Buffalo, NY (WBEN) - It used to be that when customs officers at the border crossing into the U.S. asked "Where were you born?", they'd take your answer at face value. New rules, in effect Thursday, require you to prove it. Americans and Canadians over age 18 will be required to show some document beyond a driver's license to prove citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate. In the past, some people entering the U.S. from Canada or Mexico simply had to declare their nationality...This is a straight-up lie. The wife and I have crossed the border a few dozen times since 9/11. Guess, what? They don't trust you at ALL. They used to, but it was just trust. Technically the rules said you needed to prove it, so all of a sudden you better have a birth certificate or whatever else they feel like. My first encounter with this was troublesome as it was a surprise; I got directed to a scary room with lots of stern looks, and only got in by lying. "I think they only draft citizens" as I showed the Selective Service card. I know this to be untrue, but it got me out of the room. To be clear, the Canadians are no better. They arbitrarily (i.e. suddenly enforced long-standing rules without telling us) tightened these restrictions at the same time. So, we've been traveling with passports every time for the past 6 years.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
What makes them lie?
Am I the only one who actually travels across the U.S./Canada border? Anyone seen the press releases and reporting today. This one is typical:
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Trying to make things too easy
Lets take the tax prep software commercials. Turbotax has this on their website:
Asks Easy Questions No tax jargon here. Just easy-to-answer, plain-English questions about you, your income and your life. Plus, TurboTax Deluxe, Premier and Home & Business save you time by only asking questions that pertain to your unique tax situation.I've used such tax software for a few years now. I spent a long time doing it all by hand, because I had a freelance business and other complexity that they didn't address, but for a while now I've been doing the computer based ones. As I am waiting to do the taxes this year, I realized I am accumulating paperwork. That's it. When I have enough, then I'll be ready to fill out the forms. Historically, almost everything that goes into the program is just from those forms. Everyone remembers to send me the right ones, and fills them in right. So, I end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what "easy" question I need to answer to make sure I fill in the right box for the form I got in the mail. I'd rather have tax prep software that says
What form are you looking at now?And I type it, or pick from a pulldown of all probable forms. And then I just type in the info in the various boxes. That would seem easy to me. Even if I don't actually know what any of it means. Ask some of those ease guidance questions at the end based on this info if you want. For systems that already have well-entrenched processes, even complex or bad processes, its often best to not buck the trend by trying (probably unsuccessfully in the end) to make things too easy.
Monday, January 14, 2008
A good example of why we don't care about Twitter
I get messages like this from my wife all the time:
Rotated for your convenience. I often get several picturemails a day from her.
A picture says a lot. Since y'all don't have the context, its of the dog and cat /both/ on her lap in our living room. Everyone napping. No text needed, and this worked a lot better than any text could.
Rotated for your convenience. I often get several picturemails a day from her.
A picture says a lot. Since y'all don't have the context, its of the dog and cat /both/ on her lap in our living room. Everyone napping. No text needed, and this worked a lot better than any text could.
Sneakernet
Anyone remember this phrase? It seems to have fallen out of favor lately. For those too young or not nerdy enough, its the practice of physically transporting storage media. Originally floppies, but I spent a lot of time driving SyQuest platters and other stuff around town.
It was really the only way to do things when computer networks were poor, not well-interconnected, or nonexistent. A lot of time was spent walking (and mailing) disks about when I installed PhoneNet network at my first job. It was revolutionary, but still too slow for most file transfer.
I was just thinking that sneakernet seems to be rather back in vogue now. I get or give flash drive data constantly. All sorts of folks travelling or serving overseas send camera or other media back home. Packet sizes have gone up (my free promotional thumbdrive is 2GB, or 46 times larger than my shockingly-large-at-the-time SqQuest) though speed is the same. But unlike the old days, no one really seems to be considering it as a formal transport method.
