Google Maps is great for its pretty satellite pictures, but for finding you way from one place to another it sucks. Part of my confusion in getting to my customer site in Boston Monday was due to using Google Maps over Mapquest. I’ll never make that mistake again!

This morning I decided to see how to get from Raleigh to Knoxville. One would think that I-40 would be the way to go, but then one would be wrong. Google Maps gives you a scenic, meandering trip through Virginia before heading southwest towards Knoxville.

Attention, Google: the West has long been settled! There’s no need to detour around the Appalachian Mountains. Believe it or not, there are now roads< which go through them. You no longer need pack mules or to go it on foot to go west. Lewis and Clark have done all the dirty work for you, hundreds of years ago.

Only Lewis and Clark did a far better job.

As I blogged about earlier, the Commonwealth Games were recently held in Melbourne. Unfortunately, the Games were scheduled right when Australia was due to switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. Anticipating the trouble this would cause for athletes and spectators, some asshats in Australian government decided to delay the switch to Standard Time by a week. As you can imagine, this ill-conceived decision has caused no shortage of confusion. Sure, there was no trouble getting people to the Games, but now no one really knows what time it is.

I got bitten by this yesterday morning. My hotel phone is a combination phone/clock radio. I asked the hotel staff to fix the phone as there was a short in the line which caused static. The maintenance guy dutifully came by and fixed things, namely by completely replacing the clock/phone. The only problem is that he set the time to be an hour earlier than it was (at least, what I think it was. Who knows?). Thus, I awoke an hour later than expected and was an hour late getting to the trade show.

I updated the clock to match the time posted on an Australian government website and raced out to the show. I was grumbling about the clock thing all day until I woke this morning. Though my clock said 6 AM, the radio announcer kept saying 5 AM.

Houston, we have a problem. (Houston, by the way, is currently observing CST.)

Great! Either the announcer or the clock is wrong. My laptop’s time is still in EST, so that’s no help. I turned on the TV to see what the Australian TV networks were saying. Sure enough, they said it was 6 AM, too. The radio guy was wrong.

I decided to cut the hotel maintenance guy some slack. In this crazy environment no one can possibly agree on the time!

All this trouble doesn’t even begin to address the problems with all of our modern society’s computers, several of which were stuck in one time or another. Microsoft released a patch to tell Windows servers to follow the new delayed switch rule, but the big drawback is the need to remove the patch before next year. How much you want to bet that at least fifty percent of computer owners forget to do that?

Perhaps this is a reminder from the Universe that Time is not real. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that I may be late for breakfast now.

Or not.

Why is it now 2006 and still you have to jump into your car to find if the local store has something in stock? Why can’t you go to the store’s website, enter your ZIP code, and have it show you whether something’s on the shelf or not? Wasn’t this supposed to be the promise of the commercial Web? For instance, Lowe’s Home Improvement does it right while Barnes and Noble doesn’t have a clue.

If you’re a local merchant and I visit your site, I want know if what I want to buy is available now. I don’t want to drive all the way to your store only to discover the product I want is out of stock or only available on the web. Get with it, folks! The web has been around for, what, 16 years now? This isn’t new stuff here. Are your inventory systems so inaccurate that you don’t know what’s in stock, or is there some other reason you don’t want to make this public?

Your website is another storefront. I want to look at your shelves just like I do in your brick-and-mortar store. I do not want to have to pick up the phone and spend ten minutes on hold while some lackey checks the shelf for me. Let me do it myself! It’s easier on both of us.

Until brick-and-mortar stores figure this out, places like Amazon.com will keep eating their market share. At least you can avoid a trip.

A study by Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with those wacky folks at the FAA, has indicated that the use of mobile phones can pose dangers to critical equipment on aircraft. Dr. Bill Strauss of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, says his study indicates the interference from these devices is higher than expected.

“These devices can disrupt normal operation of key cockpit instruments, especially Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, which are increasingly vital for safe landings,” Strauss said.

Until the study’s results appear in the IEEE’s Proceedings, we’ll just have to wonder about a few things:

• How could they know the aircraft’s GPS receiver was affected if they were monitoring it only from a receiver in a carry-on bag?
• Did they have an independent method of determining their position like LORAN?
• Were the researchers in constant contact with the pilots?
• Are the pilots trained in GPS technology to the point they can recognize faulty behavior?
• How does one measure from an overhead bin the effect of a cabin transmitter on electronics in the cockpit?

