Owens Corning Basement System Thoughts Part I

08/12/03

Well the basement is finished...sort of.

To recap, my wife and I bought a new house this year. We had finished the basement in the old house. And by we, I mean we contracted it out. That went perfectly smoothly. It didn't cost too much and it was a fire and forget operation. They took care of everything except carpeting which we went with Home Depot who installed the carpet and off we went.

The downside of the old basement was that we went with dry wall. This meant that it took months to do and there was dry wall dust everywhere. I'm about as unhandy as you can get so this meant that we had contractors in the house for nearly 3 months. It all worked out but it was somewhat painful during the actual work. But we were very happy with the result.

So this time when we went to do our basement we decided to go with the Owens Corning Basement System. Instead of drywall, it's a fabric type material on top of insulation. It's quite nice but it's much more expensive (nearly twice as much). The only material downside on it is that unlike drywall, it's hard to build onto it (you can't build a bar into it for instance).

But the nice part of the Owens Corning Basement System is that the whole job only took 2 weeks total (except for the carpet).  This is for a 1,300 or so square foot finished area so that's pretty quick. And no dust.

Unfortunately, it's not been a fire and forget operation like our old house's basement. That's because Owens Corning licenses out to contractors in each state and they seem to have adopted some fairly shady business tactics that as I write this make me inclined to recommend others not to use them (I'll be writing a second article to see how things turn out). First, they use the standard high pressure sales tactic of trying to make you sign a contract the night the sales guy is in. Being in business, I don't actually have a problem with this because you can always cancel later.  However, while we was here, he made lots of promises such as “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything.”

While the sales guy was here, I was on the net checking to see what other people said. I couldn't find very much customer reviews. Of course, that means potential customers doing a search for customer reviews are likely to come across this. Which makes the installing company's attitude that much more ridiculous.

We were quite clear with the sales guy, that this project was going to cost us about twice as much as our first basement so we definitely wanted this to be a fire and forget thing. Other than the carpeting, they would take care of everything. And the reason he recommended us not going with them on carpeting is because we wanted padding under our carpet (makes a big difference). But as I typically am, I was very candid: I'm not a handy guy. I pay you the money you finish the basement completely -- walls, ceiling, lights, electrical, phone, cable, doors, etc. To which he responded "Absolutely!"

And this makes intuitive sense. The Owens Corning Basement System is targeted especially for people who are fairly well off and just don't want to have to mess with this stuff themselves.  Because we paid a premium we expected pretty good service.

About mid way through, we were informed that we were expected to contract out ourselves or call the cable company and the phone company to actually install the phone and cable lines. Huh? We didn't have to do that in our old basement and that would have been a significant cost for us not to mention a headache to have to go and take care of. It also violated our understanding -- "We pay you mucho bucks, you take care of everything but the padded carpet." They begrudgingly took care of that. But it took quite a bit of pushing on our part to get that done and we had leverage then - we didn't have to pay until it the installation was complete.

The quality of the installation was very good. But as soon as the carpet was installed (which was put in very well) we learned that the doors were not able to handle a padded carpet. This is despite the fact that we made very clear, at the very start that we were going to get padded carpet. The proof of which is that Home Depot was who the sales guy recommended because we said we wanted padded carpet.

Only 2 of the doors were not able to fit in because of the padded carpet. For the installing company, fixing this is trivial. For us, it means finding another contractor to come in and do it (the doors are hollow so I'm not going to mess with them, one mess up and they're ruined) which mean's it'll be expensive.  So far, the installing company, J&E, has dragged its feet on fixing this. Which I find very aggravating because 1) We told them up front we were going to do padded carpet, 2) We paid a premium for this project, we expect at least equal service to what we've received from past contractors.  Our whole house was built by contractors, same for our old house and we've never had to deal with a company yet that's been this petty about this kind of thing.  One of the sets of doors goes to our furnace room which is loud and somewhere we don't want the 2 year old to wander into which keeps us from fully using the basement until it's fixed.