And that leads to the real issue. By being an ad hoc network, little or no attention is paid to efficiency, load or the security of the network. For example, I have no idea where my thumbdrive is right this minute. And at least weekly there's a scandal where a government agency, bank or someone else looses a disk. Media these days is not routinely secured, data is not routinely encrypted, and nothing inserted into my computer is scanned to make sure its safe, all of which was pretty routine for transported physical media 20 years ago.
I worked at a place in the early 90s that transported 9 track tape, among other things. With medical and financial records of people. I believe the data was encrypted in some manner (not sure, but I know we had to bring it into the host computer and process it before use, so I think so), it was transported in a big, red plastic case with a padlock (also kept it safer from EMI issues) and was moved by a medical courier service, with a well-tracked log and guarantees as to time-to-deliver. This procedure could not be violated; one time the tape wasn't ready when the courier left, and we couldn't just send some random employee out to deliver it.
Why, despite our other paranoia, have we all become so complacent now, I wonder?
Friday, January 11, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
A different GUI evaluation
This training organization I work with has, at astonishing expense, acquired forty sets of MILES. For those too bored to follow the link, that's the laser field training system the U.S. military (and increasingly, others) use so they can shoot each other without bullets.
Its a complex, multi-part system, with control units and setup screens. We don't even have all the components (there are desktop computers that can track and record everyone's movement).
The laser is emitted from this device that is strapped to the barrel of the rifle:
It has a pretty transparent user interface (it shoots when you pull the trigger and a blank fires from the normal gun, in the normal way), and no GUI, so we'll ignore that, but there are three things that do have buttons and screens. Some are quite odd, so I thought I'd review them briefly.
Starting with the simple one, everyone with a gun (and anyone else like a civilian or hostage) has a harness, worn over your uniform and other gear, and a "halo," strapped over your hat or helmet.
The black dome things are the laser receivers. there are some on the chest harness also. The halo is dumb, and simply sends signal to the chest harness with an induction loop, so there are no cables. The chest harness has a little computer that interprets the signals, and does the appropriate thing based on if it got hit or near-missed. It beeps when you are dead, and kills the weapon so you can't shoot others.
The computer has a little control interface on it.
I only have this one terrible shot, and its boring, so I am not gonna review it much. It works like most of the simple menu driven interfaces, like your basic printer or something. Scroll arrows, enter key to execute functions. The "i" key is supposed to be pressed to turn it on, but its not needed; any scroll turns on the display also (to preserve battery, all these items are very inclined to go to sleep).
It has lots of unlabeled functions. Tapping any key will silence an alarm. Holding enter down for 2 seconds toggles backlight. Holding both arrows at once initiates a count to turn on an alarm so controllers can find you. Like if you fall off a cliff.
The CD/TDTD (don't worry about it, just call it a "god gun." Everyone else does.) is a free-standing device used by administrators when setting up the devices, and by observer/controllers (O/Cs) during the exercise.
The system is modal, and softkey driven. There are a few obvious keys, like power and light (backlight), and the second column from the left are the three modes of operation. These are pretty clear, especially the Run mode, which is that used during exercises. Which is good, because it needs to be used rapidly, outdoors, in all weather, etc.
The right side buttons are more or less normal softkeys. They vary between modal switches (just selection) and drilling down into sub-menus. In the Run mode, they are just selections (highlighted to indicate). Then you press the trigger to activate the function selected.
Except they have one weird behavior, even in Run mode. See the parenthetical phrase (Cntrl Mode) after the NEAR MISS label in the image above? If you press the softkey again, you get that other function:
Not sure this is a good way to do things. Its a way to multiply your functions, and they are often related to each other, but its got poor affordance. And I have never seen it anywhere else. I assumed that the parenthetical was another name for it, or something. A slash on the button, with a paren under it might be able to work:
/()
There are some other nice things tossed in there subtly. The Run mode items are all flush left. All other items are indented a little bit.
At a glance the O/C can tell if they are in Run mode or accidentally in some administrative mode, without reading the actual words.
