With appropriate apologies yet again to Isaac Asimov, I am proud to announce I have actually passed one of the milestones of a test site. I completely destroyed my site and backup in an attempt to make changes in a new and different way and had to rebuild from the unlikeliest of all places, the existing rss feed in my Google reader. And for those of you who have taken my feed, while I am extremely happy I had that history from which to draw, you will see double entries  for everything before this post, as it is my first original post after the rebuild.

Now, back to your original programming…

Photo credit: zeevveez

I’m going to date myself.

Hi, my name is Jim and my first Social Network with a Graphical User Interface was Prodigy. That’s right, I said Prodigy. That wondrous combined effort of Sears and IBM. That, of course after various BBS’ like Twelve Tone Systems Calkwalk BBS and others. And I’m talking about the blazing speed of 300 baud.

What’s that you say? I’m too young to possibly have done that? You’re right, of course. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but I was using the Coleco Adam In utero. I already had my birth certificate filled out when my Mom went into labor, but that’s a story for another time, back to my point.

After Prodigy, there was America Online. You know, the Facebook of its day. After all, Steve Case took it to the point that there was the AOL-Time Warner merger and he was going to rule the world. Wow, the heady days of that now ever-present empire…What? AOL is mainly the butt of jokes for most of the tech savvy world? But we were so invested in it. Oh well, then there was MySpace, Friendster, Second Life…Okay, I didn’t get into all of them, but I think you might be starting to see my point. It’s been a long road to getting a presence on the web.

Everyone needs to be on the web today, if you want to make it any aspect of business, or so we’re told. The thing that’s different now is that it’s easier to have your own presence on the web than ever before, from both an economic perspective and a technical perspective. It’s cheap to have your own website and it’s easy to set it up with a blog such as this. Oh and this is free, too. So the biggest cost at this point is your sweat equity. What you put into it. And that begs the question how many times do you want to reinvent your wheel?

Previously on the web, you didn’t have much choice, if you wanted to be on the hot property services, you had to interact there, it was a destination, no choice. So when one hot property fell out of grace with the fickle populace, you started over at the next new one, unless you were too stubborn to change.

Now, you can easily be your own destination for interaction and not have to rely on the virtual hot property for everything. But you have to make your choices.

Facebook has its social plugins and its social channels. Some of them are great if you want your site to stay as your hub, your destination. Some actually draw the traffic away from your site back into Facebook to never be yours again. For example, you can set up a metatag that will allow you to use Facebook Insights for your website, sounds great, right? What happens if Facebook pulls an AOL? Where does your analytic information go then?

Another example that springs to my mind is “Facebook comments” on your website. While it makes it easy for anyone who has a Facebook account to comment on your website, there’s also a default checkbox setting that says “Post to Facebook”. Think about the process here. Someone comments uses “Facebook comments” on your site and uses the “Post to Facebook” option. Someone else sees that on Facebook and replies there. You’ve now just used your website to drive traffic to Facebook! So you started the interaction on your website and got it going, but it belongs to Facebook. Once again, what happens if Facebook pulls an AOL?

What would you rather do, reinvent your wheel with the next shift in the web, or keep what you have and build on it?

Photo Credit: vxla

…At least not in the blogging world. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a powerful tool, when used correctly. The problem is, in this world of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, if you’re not familiar with the acronym) copy and paste can and frequently is the monkey wrench in the works. That’s because it’s a quick and easy shortcut and when most people use copy and paste, they generally don’t proofread what they pasted. After all, They proofread it before they published it and it was fine, right?

No, that’s not a mistake, that’s an example based on something I read earlier. That’s one of the pitfalls of copy and paste. What they wanted was italics, so that example would have read “That’s because it’s a quick and easy shortcut…” but what they got was the first example sentence, complete with CSS tags that the majority of readers don’t know and won’t be able to interpret. Not very pretty and with just a bit of extra effort, completely avoidable.