At this point, I am on the fence as to whether I should have gone with a traditional dry-wall contractor or not. I wouldn't be so ticked off if I had paid half as much and had to put out a few hundred dollars for something like this.  But this project cost over $35,000 to complete.  As anyone reading this can conclude, that's a serious premium. But one I was willing to pay for a hassle free, quick, high quality basement.  And at this point, it's starting to become a significant hassle for us. But more than that, I'm starting to feel like we're dealing with an unscrupulous company.

That's something to consider -- for us, it was just a couple of doors. This should be a no brainer on their part to fix. It's clearly their responsibility. But imagine if something more significant had gone wrong. Anyone who's ever had a home improvement done knows how many serious things can go wrong.  If they're unwilling to come back and fix something as trivial as doors, then I can't imagine how they'd be on anything more significant.  That is something anyone reading this should consider -- as soon as they have your money, are they going to make good on their promises still? Are they going to stand by their service? So far, the answer is no.

Which leads me to wonder how much Owens Corning is looking at who they license to install this.  People like me are their target market. But people like me are typically very busy and don't have time to deal with piddly nonsense like this. Thank goodness for us that it's just doors and not something more serious. Because when people pay twice as much for a service, they tend to have high expectations for that service. In this case, service that was equal to the service we received from our other contractors (like on our basement in our old house).

The Owens Corning Basement system is a solid product, but right now, I can't say it's provided by solid companies based on my experiences. I'll let you know how things turn out.

The World of Skinning 2003

08/08/03

I'm working on this year's edition of the Skinning Primer. http://www.joeuser.com/writings/skinprimer.html.  There are millions of people each year who discover that it's cool and fun to be able to customize Windows. There are lots of corporations who find this useful too. So I try to write a guide that covers it all.

But it's tough since to do any sort of reasonable job at it I have to cover "the competition". I try to do so in the primer. But inevitably, when it comes out you'll have the usual set of complainers arguing that it's biased.  Of course it's biased, I work for a skinning company so I know our stuff the most. But no one else ever bothers to write one of these and it's really needed. Besides, it is reasonably objective, it just has more details on our stuff since I know it the best.

This year we're really doing some neat stuff though. The new version of SkinStudio not only can make Windows Media Player skins but has a new "universal" skinning format. The idea is that eventually people will be able to make a single master skin and then export it to various skinning formats. We plan to  open it up so that anyone can write a converter for their favorite program. This way, "smaller" programs will get attention too. Our view is the age old "A rising tide lifts all boats."  Of course, to the cynic, we're just trying to "dominate" the skinning formats but that crowd will never be satisfied.

What really has me excited is Longhorn. There is a ton of really cool stuff that's going to be in it. From a customization point of view, the big news is the new compositing engine. This will let us do all kinds of things with hardware assist.  That will be really cool. Of course, that's a ways off.

Small Form Factor PCs

08/08/03

I've been doing research into small form factor PCs. The best ones I've found so far seem to be from Shuttle. http://www.shuttle.com. The only problem is the noise. I don't think these guys realize just yet that noise matters.  The small form factor machines from Dell are extremely quiet. Unfortunately, they come with that awful Intel based video chipset which is useless for games or home entertainment.  What's needed is a small form factor machine that's as quiet as the Dell but has a built in ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro or something.

Good & Bad Karma in Net Communities

08/06/03

“Can't we just get along?"

If you hang out in a net community long enough, eventually you will have those who just don’t like you. The technical term I use for them are detractors and they fall into 3 categories:

• Passive detractors. These are people who, if exposed to something you write, will tend to criticize it, even “unfairly.”
• Active detractors. These are people who will go out of their way to “stalk”  you on a particular site or news group to flame you.
• Motivated detractors. These are people who dislike you so much that they are actually willing to put in effort to do you harm. They’re the guy who will contact your ISP, start a home page dedicated to attacking you, create posts and threads about you.

No matter how nice you are, no matter how pleasant you are, you will eventually have detractors if you hang out long enough. Each time you do something publicly, you are putting out what we’ll call “Karma”.  Everything you do generates both good and bad karma.