The trigger is more or less the OK/Enter key. This makes sense, as usually a function execution involves sending or receiving codes through the front of the gun; its gun-like, so the trigger works great for this. When fired, lights come on the back to indicate it, and warn that you are emitting a laser (its marginally dangerous to eyes at under 10 meters). Unfortunately, the labelling is poor; the bottom line where it says "TR= whatever" is the trigger function. Sometimes its in code due to space and is hard to understand unless you are trained a lot.
Oddly, the "OK" key is essentially a Back button. In most situations, it will send you back up one menu.
The softkeys occasionally change to be other things, like scroll keys, as here when used to edit a number. Reasonably self-explanatory, but since its a behavioral change its a bit jarring.
The main laser emitter is not the prod in the front, but a large, flush area below it. This is a problem for some testing; people who use these know that the frontmost part of a gun is the muzzle. In this case, that prod is a less-used IR data port.
The last device we'll look at today is the ASAAF. This one we call "the ASAAF." No nickname, sadly.
Its a massively fragile, fiddly device, and expensive as hell to boot. The Alignment Head clamps to the laser emitter on the rifle, and the Display Assembly is the control unit. Permanent cables tie the two together in a sorta clunky manner.
To zero the lasers to the gun you are telling the unit what gun you have, and then a red aiming target appears. You press buttons to move it till its lined up with the sights on the rifle.
Speaking of buttons, here they are:
It seems that the left side array is a typical 5-way pad. I love seeing these made out of membrane switches. Then I try to use them. Here is as bad as it can be. You have to use it without really looking, as your eyes are occupied with the sights. Its quite hard to use. For other functions it's used a lot like a normal scrolling menu, like to pick the weapon system from a list.
But its not a 5-way pad. The center Aim button is in NO way OK/enter. Its one dedicated function. Just like Align is a dedicated function. Pressing either of these makes actions happen to the mounted laser device, immediately, regardless of what else was happening. As far as the other two, Weapon Type pulls up that scrolling menu, and User is a setup screen, a heirarchical menu of options.
There is no enter button, in fact. Selecting something makes it true. You just go to the next function that needed the value. This is not just weird and hard to understand, but its worse because its different than the other devices.
In fact, that's my biggest gripe about the whole system. Not that any one system is hard to use, or requires training to really understand, but that there is no one UI paradigm. Each device is totally different from any other device.
It has a pretty transparent user interface (it shoots when you pull the trigger and a blank fires from the normal gun, in the normal way), and no GUI, so we'll ignore that, but there are three things that do have buttons and screens. Some are quite odd, so I thought I'd review them briefly.
Starting with the simple one, everyone with a gun (and anyone else like a civilian or hostage) has a harness, worn over your uniform and other gear, and a "halo," strapped over your hat or helmet.
The black dome things are the laser receivers. there are some on the chest harness also. The halo is dumb, and simply sends signal to the chest harness with an induction loop, so there are no cables. The chest harness has a little computer that interprets the signals, and does the appropriate thing based on if it got hit or near-missed. It beeps when you are dead, and kills the weapon so you can't shoot others.
The computer has a little control interface on it.
I only have this one terrible shot, and its boring, so I am not gonna review it much. It works like most of the simple menu driven interfaces, like your basic printer or something. Scroll arrows, enter key to execute functions. The "i" key is supposed to be pressed to turn it on, but its not needed; any scroll turns on the display also (to preserve battery, all these items are very inclined to go to sleep).
It has lots of unlabeled functions. Tapping any key will silence an alarm. Holding enter down for 2 seconds toggles backlight. Holding both arrows at once initiates a count to turn on an alarm so controllers can find you. Like if you fall off a cliff.
The CD/TDTD (don't worry about it, just call it a "god gun." Everyone else does.) is a free-standing device used by administrators when setting up the devices, and by observer/controllers (O/Cs) during the exercise.
