Remember when Staples was exciting?

During the last two trips for Staples, I've noticed more empty shelves and a reduced number of things you might actually want to buy. They have plenty of staff on hand, though. Nice people who wander around the store, waiting for you to ask for their help.

"Can I help you?"

"Thanks. I'm looking for small windowed envelopes." I'd seen a box of 500 at Sam's Club. I won't use 500 of these in my lifetime. A box of 25 would be fine.

Both of us looked high and low on the shelves. No small windowed envelopes.

We concluded that both of us could not find the envelops. "You can order them on the web," the sales assistant said. "I can go look it up for you." He motioned to the computer at the end of the aisle.

Indeed, we could order the product online from the store.

Those of you of a certain age, remember the old Sears catalog stores? You could walk in to a storefront where they had Sears catalogs on the counter. You'd look up the item you wanted, pay for the purchase in cash, and have the product delivered to the store or to your home.

Staples is doing something weird here. They have made an effort to put good sales support staff on the floor and then give them nothing to sell.

They used to have a slogan, "Yeah, we've got that." It was a good slogan. It inspired confidence without arrogance.

Time was, we'd go there and buy what we wanted and another armload of stuff that caught our attention -  boxes of pens, a deal on manila folders, a power strip, and a wastebasket to carry home all the stuff that we just bought.

On my last few trips, I've bought less than what I sought and very little on impulse. OK, so we bought yet another 4GB flash drive.

P.S., Staples has the envelopes online, but only in quantities of 500.

Plan ahead for Halloween

[caption id="attachment_2786" align="alignright" width="700" caption="Holden Rite-Aid"][/caption]

Wait, isn't science supposed to explain stuff?

ON 31 October, a newborn baby somewhere in the world will become the 7 billionth member of the human race. Dunno where, although, statistically, most likely birthplaces for Baby Billion would be India or China. (अरब बच्चे or 婴儿亿元 , respectively).

There's another reason why this baby would be born in Asia. American women avoid giving birth on Halloween.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="612" caption="Women defy biology to avoid giving birth on Halloween | Try Nerdy"][/caption]

The researchers could only speculate why women would time their births and aim for Valentine's Day, but clench their teeth and everything else to bring forth their babies in early November.

My mother and the mothers of the three other kids, including a set of twins, must have missed that memo. There were four of us in a high school class of 100 with Halloween birthdays.

The pattern of avoiding birthdays around holidays holds into the new year.

Rank	Date		Rank	Day
364	1-Jan		14	7-Jul
362	2-Jan		12	8-Jul
356	3-Jan		18	22-Jul
350	4-Jan		17	12-Aug
347	8-Jan		2	9-Sep
351	9-Jan		9	10-Sep
349	10-Jan		16	14-Sep
348	1-Apr		8	15-Sep
346	13-Apr		1	16-Sep
361	4-Jul		4	17-Sep
355	31-Oct		10	18-Sep
352	24-Nov		13	19-Sep
353	25-Nov		15	20-Sep
357	26-Nov		7	21-Sep
358	27-Nov		5	22-Sep
359	28-Nov		3	23-Sep
354	23-Dec		6	24-Sep
363	24-Dec		11	25-Sep
365	25-Dec		19	30-Sep
360	26-Dec		20	1-Oct

In spite of their avoidance for birthdays near Christmas into the early part of the new year, many will aim for that tax deduction. The middling days between Christmas and New Year's score pretty well compared to other dates in that week.

26	30-Dec
42	29-Dec
62	28-Dec

Data source: How Common Is Your Birthday?

The CMO Site blog - Sun Rising on Solar Energy Marketing

Solar energy businesses are marketing themselves successfully when they avoid the controversy around government investment and global warming and concentrate instead on value to the customer.
Read the rest at The CMO Site - Karl Hakkarainen - Sun Rising on Solar Energy Marketing

Happy 20th Birthday, Matt

[caption id="attachment_2753" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Matt in 2004, with Cassie, age 1 day"][/caption]

And, of course, we remember what happens when we turn 20: Neil Young - Sugar Mountain

Book review: The Secret Life of Word

The Secret Life of Word  by Robert Delwood « XML Press

I've waited for a long time for a book such as this. It's very good. It delivers clear information about Word 2010 with writing that's fresh and human, as though you were being coached by a knowledgeable and helpful co-worker.