This sounds like a sham to me. The press release is vague with details. Nowhere does the press release specifically state that cellphones were observed to affect aircraft systems. It simply states that the risk is “greater than expected.”

Show me where a properly functioning mobile phone, transmitting on the 900 MHz or 1900 MHz bands at a puny 600mW at its strongest, affected the reception of a 1575 MHz GPS signal coming in from an external aircraft antenna. Show me! Any harmonics at 1575 Mhz must be significantly weaker than the primary signal. That’s assuming such a phone is shoddy enough to cause harmonics, which is a big if since undoubtedly it never would have gotten FCC approval.

How can a device be safe to hold right next to your brain and at the same time dangerous enough to endanger an aircraft? How does this make sense?!?

It’s either one or the other, folks. Somebody’s lying to us.

Is it just me or is this protest particularly weak? I mean, here are some Indonesian kids attacking the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta and all they can find are rubber traffic cones?

Really, now, is that any way to riot? America’s most timid college students can mix it up better than these kids. Heck, even geeks in engineering school could throw down better.

If traffic cones are now weapons of mass destruction, what’s next? Should orange barrels be outlawed? How about those portable flashing road signs? Al-Qaida could send terrorist messages or something.

Come to think of it, I’ve never really trusted the guy holding the stop sign at road construction sites. While he looks bored out of his mind, I bet he’s really planning an embassy attack!

Where’s the Department of Transportation … er, the Department of Homeland Security when we need it?

I was a little groggy when I waited in line for breakfast at the Orange County Airport’s McDonald’s. I noticed the cash registers at Mickey D’s have become far more sophisticated than they used to be; indeed, they are more or less commodity PCs. The only thing different is there is no mouse.

I began thinking about how a cashier would fare having to line up and push a mouse around the screen every time she entered orders. It would take twice as long to take an order, at least! Computer mice aren’t as easy to use from a standing position as they are from a seated one (in my opinion, anyway).

This brings me further into my longstanding issues with a lot of computer interfaces. For all the marketing that went into them, the mouse-and-menu model is spectacularly clumsy. There is little intuitive in steering a mouse around to get what you want. A substantial amount of movement and thought must go into translating those hand movements into a place on the screen.

That’s when I realized how efficient touch screens are. Tablet PCs and PDAs use touch screens. Most use them to an advantage, though not all. My Sharp Zaurus has a brain-dead, menu-driven interface which likely played a role in killing it as a product. Good touch screen interfaces eliminate the translation step of hand movements-equate-to-pointer. The user might not be consciously aware of this mouse-work, but it nevertheless is there, potentially adding stress to her work.

There is little thought wasted in poking a button on a screen to make something happen. Over eons humans have learned that poking something is a good way to provoke a reaction. Interfaces designed to take advantage of this let users get right to the point (no pun intended). Such users spend their time doing their work rather than fighting a mouse.

To summarize: The computer mouse beats typing, but still isn’t as easy as a touch-screen. Interfaces overflowing with menus are bad. Let out the caveman in your users by making your interface caveman easy.

While I’m in a grouchy mood, let me unload on NASCAR driver Greg Biffle. As if NASCAR drivers didn’t waste enough gas making endless left turns, Biffle has to take it further. When his doggies had an appointment with the NCSU Vet School, he packed them into his helicopter rather than drive to Raleigh from Mooresville (total Mapquest drive time: two hours, 40 minutes. Faster if you’re a NASCAR driver).

Now I know how attached people can get to their pets. I’d go out of my way to help my pets if they needed immediate medical attention. But Biffle’s dogs weren’t in urgent need of attention: they were going to a routine exam! Was it really necessary to get all Rambo and stuff? Why didn’t Biffle rappel down to the vet school roof while he was at it?

Heck, I’d love flying in a helicopter, too, but I wouldn’t fly it to the grocery store. This is just a bit too much.

I just watched the video of his Marcus Vick’s cheap shot during the Louisville game. Vick is a punk and an embarassment to college sports and Virginia Tech in particular.

Let’s see if Tech does anything about it.

On checking out CentOS‘s website, I found a legal notice sent to them by the attorneys of a Local Linux Distribution Company, known here by the code name “Green Chapeau.” The part that caught my eye is this:

Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client’s web site without permission.

I understand how important it is to protect trademarks, but requiring permission for people to link to your website? Excuse me? And this company claims to be an “open source” software company?
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