Good karma makes people like you. Bad karma makes people not like you. But everything will generate both. Even a simple “Hi everyone!” post in a thread will generate some bad karma. Why? Because there is always someone, somewhere that is going to be offended by something you write no matter how innocuous. Some people don’t like happy people for instance. Some people get mad at “noise” being posted in a thread.

The goal isn’t to eliminate bad karma. The only way to do that is to not participate. The goal is to try to control how much you put out.

Understanding communities

I’ve been involved in on-line communities for 17 years. And I mean involved as in daily postings via modem onto bulletin boards and such.  I started out on BBSes back when I was 15 years old in 1986 (300 baud modems). I have always enjoyed interacting with people around the world.

At the same time, I’ve always held strong opinions and because of constant activity for 17 years, my typing speed has slowly increased to the point that I now type 130 words per minute if I am in a hurry.

As a result, I’ve gotten my share of detractors. No one has created a website dedicated to flaming me or anything (yet) but I’ve come to understand what patterns of behavior generate detractors fastest.

Every net community has 5 basic types. (here is a link to a site that lists lots of different categories of net users but they boil down to these 5 really: http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html). My type is here: http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame21.html (except I know why I get loathed on occasion! J ).

1)      The Contributor. This is the most common type of person participating in a community. They are a friendly, well adjusted people who see participating in an on-line community as an extension of their social life. Good karma and bad karma don’t affect them that much. Abrasiveness and other factors tend to slide off them pretty well.

2)      The Mover. The mover is the type of person who wants to help shape the course of events. They’re a leader of sorts but more to the point, they work to organize the community to do various things. These activities make them a natural target.

3)      The Wannabe. The wannabe might as well be called the “Anti-Mover”. They don’t really want to put in the work to be a mover but they want the respect and admiration that movers get. Therefore, they try to tear down their opponents for moral lapses (real or imagined). Those who oppose them aren’t just wrong, they’re evil.

4)      The Critic. This is the person who tends to want to criticize things or “Suggest” things all the time. They’re not trolls because they honestly want to “help” the community.

5)      The Troll.  This is a pretty universally understood term. These are the guys who see other people as part of a video game. They subconsciously dehumanize their targets. Their goal is to generate enjoyment for themselves at the expense of others.

Most people exhibit multiple traits at different times. You mix these primary colors to together and you get the couple dozen types found on the flame warriors page.

Understanding Karma

So you’ve been posting on a news group or web forum for 2 years. You’ve never flamed anyone.  You see a “flamewar” going on and you go on and try to play the roll of diplomat only to get flamed for “no good reason”. What happened? You tell yourself that it’s like interfering with two wild dogs, don’t get in the middle. But that’s not really the cause.

As mentioned in the introduction, everytime you post you generate karma. Both good and bad. And it builds up over time with other people. The problem with net communities is that they provide an incomplete picture of a person. As a result, as bad karma builds up, people will tend to ascribe to you personality traits that may have nothing to do with what you’re like as a person.

So the person who tries to peacefully resolve a dispute may get flamed because he (usually a she actually) is thought of by the regulars as being “aloof” or “holier than thou”. In this example, it might be because those who get involved in trying to resolve a net dispute may in fact come across as trying to force their belief system on others. Some people, after all, like to debate.

But let’s go with some practical data.

When you post you can break down what you write in terms of these factors that can generate bad karma:

• Abrasiveness. How rude do your writings come across to others?

• Wordy. People who write long posts tend to generate more bad karma because it subconsciously makes people think that you believe your posts are so important that they should be willing to invest significant time to read what you write.

• Special Treatment . Does your post flaunt in some way special privilidges in people’s faces? For instance, in a post I made recently on WC, my posting editor is an HTML editor. I pasted my last post right from MS Word. This had the unintentional effect of having my font larger than others. Most users only get to put in text. So I was “flaunting” my special priviledges. This will generate bad karma, especially when used frivolously. Or maybe you’re a moderator on a website. Don’t make threats or remind people that you’re a moderator unless you have to.

• Double Standards . Lots of people have a standard of behavior for themselves and one for other people. That standard is usually pretty lax on themselves and very strict on others. This can irritate people quite quickly.

