James's Weblog

For the Christmas before my dad passed away, I bought him a Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Palm OS version of TomTom Navigator for him to use with his Treo 650. I’ve started using it myself on my Treo during the past few weeks.

Things I don’t like:

• TomTom’s restrictive copy “protection” scheme. Had I realized how draconian it is, I probably would never have bought their software. They require software activation, and the software can be activated at most twice. To show just how ridiculous their policies are, from their “I am having trouble activating a second hand TomTom Navigator” knowledge base article:

  Second hand TomTom Navigator products are likely to have already been activated once or more by the first buyer and the product code may therefore no longer be valid. For this reason we advise our customers not to purchase TomTom Navigator second hand. If you have already purchased a second hand TomTom Navigator product and cannot activate the software, we suggest you return it to the seller.

  In other words, they’re unwilling to help you, and you’re screwed. I’m somewhat tempted to call them to complain that the previous owner was my dad and that they’re a bunch of insensitive jerks.

  I downloaded a crack off the Internet instead.

• Doesn’t automatically switch between day and night colors. The day colors are too bright at night, and the subdued day colors are too hard to see in the sunlight. At least hitting the “C” key quickly and easily switches between the two.

• No verbosity control. The thing is a chatterbox sometimes, saying things such as, “Turn right, then turn left. Left turn ahead. Turn left.” within the span of seconds.

• Some of its directions are misleading. TomTom often gives verbal directions like “turn right, then turn left” even though the left turn is a half mile away. I’d rather it didn’t mention the second turn at all until getting closer to it or if it said, “turn right, then stay in the left lane.”

• Menus are permanently cluttered with buttons that require paid service. I have no intention of ever paying for traffic or weather service, but they’re always listed in the menu choices, and I’m forced to wade through them. Reducing options in a software application that might be used while driving (despite their warnings against it) would be good.

• It uses strange defaults when restarted. When the software starts up and tires to retrieve the current location from the GPS receiver, it initially displays the “Home” location rather than from the last known location. It’s disorienting and weird. And once it does obtain the current location, TomTom Navigator always wastes time attempting to navigate to the last destination, even if you previously cleared the route or even if you already arrived there.

• It doesn’t tell you the name of the street you’re currently on. Admittedly that’s not so important if you’re just blindly following the navigation directions, but it’s something I’d like to know.

• It formats addresses as “Fake Street 123” instead of as “123 Fake Street”. There’s an option in the preferences to put house numbers first, but I can’t tell what it affects.

• You can save addresses to a special “Favorites” list and give them meaningful names. For example, you can save “742 Evergreen Terrace” (er, “Evergreen Terrace 742”) as “The Simpsons’ house”. However, once aliased, you can’t retrieve the actual address. Want to tell someone else where “The Simpsons’ house” is? Too bad.

• Incapable of learning. There’s no way to teach it about roads it’s not aware of, and worse, there’s no way to teach it about permanently blocked roads. Consequently, it will forever get the directions to my house wrong, because I live in a gated community, and TomTom (like most online mapping services) thinks there’s an accessible entrance into it where there isn’t.

• Inconsistent time formats. When showing the amount of time to the next turn, sometimes it says “0:15 hrs” to mean 15 minutes. Sometimes it shows “9.50 min” to mean 9 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, I told it to use U.S. formats.

• Blinking speed indicator. If you choose to show your current speed, when the software thinks you’re speeding, it displays your speed in blinking red text. This is annoying because the speed limit can be higher than it thinks it is, the blinking red text is annoying and distracting, and because it’s blinking, by the time I look at it, the text is often gone.

• Its “point-of-interest” system is hard to use. If you search for nearby businesses, the list of search results shows you how far away they are but not where they are. Selecting an item from the list automatically navigates to it rather than giving you more information first, and if the selected item turns out not to be the one you wanted, you need to perform the search all over again. Oh, and there is no point-of-interest category for supermarket/market/groceries.

That said, the TomTom Navigator software does look very nice and have a good feature-set, though I wish its features were more easily accessible.

My dad passed away yesterday morning. He was 58 years old.

Almost exactly one month ago, coincidentally when I had surgery for my broken fibula, my dad felt unusually weak and checked himself in to Washington Hospital in Fremont. After spending a week there and another week at Stanford Hospital, doctors diagnosed him with advanced liver cancer.

