Obama Nation

The Obama campaign, with special guest John Kerry, was canvassing in my loverly little town this weekend. And they didn’t even stop by. Which is understandable, I guess, as I’m out in the boonies, so it would take all day to walk down one block. They probably stuck to the more densely populated areas.

Even so, they probably covered the whole town before lunchtime.

Obama’s had a lot of good momentum in the last few weeks, but he’s still trailing Clinton by high single-digits. I’m hoping there’s a bunch of people without phones in Philly who are going to pile into the poll stations tomorrow and upset the apple cart.

I would go into reasons about why I like Obama more than Clinton here, but I don’t know squat about politics, so I’ll just say go read some respectable blogs, like the Huffington Post, and see for yourself.

It’s a Hardware Problem

Several months ago, I wrote about an iPhone web application I’m writing (current code name: GymTrakker). What with the whole “moving across the country and starting a new job” thing, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend coding it. But I have been using it (well, until recently, see below) and am about to get back into it.

The problem is, of course, that I need to redo everything.

Well, not quite everything. Let me back up a bit.

Literally two hours after we moved into the new house, we had working Internet. Within a few days of the movers showing up, I was back to using the Bowflex. Every time I tried to use GymTrakker, though, I would lose wireless connection to the server (the server being my MacBook Pro in the other room).

I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Anne was reporting periodic network problems from her office downstairs as well, but it was intermittent and I didn’t track it down right away.

Sometime after she left for Belgium, though, after several workout sessions with no wireless connection, I decided to figure out what the problem was.

After some debugging, I figured that it was the wireless that was the problem, not the actual Internet connection (my G5, connected via CAT-5 was working fine). And it seemed to happen mainly when I was working out, or otherwise watching DVDs in the workout room (since it’s the only TV we have right now, I sometimes eat dinner in there while watching a DVD).

My first thought was that the TV has wireless headphones, and that signal might be interfering with the wifi. But after checking the manual, it didn’t seem to be in the same frequency band.

Then I remembered that the DVD player/home theater system has wireless surround speakers. A quick look in that manual revealed that it operates in the same 2.4GHz spectrum as 802.11. Bingo.

Ever since I disabled the wireless surround speakers, the wifi has been working flawlessly.

Once I solved that issue, I figured I could start using GymTrakker again. Oh, how wrong I was.

You see, in the meantime, I had upgraded my Macs to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). After a night of Googling, I discovered the following things about Leopard:

• The PHP that is included is now PHP5
• PHP is not turned on by default
• PHP 5 on Leopard is not built with PostgreSQL support

I discovered these things in sequence of course. First, I realized that the new PHP has a different location in the file system. Then I found out how to turn it on. Finally I realized that it wouldn’t work with Postgres.

I think the only way to get Postgres support would be to recompile PHP, which I’m not really in the mood to do, so my next task is to port GymTrakker to work with MySQL, which is supported in PHP5 on Leopard.

Fortunately, I was smart: I abstracted out the database access for just such an occasion. I should be able to switch to MySQL and only change one file that has all of the sql commands in it.

Of course, I only have MySQL running on the G5, and my development environment is still on the laptop, so I’ll need to figure out how to access the database across the network. Shouldn’t be too hard. Right?

On The Design Of Bandages

Or, more specifically, bandage wrappers.

This may seem like a trivial thing, but to a klutz like me who goes through band aids* rather quickly, the ease with which I can unwrap and apply one (especially with a geyser of blood erupting out of one or more fingers) is very important.

There are many brands of band aids out there, but basically your choices these days come down to Band-Aid and store-brand. Curad used to be the big competitor, but I don’t seem to see them anymore. Guess there’s little room for two brand names in this commodity market.

Still, the supermarket and drug-store generics provide a decent and cheap alternative to Johnson & Johnson’s 800lb gorilla. And, in some ways, they are even better. Specifically, in the wrapper design.

People my age (mid-thirties) will remember the old-style wrapper that Band-Aid had from growing up: It had a little red drawstring embedded in the end which, when pulled, was supposed to neatly slice off the end of the paper wrapper.

How often this actually happened, however, rather depended on the humidity content of the air, the phase of the moon and what color your socks were. Usually, you just ended up with a little red thread in one hand and a yet-unopened Band-Aid in the other.

I remember, even then, thinking that Curad had the much better system. The end of the wrapper separated slightly, and you could grab either side and peel the whole thing apart. It took forever for Band-Aid to change. And even when they did, they screwed it up.

Here is what they switched to:

Note the blue bar down one end with white arrows. As a design cue, this appears to be very good: Your attention is attracted to that end of the wrapper, and the arrows suggest to pull in that direction. It looks like you can just slide your finger under the blue tab and peel.

Ha ha. What were you thinking? Obviously, the marketing department of Johnson & Johnson figures that if you bleed all over the Band-Aid while you fumble to get it open, you’ll throw it away and grab another one, forcing you to go through the box quicker.

The side with the blue bar on it is longer than the back side. For years, whenever I tried to open one of these, I would try to slide my finger under the blue part, and get frustrated when there was this extra bit of white preventing me from doing so. Every time, I would think to myself, “OK, you do this wrong every time, remember, it’s the opposite of the way you think it is.” And every time, I would do it wrong again.

This is the very definition of bad design (or insanity, I forget which). It would have been very easily fixed, too, by just cutting the front side of the wrapper off at the end of the blue. It would stick out like a little tab that you could peel right off.

By comparison, here is a store-brand, bought recently:

Note nothing is obvious about how to open it from the front (except for the little diagram, but as we all know, nobody reads instructions). But if you tip it to the side, you see the ends are split, ready to peel, and have even lengths:

Sure, some visual cue on the tab would have been nice, but I posit that no cue is better than a misleading cue.

Apparently, J&J must have gotten my crank letter, because they’ve changed again. Unfortunately, they just gave up on the whole peel-tab idea, for some reason, even though they were soooo close to getting it right. Now it’s just sealed up, end to end:

It’s like they decided to go back thirty years, but leave out the little red pull string. Now there’s no misleading visual cues, but you have to tear the thing open, hopefully without tearing the band aid in the process. There’s not even a little starter tear like you get on ketchup packets.

At this rate they’ll be selling leeches in a few years.

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*I’m going to use the lowercase “band aid” to refer to the generic “self-adhesive bandage” and the capital “Band-Aid” to refer specifically to that brand. It’s just easier and everyone uses it anyway.

Dun Dun Dunnn!

Funniest five seconds, ever:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs&hl=en]