The premise is simple. Using the Office scripting interfaces, macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can get a lot of good work done quickly and more accurately.  Delwood guides the reader through a series of common tasks often encountered by writers. At each point, you get just enough information to know what you're doing and how to do it.

Most technical writers avoid Word because, well, it can be messy (particularly if you've inherited someone else's Word files) and because it's not great for longer documents (more than 50 or so pages). Development teams and managers like Word because it's always around and they can edit the files when they want to (leading to the first problem). Given that more and more tech writers are working on short-term contracts where they have make sense of files that have been picked at by a half dozen authors, this book can be valuable resource in cleaning up cruft and bringing order to the sources.

Delwood is a fine writer with a reassuring voice. He introduces topics such as building blocks, Smart Tags, and macros with just the right balance of background and practical tips. There are plenty of good code examples throughout the book. Rather than having to retype everything, however, you can pick up the examples at the publisher's web site.
There were plenty of pleasing touches throughout the book, such as the use of "Hello, Word" in examples. made more poignant as we mourn the recent passing of C's, Dennis Ritchie.

The section on Find and Replace begins with "It may seem odd to consider Find and Replace as an automation technique." The examples then go on to show how you can bring back some order to a document with carefully targeted automation. Word is notorious for generating bloated HTML output. This small procedure is part of a larger effort to clean up that bloat and give you a more usable file.

Sub RemoveHTMLTags()
ReplacementText "<p*>", "<p>"
ReplacementText "<span*>", vbNullString
ReplacementText "</span>", vbNullString
ReplacementText "<o:p>", vbNullString
ReplacementText "</o:p>", vbNullString
ReplacementText "Times New Roman", "Comic Sans MS"^[1]
End Sub
^[1]

Delwood brings out the quirks and inexplicable behaviors in Word. He explains how the changes from Word  95 to the 2007/2010 era really messed people up. The user interface changed, hiding familiar menu options in out-of-the-way ribbons. New elements such as building blocks confounded people who were used to dealing with simple templates. He noted that Smart Tags, which most of us missed when introduced in Office 2003, are an under-appreciated feature. He then goes on to explain why they are useful (treating selected words as more than just characters, but words with a special meaning) and how to use them.

Debugging scripts is hard. The book keeps it simple, providing basic guidance instead of trying to turn a tech writer into a software engineer.

There were a few nits that I noticed, but nothing that diminishes the utility of this fine book.

• The email address for comments is incorrect, likely the result of a duplicated paste that was overlooked by the editor.


• Most of the time, the examples are clear and easy to scan. In the section on Smart Tags, however, it gets confusing because the headings for each section and the example captions appear to run together after a while.

This is a very useful book. I've already applied some of the material to documents that I maintain.

---

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for the purposes of this review. I am not compensated for my reviews nor was my review influenced by the manner in which I received the book.

How do you like them apples?

We're nearing the end of the apple season here in central New England.

It used to last longer, until early November. Orchard owners would spray the apples with Alar (daminozide) to ensure consistent ripening; a related effect was that ripening was delayed. About 20 years ago, however, the EPA banned Alar as a suspected carcinogen. As a result, many varieties of Macintosh lineage began to ripen as much as a month earlier. The Macs, Macoun, Empire, and Cortland apples not only come in earlier but don't stay crisp as long, becoming something like Styrofoam soaked in apple juice.

According to the New England Apple Growers Association, about 40 varieties of apples are grown locally. The Red Apple Farm in Phillipston MA has a 101 varieties grafted onto the original Cortland tree.

