Via Mark, my personal Metafilter.

I heard a wonderful story about Maurice Sendak last week. He was unusually touched by a letter he got from a small boy and included an original drawing in his reply. The boy’s mother wrote to thank him:
   ‘Billy loved your letter so much, he ate it.’

Over watermelon margaritas, Dom inducts me into the tribe of the female traveler. I’m planning to spend six months in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos but I’ve never done serious solo travel before and let’s face it, I’m clueless. She leans over, a conspirator:

   ‘So, you know about The Keeper, right?’
   ‘Ummmm…should I?’

Oh boy. No, I hadn’t given any thought to the problem of carrying several months worth of Western tampons through the Mekong Delta. Up to now, one of my main skills has been persuading others to carry my stuff—groceries, laundry bags, lipstick, books. I’m more smitten by the romance of Dervala the Intrepid Traveler than by the realities of mosquito netting and ugly shoes.

Following her advice, I searched for the mysterious Keeper on the Lonely Planet message boards and turned up this charming post:

Thanks for the sympathy, RogerMORE (and for your firm grasp on economic priniciples). Turns out The Keeper Menstrual Cup answers your plea. It’s a weird little plunger cup, like a diaphragm. The makers promise it can hold ‘up to 1 full ounce of menstrual flow’.

You rinse it.
And it’s $32.

But Dom swears it’s essential so I punch in my credit card details. The screaming confirmation message proves that I’m now part of a cult:

You Will LOVE Your KEEPER !!!

Tom Shugart gently challenges my assertion that American Boomers have disappointingly little to teach us. He writes:

I’m touched. There’s truth to it. Previous generations learned to see themselves as grown-ups, and as parents, very quickly. Ingrid Bergman was 23 when she made Casablanca, but she wore clothes her mother would have worn and carried herself the dignity of a forty-year-old matron. Fifties and Sixties teenagers, on the other hand, were the first generation not to identify themselves early as responsible adults with a duty to instruct their youngers. I thought it hadn’t occured to them that it was part of their remit to tell us what to do. But Tom reminds me that that may have been a deliberate choice, and that this freedom may be their best gift to us.

Do check out Tom’s post on hearing Rock Around The Clock for the first time, by the way. There ain’t nothin’ like a guitar riff for sealing the identity of a generation.

Ooh! Ftrain Paul links to something lovely—“MANUAL”, a collection by the best web writers out there, including Mr. Ford himself. The organizing theme is the concept of ‘how to…’, and Dean Allen’s design is as elegant as anything yet produced by a bearded man.

How-to guides have a venerable history, from Addison and Steele’s 18th century Gentleman’s Magazine right up to The Rules (spoofed in this collection by Alexis Massie. I’m addicted to them, though rarely smart enough to follow the prescriptions. There can hardly be a group of people less qualified to advise than writers, so this collection should be entertaining.

Mark forwarded this from the 0xdeadbeef mailing list. It’s exerpted from the July 1943 issue Transportation Magazine, and is intended as a guide for male supervisors adapting to the influx of women workers during World War II.

I would have written this off as Internet joke invention until I read about Professor James Tooley’s belief that guides like this led to what he calls the modern Bridget Jones Syndrome. Finally, an explanation for my Chardonnay and Kit Kat consumption.

Moveable Type blogs are so much more elegant than the clunky Blogger templates. Better features than the disappointing Blogger Pro, too. And the moveable type dot org address has a nice tilting-at-windmills quality.

Perhaps moving my site over to MT would be a good displacement activity instead of sorting out travel visas and health insurance claim forms. Or, say, rambling about blog templates at 11.36 pm.

I work as a product manager for a consumer software company. Like my customers, I don’t necessarily care about technology for its own sake. I don’t feel strongly about Java over C++, or Unix over XP. I just want make it easier for people lucky enough to own mobile gadgets to find the nearest place to eat, shop, or see a movie. My tools are language, images, pestering, and my limited common-sense.

Text-messaging on a mobile phone is unpleasant, but when my mother learned that it cost 80 pence to call my sister at peak time compared to 10 pence to send a brief message, she learned to hunt and peck on a phone keypad. If my industry can provide her with technologies like T9 (which tries to complete words automatically based on the statistical frequencies of letter combinations), wonderful. If the hardware people can design a better keypad, better still. But in the short run, we hardware and software designers are at the mercy of the people who decide that these are the messaging alternatives available to her, and that one will cost eight times as much as the other. And sometimes it seems those guys take their cues from chicken entrails, Miss Cleo, or, worse, the deadened consensus of the 45 people in their weekly marketing meeting.

Here, for example, is how one major US carrier lets consumers know that their phones can do more than make voice calls or dial up the so-called wireless web:

iDEN Update gives you the power to personalize and enhance your phone. You can download the growing list of Java� technology-enabled applications, update the phone features and program your phone with the latest software enhancements.Downloading applications and features “Over-the-Air” is easy. Click on the Applications and Features buttons below to view what is available for your phone. This exciting new technology enables you to download applications “Over-the-Air” using this website and a few simple clicks on your phone. Use the Minimum Requirements Wizard to find out if you can get applications and features “Over-the-Air”!

I call this Mystery Meat Marketing. Why in the name of Scott McNealy should I be interested in ‘Java Apps’ (which is exactly how the phone menu item reads)? Why is “Over-the-Air” such an exciting concept that it requires air-quotes and weird adverbial dashes and capitalization? How many approval loops did this drivel crawl through? Here are are my “Over-the-Blog“� alternative descriptions for this wonder technology:

Get a cute ringtone.
Play a primitive but entertaining golf game while standing on line for the ATM.
Get traffic information while you’re driving (in case you don’t have a radio and you’d like to risk death by squinting at an 8-line screen while on the freeway).
Deal with email from your phone.

Is it important to me that any of these are Java� technology-enabled applications that I can download “Over-the-air”? Do I look like I have a pocket protector jammed up my ass? We don’t want 1/8 inch drill bits. We want 1/8 inch holes.

Here’s another snippet of deathless tech-marketing prose from a different carrier :

See The Demo!
Still skeptical? Check out the demo and you’ll see how awesome this new BREW technology is. And how it lets you download and run cool applications (such as enhanced-graphic games) right on your BREW-enabled phone. Check it out … and you’ll be sold!

Uh, that’s okay, thanks. I ate already.

Making technology work is not difficult. Nor is making software easy to use—it just takes empathy, humility and perseverance. The really hard part still, it seems, is teaching big-company geeks and bureaucrats how to tell their customers why our work is worth their time and money.

NOTE:(c) 2001-2002 All Fights Deferred (as Caterina says). These opinions in no way represent the views of my company.

In Chinatown, a man dances with his forklift truck as partner. There are huge sheets of metal in a row, covering a trench in the road. He is moving them from Mott St. just around the corner to the new trench on Canal. Floodlights shine on his dancefloor. He shimmies the truck over and gently, gently, scoops up the metal sheet as if he were picking up a fried egg on a spatula. He pulls it against the body of the truck, so that it’s held diagonally by nothing more than tension. He reverses around the corner, one quick movement, and lays it flat. Like a bitch chivvying pups, he noses it into place with the forklift. It clicks, satisfyingly, next to the previous one. I ride my bike over these covers every day, and dread the irregularly-stacked disasters that will someday claim another of my front teeth. Standing there in my bike helmet, I give him a little round of applause. He bows, and drives around the corner to get the next one.