What’s far worse is when copy and paste brings over a bunch of extra code that you never see on the page that affects your formatting. It’s HTML and CSS coding that can override the stylesheet of the blog and makes the formatting or appearance of your blog inconsistent. You may have run across it before in reading blogs on the web, where one post will look like this and…

…The next post looks like this.

Unless you know what you’re doing, you probably won’t be able to fix it and even if you do know what you’re doing, it’s a pain to clean out all the extra code. Microsoft Word as an example, has a reputation for adding extra code and I can’t count the number of times I’ve asked people with whom I work not to save to a .doc file then copy and paste.

So, what do you do to avoid the problems with copy and paste? Proofread, for one. You’ll catch a ton of problems before they make to the virtual page that way. Another habit you should start is saving to a plain text format, like .txt, then copying and pasting into your virtual document. You’ll have to format the text again after you’ve pasted it, but it all but guarantees that your page will look better because of it.

[This is a cross posting of my story done for TheLocalTourist.com]

That lyric from “Big Yellow Taxi” kept running through my mind on a gorgeous Friday morning not too long ago. I had the opportunity to have some fun, but with a purpose driving a few different types of vehicles at the Lexus Safety Experience here in Chicago.

With all the recent press about unintended acceleration, Lexus thought it was a good idea to take the show on the road to dealers and to a select group of media to show off the safety features available on Lexus vehicles.

The idea behind the day was this; You drive two identical vehicles on three different courses demonstrating some of the safety features available on Lexus vehicles with a professional driver in each car instructing and watching you. The first vehicle had the safety feature disabled, the second vehicle had the feature enabled and you were driving on a course laid out with cones. Now, I’m no gearhead, but I love to drive, so you think I’m passing this up? No way, but on to the examples.

First up, The Lexus ES 350 (pictured above) and the Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) . Most everyone thinks of this safety as only helping you stop, but as the professional driver put it, another way to define the ABS acronym is “The Ability to Brake and Steer”. This example was the most fun of the day for me and here’s how it worked. I was told to floor it until I heard the pro driver tell me to brake hard when I reached a patch of sand laid down for the course and then turn as hard as I could to the right until I locked the steering wheel. That’s the way most drivers react in a situation like, say, you’re driving down the expressway and someone in front of you moves over just in time for you to stare down the business end of a the cement truck stopped in the middle of the road.

So, being duty bound to follow my directions to the letter, I floored it until the Pro told me to brake, slammed them on and cranked the wheel all the way to the right. The first ES 350 with ABS disabled? I went straight as an arrow just off the end of the course, knocking out the cones at the far end. In other words, I would have been testing the front crumple zones and airbags on the car while enjoying a nice cup of fresh cement soup. As for the second ES 350? While I can’t say for sure that I would have missed the cement truck entirely, I was pretty close to the full car length to the right of where I started and no one in the passenger compartment would have come in direct contact with the imposing imaginary cement truck. Score one for ABS.

Next up was the RX 350 and Vehicle Stability control (VSC) and Traction Control (TRAC). Basically, the TRAC system monitors and controls wheel slippage (spinning) by reducing the throttle and maybe even applying the brakes to the wheel that’s slipping. To show its effect, there was a tarp that was covered with soapy water and I was asked to floor it once I drove the RX 350 on the tarp. The first RX 350 with TRAC disabled was like flooring it after a foot and a half of fallen snow on a Chicago side street before the snowplow could get there. You got it, going nowhere, fast. The second with TRAC enabled, a little slippage at first, but not half that of the first RX 350. I could actually see getting down a snow covered Chicago street in that vehicle with little problems.