You wouldn't know there were so many locally-grown types by going to a local market or even a farm stand. In a manner similar to bookstores and record shops, there are bins and bags of the standard apples and few, if any, of the others. Last week, while I was in Harvard Square, I bought a bag of Roxbury Russets at the farmer's market in front of the Charles Hotel. I've found no russet apples of any kind at any of the nearby markets.

All proclaimed they were selling locally-grown products and all had the same types of apples - the Mac-based breeds plus Granny Smiths and the sweet ones (everyone's new favorite Honey Crisp, Fuji, Braeburn, and red and green Delicious). It may seem like a lot, but the Mac clan taste about the same after a couple of days away from the tree and the sweet ones, while staying crisp, are too sweet.

I even tried a few out-of-the-way stores, such as the new Wegmans, Atkins Farm in Amherst, and Whole Foods in Hadley. Same selections.  But, each store offered sushi. No Northern Spy, but you can get sashimi.

For your safe listening pleasure

Remember back in the 90s when Second Lady Tipper Gore campaigned to have CDs labeled with warnings about explicit lyrics? The fear was that music would make people do what they wouldn't otherwise do. Frank Zappa testified against such, saying, "I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?"

Well, here we go again with the need for warnings. This time, though, it's for music that might put you to sleep. A UK group, Marconi Union, has produced what's been described as most relaxing song ever'.

Studies found Weightless was 11 per cent more relaxing than any other song and even made many of the women 'drowsy' in the lab.
via Most relaxing song made by UK band Boffins | Mail Online

We've been cautioned not to listen the tune while driving or walking or anyplace where gravity or machinery could harm us.

No word on what had been the previously most relaxing song.

If you're in a safe place, you can listen to the music here.

If you're really in a mood to live dangerously, you could also try to listen to the Funniest Joke in The World.

Stop and Shop becomes more about stop

While the excitement around  Wegmans in Northborogh is reaching orgasmic levels, (one early visitor remarked “I lived in Ithaca for five years and fell in love with Wegmans."), our local mainstay, Stop & Shop is trying to be one of the cool kids. They've got an app.

The app is along the lines of the Scan It reader that you see when you enter the store, except slower and less convenient.

Download the app to your phone. Note that there's no QR code that would let you load the app directly from the display board. Also, you can't use the WiFi in the store until you have the app installed. So, if you can get a phone signal when standing near the deli, you can download the app.

Scan your Stop & Shop card which registers your app and lets you connect to the WiFi so it can load all the crazy deals, like $.25 off of dozen eggs.

Finally, go buy stuff, meaning that, after you've made your choice, you stand in the aisle and scan your purchases using your phone. Click. Put the thing in your bag. Click. Put the thing in your bag. And so on.

When you get to the checkout, hold the phone up to the card by the register, scan it with the app, and your order is loaded into the register. Tell the big screen that you are ready to finish and pay with your credit card. Click the small screen to tell it again that you want to use your credit card, sign illegibly in the little window, wait until they print coupons for deodorant and mouthwash (because somehow they know that you need those hygiene items, even if you've didn't buy those products this time), and leave with your food and with your, and I'm not making this up, plastic case so you can carry your Pop-Tarts^® in safety.

It's great to be an American, isn't it?

Notes on attention

It's generally assumed that we have shorter attention spans these days. The Internet and/or cellphones are often blamed. A generation ago, we blamed television and it's quick cuts and sensationalist themes. (I haven't timed things recently, but the old guidelines used to call for some video change every 10 seconds or less.)
Researchers have produced some interesting, but inconclusive data. This past Sunday's New York Times book review included reviews of recent titles that give us new literature on brain science. We know that something new is going on, but the specifics of each situation often overwhelm any general theories.
For the record, I started writing this at 11 this morning. I looked up the NYT link, read a couple of articles while doing so, met with three people from my WISE course for an hour and change, wrote a half sentence, went about the rest of the day, tried writing while watching tv, and, finally, after reading the first page of a Ken Auletta piece in The New Yorker, turned off the tv sound during some ads, and finished this post.
I could blame the Internet or any of the gadgets that control the pipes, but I read and wrote like this 50 years ago. Some of us showed up pre-wired, waiting for this stuff and these times.