• Arrogance. Do your posts imply that you are more knowledgeable than others? Do you treat those who disagree with you as being ignorant, unenlightened, or unable to comprehend your “wisdom”?

• Noise. Do your posts tend to take a thread off topic or add nothing constructive? Females tend to fall into this a lot. In the middle of a thread discussing the Presidential Race, a female is much more apt to jump in and say “Hi Bobby! How you been?”

• Do you post things on topics that you financially benefit from? Someone who sells cell phone accessories hanging out talking in a cell phone accessory forum might be quite knowledgeable but it will still generate hostility from some people (or people who are involved in making customization software for a living participating in customization forums).

• Judgmental. Do you tend to make judgments on things that you really don’t have all the information on or don’t really know what you’re talking about?

• Melodramatic. Do your posts tend to overstate the importance of the topic? Or spend a lot of time talking about how some relatively insignificant thing was the end of the world? Do you make “Goodbye” posts on websites when something on a website has offended you? Basically, are you posting to get attention or are you posting to interact with others?

In the cold hard statistical world, you can almost imagine having points assigned to each of these characteristics. Each time you post, you can almost imagine a -1 karma simply for doing anything at all and then various larger negative points if your post contains any of the above.

Repeat the cycle enough times (i.e. be active in a community) and voila, eventually a detractor is born.

And there is another factor that compounds the situation. Ideology.  Most users don’t have a hard ideology. But some people are really set off by certain things.

For instance, talk about commercial software in an open source area and the ideology multiplier really takes off. Money is often a real ideology multiplier. Some people just hate the idea of other people making money. This is particularly true of Europeans for some reason (statistically speaking, the bulk of my active detractors have, for whatever reason, been European over the years). 

But there are plenty of other ideologies. Religion. Politics. Operating Systems. Child Care. Etc.

Controlling Bad Karma

I say controlling because sometimes you just can’t avoid producing bad karma.  Or maybe you simply make the judgment that you would rather produce some bad karma than not participate.

For instance, my public activity, as myself, on our websites produces not just negative karma but probably costs sales. But I’ve made the personal decision that I would rather participate, as myself, than use an alias and lose a few customers and generate a few detractors than to hide behind an alias.  Same thing on other websites. I love talking about and making desktop enhancements and PC games so much I made those two things my career. So whenever I talk about these things on-line, I’m creating higher than average negative karma because I indirectly benefit from the topics at hand.

The same goes for other traits. Are you opinionated? I sure am. And being opinionated means you’ll generate some bad karma since you’ll get zinged for some amounts of arrogance and other traits.

The goal isn’t to eliminate, if you know what things to look for, and how to avoid offending someone’s ideology if you can, then you can keep the amount of detractors to a level you can live with.

The more negative karma your posts generate, the more important it is that you have an idea how much they do generate and who is your audience. I.e. you don’t want to turn detractors into active or motivated detractors if possible.

With these things in mind, hopefully you will find having a long term presence in a net community to be enjoyable and rewarding. I know I have. I’ve learned a lot, mostly the hard way, over the years about this kind of thing.  Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.

The Darkside of Net Communities

08/05/03

I'm still working on an aticle about how to survive on internet communities long term. Tweaking here and there. It rambles a bit right now. Basically it describes the dark side of net communities. Many people make a lot of mistakes early on in their net lives that are hard to overcome later on. I know I've made plenty and I've been participating on-line since 1985 when I was part of a network of Commodore 64 based BBSes.

My outline basically goes like this:

Identify net personality types. Once you get an idea of the kind of person you're dealing with you can decide the best way of interacting with them.

On the Internet, facts have less power than strength in numbers. In other words, being "right" isn't even usually enough to win a debate.

Remember that every post or article you write comes with both positive and negative karma attached. Even a post that is completely friendly will have some amount of negative karma. This is nothing to worry about, but to be aware of. Post enough and eventually you will hvae detractors. Same goes for skins, themes, etc. The more you do, the more likely you'll have a detractor.

