Month: December 2000

The AlphaSmart 3000 Arrives

The AlphaSmart 3000 is a portable word-processing device aimed at the education market. It’s cheap — about $200 — and can potentially go for hundreds of hours on a few AA batteries. I know some people who swear by them as a cheap, truly portable writing device and decided to take the plunge and order one the other day.

The unit arrived via FedEx today and after playing with it for awhile I’m am very impressed with the device — for a change, I think I actually got my money’s worth on such a device.

The AlphaSmart weights practically nothing — the computer keyboard I’m writing this on weighs more than the AlphaSmart. Rather than a big color LCD screen as you would find in a laptop, the AlphaSmart 3000 has a four-line, 40-character monochrome LCD like you might find in a high-end calculator. This was my single biggest concern about the unit, but the screen is more than serviceable for word processing. The only serious problem is that the screen angles slightly and I could easily see it getting scratched or marred while being put into a briefcase or carrying case. Some sort of hinged or sliding cover for the screen would go along way to reducing such problems.

The keyboard is very nice. The keys are bigger than most desktop keyboards, although the keys tend to be a bit too springy for my taste. The AlphaSmart includes a spell checker, which works well, as well as the ability to search for specific words or phrases.

The AlphaSmart connects to a PC or Mac via a USB cable. Transferring files was extremely quick and without any problems.

If you do a lot of writing or note taking away from your desktop computer, the AlphaSmart is an excellent alternative to lugging around a heavy, power hungry laptop.

CNN Uses Florida Math in Reporting on Michigan Case

CNN correspondent Ed Garston wrote a story about the contest for township supervisor in the Michigan township of Fire Lake that simply doesn’t add up. According to Garston, “Two candidates for the office, incumbent Dave Stremlow and challenger Toni Larson, were tied at 600 votes each,” but then near the end of the story Garston reports that, “There are 1,038 registered voters in this town about 30 miles southeast of the northern Michigan resort of Traverse City.”

Huh? I’m not quite sure how 1,038 voters could cause a 600-600 tie unless there are multiple township supervisor seats, which doesn’t seem to be the case from the context of story.

Cussing Canoeist Law Back in the News

Michigan briefly made national news last year when a man was convicted in Arenac County district court for swearing in front of women and children.

Timothy Boomer fell out of his canoe and unleashed a prolonged fit of swearing that, according to witnesses, including screaming the F-word more than 75 times (obviously his English language skills were on par with his canoeing skills). It would have been proper for police to charge him with disrupting the peace or being a public nuisance, but instead prosecutors insisted on charging him with violating a 106-year old law making it illegal to curse in front of women and children.

Since then the law has been involved several times including the most recent incident. Jeffery Richards, 27, allegedly argued with the bus driver who drove his child from school. Richards allegedly said he was going to “rip off the driver’s f—– head and shove it down his throat,” followed by a string of other obscenities. Fine, charge Richards with making a terrorist threat or disrupting the police. But no, Grand Rapids prosecutors had to go and charge him with using obscenities in front of women and children.

The anti-cussing statute is clearly unconstitutional and at some point is going to be thrown out as such. The American Civil Liberties Union is already appealing Boomer’s conviction on the grounds that the statute is excessively broad. As the ACLU’s William Street told The Grand Rapids Press, “We simply think this law, the way it was developed, on its face is unconstitutional at all times.”

And yet prosecutors across the state have nothing better to do but pursue expensive prosecutions for violating a statute that will, in the end, turn out to have no force of law.

Thank goodness Michigan prosecutors are keeping me safe from profane speakers rather than pursuing more serious crimes.

Source:

Cussing law gets a workout once again. Barton Deiters, The Grand Rapids Press, December 3, 2000.

One Man’s Blizzard Is An 11 Year Old’s Dream

Here in Michigan we’re getting slammed with a blizzard. Normally blizzards are a normal thing here in the Midwest, but the last few years have seen very warm winters. The current blizzard takes me back to my childhood.

Actually Don Larson took me back to my childhood when he wrote on his site,

How well I remember blizzards from my birth city. The blizzards of January 1967 and January of 1979 where snow was piled 15 feet along the streets for months afterwards and other winters with occasional wind-chill temperatures of -50 and -80 below zero. Brrrr!