If you can read this post, the move was successful

I've initiated the process of moving my blog to a new WordPress site. If all went all well, you should receive this message and need do nothing else. If all went somewhat well, I may need to send you a request to sign up for a new email service.

Notes from The Media and Politics Frontier

As mentioned earlier, I am attending (gate-crashing)  a program on politics and the media at the 2011 25th Anniversary Schedule - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (As I write at table in the hal, Clay Shirky is pacing the hall, talking to himself, getting ready for his lunchtime speech.)

Xeni Jardin interviewed Miles O'Brien on science in the media. O'Brien, formerly of CNN until they jettisoned their science department, talked about the difficulty that we as a nation have in teaching about science. The mainstream media, fulfilling that circle, limits its science coverage because it seems that people aren't interested. There was a lot more about a lot more. You can find the recorded sessions at Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy - Home Page

The audience discussion came around to several themes:

• I'm an old-school journalist and I don't understand what you're talking about.


• What about quality?


• Where are the editors?


• Where are the authorities?

I offered a few themes that I've used before:

• The web offers a large-scale version of what we would otherwise call peer review. Instead of a dozen reviewers taking a month to read an article, you can get 100s of people giving you feedback in minutes. The scale is fast and large and solid.


• This is an evolving model that's only a few years old. It wasn't designed as such; we're building as we go along. As a result, we can't expect the level of maturity or completeness that traditional news or science publication companies have had (and have decimated).


• The stuff is personal and people react as such. When there was news about prostate screen or mammograms, people read the reports and reacted as if their lives depended on it. Science becomes real.

More later.

 

Notes from Harvard Square

The ride in to the seat of all Western knowledge took less than an hour on this foggy Friday. I left the house at 5:40, parked, and was greeted by a bearded doorman at Peet's Coffee by 6:45. Even though it's a mild morning, the doorman has made his transition to a winter jacket. The fur-lining of the hood on his jacket is indistinguishable from his wild white beard. Man Becomes Coat, should be the headline in the morning Metro.

It should be busier here. Just a half dozen folks reading their papers.

Peet's offers the oddly-flavored coffees, but refrains from promoting them too much. There's a brightly-lit Dunkin' Donuts in the same building as the parking garage. They are promoting some pumpkin abomination. I miss the Coffee Connection with their single-origin coffees. I miss lots of stuff. We go on.

I'm here to attend a symposium on  The Media and Politics Frontier at the Shorenstein Center. I have no affiliation with the center and am here pretty much as a groupie. I'll have notes about the forum here and on Twitter and Google+.

Our bearded doorman has moved into the small park in front of the door where he can have a smoke. The pigeons give him little attention.

RoasterBoy on the move

I am in the process of migrating this blog to WordPress. You can find out more here: RoasterBoy on the move « Hakkarainen Clipping Service.
These links  and other services will continue to work for quite a while. When I get the email and RSS feeds set up, all new content will go onto the new site. My goal is that current readers should have to do anything to receive the blog posts at the new site. I'll let you know directly if I learn otherwise.
Thanks so much for your interest and support.

The daily news of the future

Giving us a chance to say as much as we want about nothing.

Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com -

Book Review: Social Media for Lawyers

Professionals such as attorneys and physicians are using social media to establish their professional reputations, promote discussion of important topics, and, yes, build their practices. Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier offers practical tips for attorneys who are new to the idea of using social media such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a part of their marketing and outreach. The book walks you through the setup of these services and suggests some best practices for using social media specifically and marketing in general. The book concludes with the expected notes of caution regarding ethics. You can see the table of contents here (PDF).
The book is useful, but could be a lot more so. The biggest problem, by far, is the lack of an online resource to help the reader with the number of lengthy links used in the book.

