When I first got a pager, I was worried that I would not be able to feel it vibrate through my clothing, skin, and multiple layers of fat. Still, I set it to vibrate mode when I went to the movies or to a show. The first time I got a page during a movie, I hit my head -- on the ceiling.
After that, I left it in silent mode, and came to the realization that anyone who kept their pager set to audibly beep when paged was either unaware of the effectiveness of the vibrating alert or self-centered.
Those who have their pagers set with fancy squiggly tunes, especially, are guilty of the latter. There is no reason, generally, for anyone but you to know that you have received a page, other than to look important. The truly confident will discreetly check their pager when it goes off, or even ignore it until an opportunity to quietly acknowledge the page presents itself.
To use the audible alert interrupts others, as if your page was more important than anything they might be doing. It also gives the illusion that you are more important than you are, that you might be someone who receives significant pages.
It seems that none of the really good web pages have counters on them. I think that the best web designers -- the true artists -- don't care how many people visit their sites. They don't make them because they want people to see them, they do it because they have to. Just as a true painter paints without caring if anyone ever buys any of his paintings, and a real musician plays even if no one comes to hear.
When I first started designing web pages, I included counters to see how many people came to read what I had to say. But, I found myself checking them less and less frequently, not really caring how fast they incremented. Now I no longer bother.
Even these pages of opinions, I find, are not here so much for your benefit, as they are for mine. If you, gentle reader, should learn something here, or are entertained by my sparkling wit, then all the better, but that is not the goal. The real raison d'etre for these web pages is my own catharsis. This is how I express myself.
People ask me if I don't worry about computers and the Internet eliminating the need for people to leave their homes and interact with real people. My answer is no, I don't worry about that. I look forward to it.
But, you stammer, won't we become a planet of couch potatoes, turning into giant Jabba-the-Hut creatures, unable to move, uninterested in anything other than ordering our next cyber-pizza?
No, I'm not. I look forward to computers and the Internet eliminating the need for people to leave their homes -- freeing up time for people to want to go out. If you can avoid the hour at the post office, that means an additional hour you can spend at the pub, or the pool hall, or whereever you congregate with your friends and loved ones.
For some, technology in and of itself is interesting. To most, hoever, there must be real financial, temporal, of functional benefit to any given technology in order to justify the cost (financial and temporal) of implementing the technology.
Even I have been known, on rare occasions to use a pen and paper.
Ni-Cad batteries have a memory problem. Everyone knows it. Better to deal with it than to ignore it. But electronics manufacturers are doing just that. What are they doing wrong?
Take my laptop, for example. I often take it to a client site, plug it in, and use it all day, charging the battery. Then, I pack it up, take it home, plug it in, and start using it again. The problem is that the battery is being charged even though it has not been fully discharged.
I have no control over the charging function, and so I must find an alternate solution. I can take the battery out, removing the problem, but this is annoying when I want to use the laptop on the bus, or when working at a client site with unreliable power.
I can also not plug it in until the battery dies, but if I'm working, this is a major annoyance, and may cause data loss. The last option I've been able to come up with is to just live with the memory effect. This is what I've been doing, and I don't like it.
The only product I have seen that addresses the problem is my Canon BJ10e portable printer. It has a switch that controls whether or not the battery is charged when the printer is plugged in.
This applies to all kinds of equipment, such as cellular phones, portable televisions, and radios. This concept could even be taken one step further, with devices such as portable televisions being sold with rechargeable battery packs that could be recharged from a household or automobile power outlet, but only if needed.
Of course, the battery pack should be removeable, with ordinary dry cell batteries able to supply the necessary power in an emergency.
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