The system is modal, and softkey driven. There are a few obvious keys, like power and light (backlight), and the second column from the left are the three modes of operation. These are pretty clear, especially the Run mode, which is that used during exercises. Which is good, because it needs to be used rapidly, outdoors, in all weather, etc.
The right side buttons are more or less normal softkeys. They vary between modal switches (just selection) and drilling down into sub-menus. In the Run mode, they are just selections (highlighted to indicate). Then you press the trigger to activate the function selected.
Except they have one weird behavior, even in Run mode. See the parenthetical phrase (Cntrl Mode) after the NEAR MISS label in the image above? If you press the softkey again, you get that other function:
Not sure this is a good way to do things. Its a way to multiply your functions, and they are often related to each other, but its got poor affordance. And I have never seen it anywhere else. I assumed that the parenthetical was another name for it, or something. A slash on the button, with a paren under it might be able to work:
/()
There are some other nice things tossed in there subtly. The Run mode items are all flush left. All other items are indented a little bit.
At a glance the O/C can tell if they are in Run mode or accidentally in some administrative mode, without reading the actual words.
The trigger is more or less the OK/Enter key. This makes sense, as usually a function execution involves sending or receiving codes through the front of the gun; its gun-like, so the trigger works great for this. When fired, lights come on the back to indicate it, and warn that you are emitting a laser (its marginally dangerous to eyes at under 10 meters). Unfortunately, the labelling is poor; the bottom line where it says "TR= whatever" is the trigger function. Sometimes its in code due to space and is hard to understand unless you are trained a lot.
Oddly, the "OK" key is essentially a Back button. In most situations, it will send you back up one menu.
The softkeys occasionally change to be other things, like scroll keys, as here when used to edit a number. Reasonably self-explanatory, but since its a behavioral change its a bit jarring.
The main laser emitter is not the prod in the front, but a large, flush area below it. This is a problem for some testing; people who use these know that the frontmost part of a gun is the muzzle. In this case, that prod is a less-used IR data port.
The last device we'll look at today is the ASAAF. This one we call "the ASAAF." No nickname, sadly.
Its a massively fragile, fiddly device, and expensive as hell to boot. The Alignment Head clamps to the laser emitter on the rifle, and the Display Assembly is the control unit. Permanent cables tie the two together in a sorta clunky manner.
To zero the lasers to the gun you are telling the unit what gun you have, and then a red aiming target appears. You press buttons to move it till its lined up with the sights on the rifle.
Speaking of buttons, here they are:
It seems that the left side array is a typical 5-way pad. I love seeing these made out of membrane switches. Then I try to use them. Here is as bad as it can be. You have to use it without really looking, as your eyes are occupied with the sights. Its quite hard to use. For other functions it's used a lot like a normal scrolling menu, like to pick the weapon system from a list.
But its not a 5-way pad. The center Aim button is in NO way OK/enter. Its one dedicated function. Just like Align is a dedicated function. Pressing either of these makes actions happen to the mounted laser device, immediately, regardless of what else was happening. As far as the other two, Weapon Type pulls up that scrolling menu, and User is a setup screen, a heirarchical menu of options.
There is no enter button, in fact. Selecting something makes it true. You just go to the next function that needed the value. This is not just weird and hard to understand, but its worse because its different than the other devices.
In fact, that's my biggest gripe about the whole system. Not that any one system is hard to use, or requires training to really understand, but that there is no one UI paradigm. Each device is totally different from any other device.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Airlines beat mobile operators
Its not just the TSA or similar bureaucracies that mess with the public, the airlines themselves are becoming more unfriendly all the time.
We just bought the tickets for Alison's yearly migration back to Canada, and every year it's weirder. Disregarding most of the process, here's the additional taxes and fees portion alone:
Yup, $84.68 in taxes and fees that were in no way visible when browsing airfare. For the fare we paid at least, that's almost exactly a 50% tax rate (do the math).
Yup, $84.68 in taxes and fees that were in no way visible when browsing airfare. For the fare we paid at least, that's almost exactly a 50% tax rate (do the math).
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