The second half of this was the VSC and I was asked to get up to 25 mph and without touching the brakes or accelerator, make as tight a 180 degree turn to the right as the steering would allow. In the first SUV it was pretty much what you’d think. Even at 25 mph there was tire squeal and the momentum took me outside the tight radius of the corner, basically feeling out of control and riding it until it got back under control and that was with neither accelerator or brakes applied. Just out of control enough to prove the point. The second time was fun and a full sensory experience as well. the moment I felt the weight shift due to the momentum of the SUV, a warning signal started beeping that reminded me of every movie I’ve seen where an airplane lost cabin pressure in the cockpit. But instead of an air-mask dropping from the ceiling, the brakes were applied automatically and the the SUV righted itself and made the turn easily. It was just letting me know that it was taking care of the brakes for me, in this case. I was grinning at that one, but it was an obvious difference in the turn that allowed me to be in control of the SUV. An interesting side note is that these features can be disengaged for the more experienced driver. I don’t think that most drivers would think to do that in the first place, but it’s good to know that you have that choice.

Last in my rotation was the Smart Stop Technology course. This situation was a little different. This was the only example where the first car, a 2010 IS 250 didn’t have this safety feature at all (the IS 350 is pictured here). The second car. also a 2010 IS 250 had Smart Stop technology. Why the difference? it was in 2010 that Lexus implemented the feature as a standard on all its models, the first manufacturer to do so. What this does is if the accelerator is open more than 1/3, the car is going faster than 5 mph and the brakes are applied firmly, the throttle is cut automatically, speaking directly to the unintended acceleration issue. It was designed to simulate a stuck throttle and thisproved to be the most difficult for a lot of people to do because you had to drive with both feet: one on the gas pedal and the other on the brakes. It was pretty fun for me too.

Before I started the pro pointed out that brakes will override the accelerator every time in every car and will stop the car, regardless of whether or not this safety feature is available on the car, but the again the human element plays as big a part in a situation like this as any safety feature, How quickly you think and can react in an emergency situation depends on so many things. I was told to floor it and then when the pro driver said “brake” hit the brakes as hard as possible and stay on both the accelerator and the brakes until I came to a complete stop. Then and only then could I release both of the pedals.

When he told me to brake the first car I pushed the pedal so hard that I literally lifted myself off the seat while I came to a stop and then released. The second went pretty much the same way, except as I was stopping the pro driver said “Stay on both pedals and look at your tachometer”. I looked just in time to see the needle of the tachometer finish dropping off because there was no power to the engine, even though my foot on the accelerator was on the floor. It was a very graphic example and impressive, too.

As I walked away with an ear to ear grin on my face and that line from Big Yellow Taxi running through my mind, I was thinking about the things you don’t have to think about anymore when you drive a car today. Well, at least when you drive a Lexus.

I got a call today from Tim, the other half of Jim & Tim with a bit of good news. We’re playing Elburn Days this year on the 22nd of August at Noon for three hours in the Beer Tent. I played that gig with Tim three years ago, as a matter of fact, it’s what got Jim & Tim started, It just took 2 1/2 years to come to fruition, that’s a good gestation period, right?

I was actually filling in for Pete who was gigging with Tim at the time. Now being a classically trained singer, I had a lot of work in front of me to do 3 hours of classic rock, but I was definitely excited at the prospect of working with Tim. We had a few rehearsals and it came time for the day and it was one of the worst weather days you can imagine.

It had been raining the day before, in fact, they shut down early because of the rain and cancelled events. Sunday wasn’t faring much better, but you never assume a job is cancelled until you’re told so, so I jumped in my car and drove over. It was sloppy from the previous day and it was starting to rain again. We got there and set up, only to find out that all the bands were cancelled from the night before and it was looking like they were going to cancel them that day too, just waiting on the call. So we start playing to a very, very small crowd.

Then a few more came…and a few more, but still nothing big. the crowd grew little by little until we hit the three hour mark and they asked us to play another hour. and at the end of that hour? More people and they asked us to play another hour…well, long story short (or is it too late for that now?), we ended up playing for 7 1/2 hours when I was basically only prepared for barely three. and in the meantime, word had spread and we had the biggest crowd of the day when we stopped playing and the crowd was begging us to keep going. You can read about the reaction in my first blog. I had to be pushed out of my parking spot, the ground was sooo soggy my car sank. It was a great day and left me with a great story.

And now I get to go back this year and play again. That’s what cool about it all.