There are passive detractors, active detractors, and motivated detractors. Knowing the difference is key. I've learned the hardway that ignoring the types leads to distress.

One motivated detractor can do great harm. So thing to try to avoid is to turn a detractor into a motivated detractor.  Sometimes this is impossible.

A lie said enough times becomes perceived truth.

Often showing that you're right does more damage to your perception than sucking down a low blow.

The most problematic net type is the wannabe. The wannabe is the one who feels that those who are in "authority" are unworthy and that they themselves should wield supreme authority based purely on their intrinsic superiority. The wannabe can be identified by describing those who disagree with them as having moral failings while themselves being righteous. The other traits, hypocrisy, dishonesty, vile behavior, sensitity to criticism exist in other net types. What's different about the wannabe is that they almost always become "motivated detractors". They're looking for someone to lash out at, so the key is to just stay away from them.

Beware of taking any net issue too seriously. Unless you're elected to a political position in the "real world" debates shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's supposed to be for fun and we are all very limited, by the nature of the medium, in actually wielding "power". So whether it's debating skins, format, programs, OSes, politics, it's key to not take it that seriously. A debate should be seen as an exchange of idea. A civilized on-line strategy game (I know that sounds bad but take it in the spirit in which it's meant). That means don't demonize your opponents and keep an eye out for those who would damage your reputation or likely to become an active or motivated detractor.

anyway, those are the main points.

As some can guess, I speak from experience on this stuff.

Gadget Update: August 2003

08/04/03

I'm way behind in my reviews on gadgets for this month. I don't think I even got any out there last month besides the tablet PC.  I have the Sport MP3 player that I've been giving a work out this week. It's an MP3 player that is just the head phones. Comes with 128 megs on it which in my case means I can fit every song I could possibly be interested in hearing on it. Still trying that out. Ah and the PC as a Tivo thing I'm still messing around with.

There are also the Mira devices starting to perculate. Let me explain what those are. I have a tablet PC. My big problem with it is that it's relatively heavy at around 3 pounds. A tablet PC is a full blown PC though.  What I think would be nearly as good would be a "Dumb" device that merely connects to one of my various PC's in the house via remote desktop. That's basically what Mira devices are. They don't really have any intelligence themselves, they just let you connect to other devices.  So I've started looking into those. The news isn't that good yet though. The Viewsonic one is also almost 3 pounds and it's not even a real PC, it's Mira based.  Here's the situation vendors: Anything over 1 pound and it loses much of its point. I might even give 1.5 pounds a shot.  But at 2.5 pounds, it's just too heavy to be something to read (and let's be real, the main point of this is to check your net stuff, web, mail, IM, etc. from remote).

Now for those of you who think 2.5 is "light" well I'm a weak nerdy guy and while 2.5 pounds isn't heavy, it starts to make its weight felt after an hour or two of holding the thing. And I'm a lazy man. Dangerously lazy.

The Geekling Culture

08/02/03

There is something that has always bugged me about the "IRC culture" that exists on the net.

Let me elaborate: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It is typically inhabited by 15 to 25 year old white males. Each IRC "network" has many channels on them. For some reason, the culture there defines prestige based on knowledge of a particular sort -- knowledge of what "sucks". This in turn leads the population to constantly and proudly proclaim that virtually everything "sucks".

Usually, the person making that claim has never even tried what they are saying sucks. Rather, they have heard from someone else who might have tried a given thing many years ago that it sucked and they just repeat it.

Typical example: Windows XP released.

Mac user response: "Windows sucks, it crashes 50 times a day and looks like crap and it's slow and bloated."

Translation: One of them used Windows a very long time ago on bear minimal hardware and the others are just regurgitating it.

This isn't to pick on Mac users because it's not Mac users who are like this in general. It's again, a certain demographic of 15 to 25 year old white males who either hang out on IRC or can't stop the urge to post on technical websites in response to news articles.

I see this a lot when we announce our software.  A news item about WindowBlinds or DesktopX or whatever will be posted and inevitably one of these geeklings will fail their "don't claim things suck that you haven't tried" roll and post how a given thing sucks. Maybe they tried an older version or more typically they've never tried it at all.