They speculated that the tumor in his liver had been developing for two years, and whatever symptoms he had went by unnoticed or were misattributed to stress, to overwork, or to simply getting older. This past year was particularly rough for him; his father’s brother passed away from brain cancer early in the year, his own father died in July, and his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

The doctors said my dad’s cancer was untreatable and sent him home, where he wanted to be. He spent the past two weeks in his bed, too weak to stand on his own. All of my uncles and aunts flew in from the east coast to help take care of him as he grew progressively weaker with each passing day. He spent the past several days drifting in and out of consciousness. On Thursday evening, he went into a deep sleep, and when I when I awoke Friday morning, his breathing had become rapid and shallow. I left his room for several minutes, and by the time I returned, his breathing had stopped.

It all happened in such a short amount of time, and it all feels very surreal.

I miss him a lot.

I saw two other orthopedists who think I should have surgery and have a metal plate screwed in to straighten my fibula. After that, I’ll be in a cast for three months. Hooray.

Without the surgery, they say that the bone might not be aligned properly at my ankle, which could lead to arthritis later. Even worse, once the swelling goes down, the bone might actually poke through my skin, which of course would be very, very bad.

Bah.

I shouldn’t even have been playing in that volleyball game. We’d already finished (and lost) both of our league games for the day, but I felt unsatisfied, was already bummed out from earlier events that day, and played a third game for fun. Strangely, nobody seems to know exactly how the accident happened (though everybody remembers the sound of the crack), but the best I can figure is that when I landed, I must have slipped on the grass, and my legs managed to go under the net, where the other guy landed on them.

Ironically I didn’t want to play in that part of the field because of the slippery grass, but the other part of the field had some holes and was considered more dangerous.

Also ironic is that my vacation was going pretty well up until that day, and then everything came crashing down, figuratively and literally.

Emergency Broadcast System message today:

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM
Issued an alert for the following counties… Alameda County… Effective until 10/17/2006 18:57:00
Broadcast Station
or Cable System
Issued a

Child Abduction Emergency

Less than thirty seconds afterward, they issue it again, this time adding Contra Costa, Sonoma, and Santa Clara counties. There’s no information provided about the names or descriptions of those involved. Despite television being a visual medium, no pictures. Useless. And not to dismiss the seriousness of kidnapping or anything, but is it really an emergency? Most of these kidnapping emergencies usually are child custody disputes anyway, where the children aren’t in any imminent danger.

Also, apparently the Emergency Broadcast System on cable television also cuts off cable Internet access. What the heck?

For once in my life, I’ve actually started playing sports. One of my coworkers organized a small volleyball sports league that I’ve been participating in for the last three weeks.

Yesterday I jumped for the ball at the same time as someone on the other side of the net, and I guess we collided on the way down and somehow fell on each other with a very audible cracking sound. A quick trip to the hospital emergency room later, and I discovered that I’ve fractured my left fibula in two places. Who knew volleyball could be so dangerous?

It’s the first bone I’ve ever broken (that I’m aware of, at least). Sigh.

The hospital emergency room took x-rays, showed me pictures of the fractures, and put my leg in a splint. The doctors there weren’t able to set the bone, however, and told me to see an orthipedist. I wondered if I should ask them for my x-ray film, but I figured they would give them to me if they thought I’d need them. Besides, isn’t everything done on computers these days?

This morning I called the orthopedist the hospital referred me to. The receptionist set up an appointment for me in the afternoon, said that she’d get the x-rays from the hospital, and finally asked me for my phone number in case there were any problems. When I showed up for my appointment, however, they didn’t have my x-ray results. They didn’t know my date of birth, which the hospital needed to release my information. Why didn’t they call me? What the hospital eventually did fax over was not a copy of my film but a description: “two-part fracture in fibula”, more or less.

The orthopedist couldn’t do much without the x-ray pictures; I described what I remembered to him, and he could only make some conjectures. Finally my dad drove me back to the hospital, which luckily was nearby, I picked up my film, and I went back to the orthopedist. And after all that, the orthopedist didn’t really do anything. He thinks my bone doesn’t need to be set, because the three fragments of my fibula apparently are aligned well enough that it should be able to heal without a cast. Hmph.