The book includes a number of sidebar notes. The trouble is that they're called Factoids. Norman Mailer coined the phrase to describe "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." (via Online Etymology Dictionary).
At $50, the book is too expensive for what it offers. A bit of web research and perhaps even a copy of Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies would be more useful and less expensive.

G'bye, delicious

One of my maxims based on 30 years of high tech:

All software will break your heart.

I've used the public bookmarking service delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us) more than six years, nearly a lifetime for a web service. I've relied on it to park items of interest, share topics with friends and strangers, and  build blog posts from the accumulated links. I currently have more than 9500 bookmarks stored there. You can see them on my links page.
Yahoo bought delicious from its founder in late 2005 and did very little to help or hurt it. Late last year, Yahoo signaled that it was going to shut down delicious, prompting a bit of panic. Along with many thousands of other bookmarkers, I opened an account with pinboard.in. They had some fun dealing with the sudden influx of interest, but they survived: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog). Pinboard later got through an unfriendly visit from the FBI: FAQ about the recent FBI raid (Pinboard Blog).
Pinboard costs a few buck; delicious is free.
I was in the habit, though, of using delicious. I had browser extensions, scripts that put selected links into selected blog posts, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't feel like replacing. I was lulled into this inertia by delicious's continued and unchanged presence.
In the spring, a couple of guys who'd been at YouTube formed a company called AVOS and bought delicious for pretty much couch changed. They worked behind the scenes through the summer and launched the new site in late September: A New Flavor…Still Delicious | AVOS.
The reaction to the new web service was consistent: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet.
The new service has broken too many things that used to work on their way to adding eye candy that almost no  one wants or needs.
I've been patient, giving them time to listen to their customers and respond.  They've tried, but I fear that they've gone too far down the wrong path to come back and fix what they left behind, the stuff that made delicious really useful.
Today, though, I tried to do some real work with my bookmarks and couldn't.
delicious was a pickup truck that was good for real work. Now, it isn't. I don't know what it is, but it isn't what I need.
I'll be re-migrating my stuff to Pinboard over the next few weeks. Most of you won't notice or care, but a few might see a few changes. I'll keep my delicious account, but won't be adding to it.
In the 90s, there was a nifty product called Calendar Creator. It helped you build family calendars with birthdays and other recurring events of note. I don't remember if it was version 2 or 3, but one release broke everything. They tried to make it do more and wound up doing less. I bought the new version, tried it once, and never used it again.
Since then, I've seen countless products bloat themselves out of existence. Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, has added a bunch of eye candy that prevents it from running on older, slower, less powerful systems.  Facebook may be on that track as it keeps adding features that make it more difficult to use.
I like new stuff, particularly in technology. I'll try lots of products in their earliest stages and stick with them if they show promise.
When I find utilitarian products, however, I don't need improvement. I go to the store, point to my shoes and say, "I want these shoes, but new." I've worn button-down shirts for close to 50 years. (No, not the same ones, although not for a lack of trying.) My pillows are older than I am.
Google has it right. The basic design of their home page has changed very little over the years. They've added powerful features, but mostly hidden from view. When they've tried fancy stuff (Wave, Buzz), they failed and quickly dropped the products. They know how to add changes without breaking their core product.
delicious didn't do that. It broke what they did well and gave us new stuff that we neither wanted nor needed.

When blog becomes onomatopoeic

It appears that the FeedBlitz, the service that delivers email to readers of this journal, has sent some messages that include links to nowhere. (You click on the link and an empty window opens up.) This appears to be a transitory problem that FeedBlitz claims is fixed. I'll continue to monitor it. If you see any further odd mailings, please let me know directly.
Thanks for reading.

When blog becomes onomatopoeic

It appears that the FeedBlitz, the service that delivers email to readers of this journal, has sent some messages that include links to nowhere. (You click on the link and an empty window opens up.) This appears to be a transitory problem that FeedBlitz claims is fixed. I'll continue to monitor it. If you see any further odd mailings, please let me know directly.
Thanks for reading.

Happy Birthday, Lily

Happy 12th