WindowBlinds gets it the worst because it's been around so long and because for the first couple of years it was slow and unstable for most people (not because WindowBlinds itself was particularly buggy but because most people were running Windows 95 or Windows 98 which were unsable in themselves and WindowBlinds added to it).  So years later, WindowBlinds 4.1 comes out, it's faster than what's included in Windows XP, just as reliable and rock solid. Yet we'll still see idiots posting "WindowBlinds is a bloated hog that will slow your system to a crawl."

We're not talking battles of opinions. I am willing to say that WindowBlinds, as one example, is faster than the included XP visual styles and uses less memory and resources doing so on any configuration -- no exceptions. Anyone saying otherwise has either not used it or just is full of crap. And unfortunately, the geekling mentality on the net ensures that there is no shortage of people who haven't used things or are full of crap but feel the need to show how much they know by posting about things they know nothing about.

A got a real dose of this this week with the dual releases of Keyboard Launchpad and the beta of DesktopX 2. Sure enough, no shortage of people who have no idea what they're talking about slamming on it. Again: They believe they show knowledge by saying things "Suck" and software news announcements always give them a chance to put this into effect whether they actually know anything or not.  In KLP's case, it was "There's freeware programs that do everything this does" (no, not even close). In the case of DesktopX 2, it was the standard "this will slow your system down and crash it" (wrong again, you can run DesktopX 2 on the lowest end PC Windows will run on and it won't affect performance one bit. Objects created with DesktopX can but that depends on the object -- it's like saying C++ is inherently slow. It can be slow or fast depending on what the user is doing with it).

What's sad about this is that many casual users don't realize that these geeklings are full of crap. And miss out on all kinds of software.  For instance, I don't care if there is some open source program out there that can do some neat stuff. Microsoft Movie Maker 2 is quite good. Don't tell me it "Sucks" simply because you tried version 1 long ago and didn't like it. Comment on version 1, don't talk to me about version 2. Thank goodness I didn't listen to the geeklings and tried out MS Movie Maker 2, it works pretty good.  The same is true of Microsoft Windows Media Player 9. The same old "it's bloated and slow" crowd still show up to rip on it even though on any modern system, WMP 9 works pretty damn well.

Which brings me to my final point -- the more successful someone is in a given market, the more the geeklings will attack it (though overdogs like Microsoft also get some who will blindly love anything they do but that's a different group than the geeklings). So anything Microsoft makes is "bloated, slow, and buggy". Nevermind whether it's fast, tight, and rock solid, the geeklings can't be bothered to actually know what they're talking about. Saying stuff sucks is where they get their prestige. The bigger the target, the more prestige.  Stardock dominates desktop enhancements.  So when DesktopX is made available, the geeklings attack it even though it is far more powerful than programs that only offer a subset what it can do such as Samurize or Konfabulator (and certainly uses a lot less RAM to do its thing and is a lot more stable than Samurize).

I've never been able to figure out the right way to deal with geeklings. I tend to correct them when I see them. It's an issue of princple for me. But I tend to think that such reaction causes more harm than good since it merely looks like the maker of the program is trying to "bully" out "legitimate" opinions.  Hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinions. But they're not entitled to their own facts.

Is Microsoft going to own the next-gen DVD format?

07/28/03

I think Microsoft is going to own the next generation DVD format. And I don’t say that as a Microsoft booster. I think it’s just the route that is going to make the most sense.

When I bought the new Terminator 2 DVD, the second DVD came with the full movie at 1080P (that’s P, not I) which is essentially super-duper High Definition TV. It was all in a collection of .WMV files and it all fit on a single DVD.

Moreover, with a computer with a DVD drive, I could watch this DVD on any screen – regular TV or the various other HDTV standards. It would just scale to whather and do so pretty seamlessly.

What I predict is that you’ll see new DVDs come with support for WMV files. Think about it, one DVD holding a 1080P (1080 lines of resolution) movie. Right now, most DVDs get filled up with a single 480P movie because they are so poorly compressed.

So Microsoft will end up owning the next generation format. This is a market Apple could have owned.

