Microsoft’s new ergonomic keyboard

I was glad to see Microsoft announce a new ergonomic keyboard, the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, for a couple of reasons. For a while, it looked like they were deemphasizing their standalone ergonomic keyboards. Microsoft introduced a lot of wireless ergonomic keyboard/mouse sets in the past few years, but I’m only interested in wired keyboards. (The last thing I need to do is use more batteries.) This announcement renews their commitment to standalone ergonomic keyboards.

Also, almost all of Microsoft’s recent keyboards, such as the Natural MultiMedia Keyboard, have a strange layout for the keys above the inverted-T cursor keys, including Home and End. I used the Natural MultiMedia Keyboard when I was pair-programming with Scott, and it drove me nuts. Then I started getting used to it, which was worse, because it screwed me up on every other keyboard, including my own Natural Keyboard Pro. I started hoarding every Natural Keyboard Pro I could get my hands on, since Microsoft discontinued it. But now it looks like I don’t have to worry anymore.

Kepler’s Books suddenly closes

After celebrating its 50th anniversary just a few months ago, Kepler’s Books suddenly closed its doors yesterday. What a shock, and what a shame — it was one of the most prominent independent bookstores in the U.S., akin to City Lights in San Francisco, Vroman’s in Pasadena, or Powell’s in Portland. Situated in Menlo Park near Stanford, Kepler’s had a long storied history. It was another victim of the economic downturn and the spread of chain and online bookstores.

Google’s changing public perception

I find it fascinating how there is suddenly a bunch of articles talking about how the perception of Google is changing from a bunch of fun-loving hackers dedicated to helping the world to a bunch of fun-loving hackers hellbent on controlling and dominating the world. First, the New York Times, then USA Today, and finally and most hilariously, the Onion.

Catastrophe

As the scale of the enormous disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama becomes clear, two things come to my mind:

  • Despite the mandatory evacuation orders, 20% of the population stayed behind to ride out the storm. Let’s just take the New Orleans metropolitan area, which has more than 1.3 million people. That means about 260,000 people did not evacuate. If 1% of them died, that’s 2600 people. And that’s just New Orleans.
  • Do I have enough food, clothing, and supplies to last a week without any assistance from the government, after a major earthquake? Do I have enough gas to drive long distances, just in case? Right now, I don’t. (I should have bought gasoline on Sunday…) Time to get an earthquake preparedness kit.

Windows 95 — Has it really been ten years?

[Windows 95 splash screen]Windows 95 was launched ten years ago yesterday. It was a huge deal at the time. People lined up at midnight to buy it, and some of them didn’t even own a PC! I was interning at Microsoft that summer, and I remember how massive the launch was. Calling it a carnival is not an understatement. Microsoft had covered a few acres of sports fields on its corporate campus with big tents. There was a hot-air balloon (courtesy of Corel, whose program Corel Draw had a balloon as its logo then) and a ferris wheel. Overhead, a plane flew a banner that read, “Windows 95, will you marry me? Texas Instruments.” Jay Leno MC’ed the event, at a time when it was very rare for celebrities to have anything to do with computers.

Only the press and analysts were into the launch area that day. Not even Microsoft employees were allowed, since they didn’t want the launch to be overwhelmed by us. So the other interns and I worked away in our offices, wondering why the rest of the building was so empty. We were too clueless to realize that virtually the whole company was watching the event live, on the Jumbotron that was set up outside.

But at 6:30 that evening, the gates were opened to us employees, and we rushed in. In one tent, we saw software companies demoing their Windows 95-specific programs. Netscape was proudly showing off Navigator 2.0, which included such advances as frames. (It seemed like an improvement back then…) In another tent, two comedians from a Seattle sketch comedy group called Almost Live were hosting a “game show” about Office 95. When it ended, a bunch of people swarmed around Pat Cashman, mostly women, but no one approached Steve Wilson, which really puzzled me. So I did and told him how much I enjoyed their show, especially during its brief syndication run on Comedy Central.

The whole event had a festive atmosphere; everyone at Microsoft was riding high. It’s hard to remember what a significant change Windows 95 was to the PC world. It brought 32-bit computing to the masses, nine years after Intel introduced the 386. The user interface was much better than Windows 3.1. Finally, we had a real desktop and trash can, uh, recycle bin. Our file names were no longer limited to eight characters plus a three-character extension. Explorer and the Start menu were vast improvements over File Manager and Program Manager. It was much more stable than 3.1, and at least as stable as Mac OS.

And unlike the Mac, Windows 95 could run more than one program without the programs’ needing to explicitly yield control (preemptive multitasking) and you did not have to manually enter how much memory you wanted a program to use (dynamically allocated virtual memory). Even the fact that it was called Windows 95 and not Windows 4.0 was a big deal. Windows 95 truly brought personal computing into the modern era. Now if I could only remember whether I rode the ferris wheel…

Adventures in mass transit

When I first started working at IBM Almaden, my commute was about 30 minutes each way, against traffic (thank goodness). It wasn’t bad, as commutes go in the Bay Area, but I was using about 1.3 gallons per day. That quickly adds up, especially the way gas prices are now.

Then I found out that there’s a VTA express bus that goes from Palo Alto and Cupertino to two of IBM’s sites, with a shuttle connection to Almaden. Thanks to the Eco Pass program, it’s free.

Now I’m riding the bus as often as possible. I burn at most half as much gas as before, so I’m now saving a ton of money. Sweeeeeet. I can also work on the bus if I want. And I don’t have to deal with the morons who inhabit our freeways. One of my colleagues says it’s like riding a grown-up version of a school bus — almost every passenger works for IBM (although mostly at two other IBM sites, not Almaden).

There are a few downsides. One, it now takes me an hour each way, 20 minutes of that spent transferring between the bus and the shuttle, and I have to wake up an hour earlier to catch the bus. Two, on the way home, the “bus stop” has no shelter and no bench. Once winter comes, it’ll be dark and wet, at which point I’ll switch back to driving. Finally, if the bus were to, say, break down on the way to picking me up, I would be caught sitting at the bus stop wondering what the *&#$#* was going on. Luckily, my bus stop is at a light rail station, so when that did happen to me yesterday, I was able to hop on the train to downtown San Jose, and then catch a ride with a colleague and her husband to Cupertino, saving myself from a 40-minute bus ride.

The Newest American Indians

Native Americans have been dealing with the loss of their culture through assimilation and interracial marriage for over 100 years. But those claiming to be Native American have jumped substantially in the last couple of decades, including those who don’t “look” Indian. How do Indians deal with such challenges? What does it mean to be Indian? It reminds me of another ethnic group facing similar challenges: Japanese-Americans.