the product line was headed, and I hated how Sony focused its efforts on useless new endeavors instead of fixing existing problems.

2. Huge corporate bureaucracies have long corporate ladders. People can’t wait to climb them. Corporate ladders conveniently orient climbers so that the faces of the people below are aimed at the asses of the people above. At Sony, people’s lips seemed to like the taste of ass so much that it’s no wonder the cafeteria got away with serving such lousy food. Naturally, in my three years there, I didn’t go anywhere.

3. Huge corporations have huge teams of lawyers. When I joined, I signed a typical contract that gave away my claims to any work-related software that I would write or envision. Fair enough. But what happens when I have an idea and Sony doesn’t want it?

I designed a software library that I thought would be useful to third-party software developers. I proposed the project to some of the higher-ups in Japan (after all, we can’t make decisions on our own). They thought it was interesting but decided not to pursue it. I decided to pursue it on my own outside of work, but I wanted to do the Right Thing and first make sure everything was legally square. After all, who wants to be sued by a huge team of lawyers?

I talked to one of the intellectual property lawyers from the local San José office about assigning ownership back to me. I got the run-around for a few months. The lawyer from the local office didn’t have the authority to waive ownership, so he had to talk to another lawyer in San Diego. The lawyer in San Diego didn’t have that authority either, but he didn’t want to bother his superiors over such a little, insignificant project. Everyone got annoyed at me for trying to channel this through the legal system. People told me, “You know, you just should have done it on your own without telling anyone.” Sigh.

The lesson I took away from all of this was independent thought at Sony is fruitless. The heads in Japan don’t listen to anyone. You can’t get ahead without being a bootlicker. Any ideas you devise are at risk of being thrown away, forgotten about, wasted; Sony owns them all anyway, and it has no infrastructure for you to do anything about it. Why bother thinking at all?

I couldn’t take it anymore.

Sigh. I started a weblog. Who am I to get in the way of my own narcissistic tendencies? Well, maybe I finally can prove to all my misguided friends that I really am a lousy writer.

Thanks to Mitchell for sharing some of his web-space with me and for getting me started with the WordPress weblog software.

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