It's a Robotic World

07/27/03

The guy who wrote "How things Work"  (Marshall Brain) has a really interesting article in which he essentially predicts that the workplace that we know today, will be gone in 50 years. And unless we come up with a massive change in the way we live, we could face unemployment that makes the great depression look like nothing.

Here's the link to the article:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

What he talks about is happening now. And it's hard to really see how big of a deal it will become without looking at the big picture.

When I go to the local Farmer Jack to get groceries, nearly half of the check out lanes are self checkouts now. When I get my gas, it's also done without dealing with a human. ATMs are nothing new but you can see where things go.  In the article, Mr. Brain (yes, that's really his name) talks about a recent experience at McDonalds where they ordered from a kiosk rather from a person.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine if every fast food restraunt was able to replace the 4 to 6 people working on any given shift with machines that allowed people to just order for themselves.  According to the last census, something like 10 million people work in the fast food industry.  You could see 8 million of them elimiated in less than a decade. What's going to replace those jobs?

But that's really only the start of the process. Mr. Brain talks about the next big leap for technology -- fast imaging. When I was in college, I worked at Old Kent Bank as a "Proof operator". When you write a check to someone, it eventually comes back to your bank. My job was to read the chicken scratch put on by us humans and put in the bank number and amount that was then encoded onto the check so that a machine could read it.  But by my Junior year, that job had gone away. The new proof machines from Unisys had such powerful imaging systems on them that they could read the handwriting of 98% of people correctly. Today, virtually all checks are done this way. So my summer job was gone (so I went and founded Stardock to pay the bills but I'm not sure that is a general solution for people).

But such machines are big and hugely expensive. But in time, imaging will be something that is nearly perfect and available on devices very small. Why is this a big deal? Because imaging recognition combined with robots like those from Honda (which will only get better in the coming decades) will create machines that can do all kinds of manual labor. Cleaning hotels, streets, restraunts, etc.  At some point, a good chunk of the staff in the service industry will be replaced by machines. Not in the near future but in the next 30 to 50 years almost certainly.

The same is true with the manufacturing sector. If one thinks machines are replacing manufacturing jobs now, wait until the machines can "see" and "recognize" things. That's been the real stumbbling block for machines in the workplace. Without visual recognition, there is only so much they can do. Add in voice recognition and you have a pretty useful unpaid menial worker.

Now, some people may say that 50 years is too soon. But imagine where things were in 1900. No airplanes. No cars.  Etc.  By 1950 we had supersonic flight, nuclear weapons, television, movies, radio, etc.  50 years. And the pace of technological breakthrus is only increasing. The Internet, as we know it today, didn't really exist in a recognizeable form until a little over 10 years ago.  Now, I can access the net from my portable cell phone.

So it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that within 50 years we'll see a lot of these things come to pass.

The question is, what will all those people do?

Ah Corel...Corel...Corel...

07/26/03

I know how to use Adobe Photoshop. But at some point, I guess I bet on the wrong horse. You see, while I know Photoshop, I'm an expert at Corel Photopaint.

Unfortunately, while Photopaint is, in my opinion, a much better designed program, it has slowly fallen further and further behind Photoshop when it comes to creating effects and manipulating images and graphics. But what's worse, Photopaint has always been buggy. Very buggy.  No matter what computer I've used it on, no professional program I've used has crashed as much as Corel Photopaint.

And also unforunately, because I've been a long time Corel Draw user, I've had to suffer through their annoying copy protection.  Corel Draw 11 is out now. I have 10. I haven't decided whether to get 11 or not since I've not found the new features terribly compelling while the bugs seem to just keep on growing over the years.

Worse, when I say I have Corel Draw 10 I mean that I have the upgrade version of Corel Draw 10. So for me to install Corel Draw 10 on my new machine here, I have to first install Corel Draw 8 (or 9) and then upgrade it to 10 which is obnoxious. So I'll have to see if I can just dig up my Corel Draw 8 or 9 or 10 serial # and get a "full" version of Corel Draw 11.  I've emailed Corel about this but never received a response.