Thrice: Shoes, Packaging, Information
Thursday 30 October 2003 at 12:32 pm Uno: On Monday, I woke up, showered, got dressed, grabbed some breakfast (granola bar, mmm), threw on my shoes, and walked out the door. The drive to work was pretty uneventful, 25 minute commute, no issues. Parked the car in a sweet spot, got out, looked down. Oh man, it's gonna be one of those days.I had put on two completely different shoes.
Luckily, they were both brown, and most people didn't notice. I went to lunch, and still, nobody noticed. Sweet! I get back from lunch, and Jarvia was at the front desk, and looked at me funny. I said "What?"
"Why are you wearing two different shoes?"
Busted.
Duo: Why do electronics manufacturers make their packaging so damn hard to open? Do they think that all people manage to get their plastic molded packages open easily? You need a power drill and a cable cutter to just get into the package. What if you want to return it?
"I'm sorry sir, but you've mangled the original packaging so badly that we cannot accept this as a return."
Or even worse, how the hell do you get it all back into the package once you do get it open? The packagers must be some sort of highly trained individuals, or they use some sort of high-pressure packaging facility, where everyone works in 2 atmosphere pressure, so that the final product can be stuffed into every last square millimeter of that packaging. Then when you open it, it swells to enormous proportions and reduces the likelyhood that you'll get it back in without bulges in the box to nearly zero.
Is there some kind of super-duper task-specific opener for those packages? Or do I have to invest in an industrial blade saw?
Trio: Will somebody write a public-domain method of requesting and receiving information? Michael Powell of FCC fame wants a device that has all of his family's information -- social security numbers, phone numbers, insurance company, health records, etc -- in a relational database, which he can just whip out and give to whomever. I think the methodolgy should be that the requesting party sends a request (via Wifi, IrDA, Bluetooth, whatever) and the device would, based on previously set rules, send the information with no user interaction, or prompt the user to approve the sending of the information, or prompt the user for a password to approve sending of the information. All the data should be encrypted both on the device and during transmission, especially since some of the information can be very sensitive.
A little palm-like application could be built around it, using PKI or other key-passing encryption... I like the idea, but it needs to be all sorts of secure.