I wasn’t born when the 1967 blizzard hit, although I vividly remember my grandparents showing me pictures of the large trees in woods by the back yard that had been toppled by all the snow and ice on them.

The 1979 blizzard, however, was a dream come true to my 11 year old way of thinking. By that time I lived with my grandparents and their house was maybe 20 miles from the nearest small city — nothing was getting through to us. The only real thing to do was go outside and play in snow banks that were three times taller than I was. There is nothing in the world that compares to several acres of 15 foot snow — the snow was so high for a few days that as we walked on top of it we were almost level with the roof of the house.

My brother and I created elaborate tunnels which quickly became competing snow castles and the site of endless snowball fights. It took forever for the snow to melt (at least it seemed like forever.)

Looking back, I’m sure what was the coolest thing in the world to an 11-year-old must have been a nightmare for the adults, but they never let on that it was anything but magical. The snow eventually faded, but not the memories.

Flexible Database-Driven System + Creativity = Awesome Web Building Power

Jorn Barger, whose Robot Wisdom web log I visit every day, recently had an interesting essay on an idea that seems to be gaining speed; namely that the huge processor speed + huge hard drives + broadband = a revolution in how people store and access information.

Managing all that information, however, starts to be a problem. In fact, managing the relatively small amount of information I post on the web is often a big problem. I estimate I post an average of 5 articles a day overall, with many different themes and topics. Figuring out how to organize them is an enormous headache, much less actually finding the time to do it.

Barger apparently has the same problem. Barger writes,

Webloggers have a headstart on the challenge of building their own, because they’ve started archiving the best links, with annotations. They can go back thru these archives and sort the links by topic– my netlit portal was a first try at this, using the categories: fun, art, media, issues, net, tech, science, history, search, shop.

But I feel like that experiment was a near-complete failure– I hardly ever use them myself. Esthetically, they’re just too noisy. (I trimmed almost all the pullquotes when I sorted them, which may have been a mistake, and I started rewriting my blurbs, but it didn’t help that much, imho.)

A big problem that Barger hints is also the fact that often relations between topics are “fuzzy.” Sometimes I want to view information on Cuban executions as part of a Cuba topics page — other times I want to read about it as part of a death penalty topics page (not to mention as part of a Fidel Castro biography page). Once you get more than a few of these, the whole endeavor becomes a nightmare.

Conversant goes a long way to solving this problem with what it calls an Advanced Query Page type. The search page on this site is a simple Advanced Query Page, but there is a lot of power behind the hood. For example the new books page I added the other day looks like a typical web page, but it in fact is an Advanced Query Page and is dynamically generated.

In this case, all the page does is perform a search looking for anything I’ve categorized as being about “Books”, and then returns the web pages it finds in a neat ordered list. I could easily insert prefatory text explaining my love of books, etc., as well. And once I’ve got it set I don’t have to worry about updating the page — it will take care of itself.

Plus, I could easily do more refined pages. For example, if I had written a lot of articles about a specific computer game such as “Diablo II,” I could easily create a search that simply looked for that phrase where it occurs in web pages and return a list of them.

This makes it very easy to take any HTML document base and quickly create a very detailed, sophisticated directory of those documents. Powerful stuff.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' Commercial Gets Shot Down By CBS

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently got some bad news — CBS rejected an advertisement it wanted to run during the Superbowl. CBS said it doesn’t accept issue ads for the Superbowl. The commercial, which consists of cows singing an anti-leather song (I’m not making this up), is available in several different formats on PETA’s web site.

The weird thing is, what in the world is PETA doing trying to buy a $2.5 million, 30 second TV spot? As Americans for Medical Progress wrote in its recent newsletter,

PETA’s willingness to spend $2.5 million for a one-time
30 second television spot may come as a shock to some of
its donors. Most of PETA’s reported $17 million a year
budget is financed through individuals giving small
contributions in the $5 – $50 range. It is not likely
that many of these donors thought their money would
go to finance a commercial with singing cows.

Indeed.