Several months ago I finally set up a simple software page to make some of the programs I’ve written available for download.

Then, in August, I mentioned one of my Palm OS applications in a comment on mytreo.net. The editors preferred it to the competition and added some of my programs to their download section (not with my permission, but I don’t mind):

• Card Autorun download page from mytreo.net
• Moxy download page from mytreo.net

As of this writing, both programs have perfect 10.0 ratings. Yay! (There is some slight bias, however, since Michael apparently gave one of them a 10.0 rating without having actually tried it. Jeffrey thinks that maybe Michael just knows quality software when he sees it.)

My Moxy program also got briefly mentioned about 43 minutes into some random podcast.

I have four physical computers at work sharing two monitors, two keyboards, and three mice in various configurations. To make it slightly less complicated and to continue my obsession with Trackpoint keyboards, I bought a French-Canadian SpaceSaver keyboard from eBay. It’s completely unused, and it’s one-third the price of the equivalent US English keyboard (which currently isn’t available on eBay anyway). I don’t plan to use it that much, so the slightly unusual key configuration didn’t seem like a big deal, and I wanted something fairly compact to keep out of the way.

That said, I imagine that French-Canadians must be mutants. Whereas typical U.S. English keyboards have Enter keys that are about double the width of normal keys, the Enter key on this French-Canadian keyboard is tall instead of wide. Consequently, there’s an extra key between ' (apostrophe) and Enter, and my pinky finger can’t reach the Enter key without moving my hand off of the home row. Argh.

As much as I like ING Direct, the 5% interest rate that some other places offer just seems too enticing over ING’s 4.35% interest rate, so I decided to switch.

I first tried to sign up for a savings account with Emigrant Direct, ING’s traditional competitor. I was very unimpressed with their website:

• They use “intelligent” form fields that automatically advance to the next field when you fill up the current one. Although they’re not necessarily bad, Emigrant Direct’s implementation is broken. Making a typo in a field and triggering the automatic advancement has an enormous penalty:
  • Backspace doesn’t work in this model. The form fields automatically advance to the next field but have no automatic means to return to the previous field. The standard method for correcting typos consequently is crippled.
  • Shift+Tab is unusable. Not only is there no automatic way to return to the previous field, but the manual way doesn’t work either. Attempting to use Shift+Tab to return to the previous field retriggers automatic advancement, and you’re stranded where you started.

  Worse, since most of the “intelligent” fields are numeric, typos aren’t uncommon.

  Is it so hard to do this right? If you can’t make something smart, keep it stupid and consistent. Being only half-smart is dangerous.

  Also, the need for automatic advancement can be avoided by abandoning their overly structured form design where, for example, they make you enter your telephone number across three separate fields (area code, first three digits, last four digits) instead of using a single freeform field that they validate later.

• Their session timeouts are too short. Although the online application process is spread over multiple web pages, the form on each page is somewhat lengthy, and they’re full of questions to which I don’t immediately know the answers. Unfortunately, if you spend more than a few minutes figuring out when you last moved or digging up your checkbook, your session times out and all the information that you entered is thrown away and wasted.

If Emigrant Direct wants to make it that troublesome to sign up for an account, it obviously doesn’t want my money, so I went elsewhere. I next tried signing up for Citibank’s e-Savings account. Citibank’s website also suffered from automatically advancing form fields, and at the end of the application process, it offers a confusing procedure to opt out of its mailing lists:

Citibank will periodically send information to you about new products and services … unless you check the box next to your name below. Information about your accounts will continue to be sent to you even if you check the box(es).

Citibank is allowed by law to share with its affiliates any information about its transactions or experiences with you. Please check the box next to your name if you do not want us to share among our affiliates any other information you provide to us….

Financial institutions that want people to trust them with their money should avoid such shady practices that obviously aren’t in the customer’s best interest:

• It’s an opt-out system rather than an opt-in one. Lack of action grants permission. (“If you want me to eat them for you, please give me no sign.”)
• Citibank uses negative instructions.
• Citibank uses inconsistent wording; they use “unless” for one checkbox and use “if you do not” for the other.

I went with Citibank anyway. Sigh.

A couple more ambigrams:

• Nancy
• Corrie #2

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost the ability to get excited about anything for fear of the inevitable rejection and disappointment.