So while I was researching this post, I found a post by Ron Coleman that's pretty informative. It discusses an ongoing dispute about the trademark "Superhero", which is jointly claimed by Marvel and DC. (Joint claim of a trademark is a pretty unusual circumstance.)

But more than that, the post has a link to the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz.

Normally I hate these quizzes. They're a waste of time, and often completely incomprehensible in their conclusions. And often I find that the questions aren't even answerable, because none of the answers is right for me. "Which would you rather do on a Saturday night? A. Go out to the dance club and party all night. B. Go out to a bar and get plastered. C. Hang out on the street corner, looking for a fight. D. Stay home and sulk." Hmmm, I don't see either "Stay home with my wife" or "Role-playing games" on that list. (This quiz is actually much better in that regard: it has a much larger number of questions; and the questions are all answered on a 1 to 5 preference scale, so I could answer every one of them.) And often the range of possible quiz conclusions is severely limited: often under ten, and sometimes under five. (This quiz has at least eleven possible conclusions, which makes it a little better than most.)

But come on... It's a superhero quiz! Like I could possibly resist.

And while I'm pleased with the results, I wouldn't have guessed them...

So my friend Benjamin Day sent me email asking what I thought about this ebay listing: Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 s Tablet PC Laptop Computer used, which sold for $241.50.

Well, it sounds like a decent price for a Tablet PC, even if it's used, right? Except for one problem: It's not a Tablet PC. Read the specs:

Windows 2000 Professional loaded!

It even has PenX 2.02 installed so you can write with the stylus and have it turn to text! also an on screen keyboard.

In other words, this machine does not have Windows XP Tablet PC Edition installed. And that means it's not a Tablet PC.

Unlike the ebay seller above, Fujitsu knows better. They call this particular machine a 3500 Tablet, not a Tablet PC. Meanwhile, they call their ST5000 model a Tablet PC. And the difference, as you might have guessed, is that the 3500 has Windows 2000 installed, while the 5000 has Windows XP Tablet PC Edition installed.

Now you might say, "Tablet, Tablet PC... What's the difference? What's the big deal?" Well, to understand what the big deal is, you have to understand the purpose of trademarks, a subject which is often misunderstood (even by people who should know better). If owner A has a trademark on the word "SKDLF", that means that manufacturer B is forbidden from calling his similar product "SKDLF". Now in a country which enshrines freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution, why should we countenance such a restriction on what manufacturer B can say? Why should we restrict manufacturer B's freedom of speech for the protection of owner A?

And there is where the misunderstanding comes in: trademark law is not about protecting the owners of the trademarks; it's about protecting the consumers from confusion. It's about ensuring that when consumer C buys a product labeled "SKDLF", he's buying a real "SKDLF". The relevant standard in determining whether a trademark has been infringed is called likelihood of confusion. (This is why Ron Coleman, a trademark lawyer whose writings I always find interesting, calls his blog Likelihood of Confusion.) A famous example of this principle was a case in which a floor mat manufacturer was found not to be infringing Ford's trademark by selling a floor mat with the Ford logo. Not just the name, the actual logo! In deciding the case, the court essentially said that "No consumer will ever confuse this floor mat with a Ford car." If trademark law were about protecting the trademark owner, Ford would have won this case; but instead, the court judged based on the rights of the consumer, and the floor mats were allowed.

So is the ebay seller violating Microsoft's trademark? I don't know, I'm not a trademark judge. The only relevant trademark they have registered is Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. So in a literal sense, the listing is not in violation.

But by the likelihood of confusion standard? Oh, yeah, that's a violation. And I have the letter from Ben Day as Exhibit A. He's interested in a good deal on a Tablet PC (I can claim some small credit for that, I think, since I gush endlessly about mine), and he considered buying the listed item, based on the misleading title. In other words, he was confused. That's not just a likelihood, it's an established fact.

And if Ben had bought the machine and then tried to run any sort of Tablet PC software, he would find that the software wouldn't even run on that machine. If Ben weren't a knowledgeable buyer, he might even complain to the software manufacturers about the quality of their products, all because an ebay seller sold him an item under an inaccurate title.

And since one of those products that won't run on that non-Tablet-PC is Tablet UML, I take the inaccurate title rather personally. I already get questions from users who want to run Tablet UML on regular laptops (the answer is still no), and I don't want to see more of those questions just because somebody used an inaccurate title.

And yes, I did inform the seller directly, though he hasn't had time to respond yet. This confusion is pretty common, and is likely not his fault. It's an education issue: people need to learn that a pen alone does not make a Tablet PC. So I used his inaccurate title as a springboard to spread the word.

It's a little late to announce this — particularly since the class is full — but it's worth mentioning for future reference. The Richard Hale Shaw Group is presenting our Visual Studio Team System class at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, MA, with me as lead instructor.

We're also trying to find another chance for me to present Ink in 60 Seconds while I'm there.

I love maps. As much as I love words, I love maps. Every time I see a map, I see stories. I see places to go, places where things can happen, places to meet interesting people.

This goes back at least as far as when I first opened The Hobbit and discovered that wonderful fold-out map of Wilderland; but I'm sure it goes back farther than that. In fact, I would have to say it probably starts with my grandmother and step-grandfather, who gave me a great big pile of old National Geographics. I don't know about NG today; but back then, NG occasionally included some fold-out map that tied into one of the stories inside. I had maps of every continent and various countries. I had maps of Antarctica. Some of my favorites where maps of the various ocean floors, showing the continental shelves and the midoceanic ridges. I even had maps of Mars and the Moon. It just fascinated me to have these maps of places that most people had never seen.

And as a gamemaster, I need maps. Oh, I'll draw my own when I have time. I'll draw them by hand, using Windows Journal; or if I want something more ambitious, I'll draw them with ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer 2, a somewhat cumbersome but amazingly powerful mapping program designed for gamers.

But sometimes I just need a map that I know is out there. Especially when I'm planning a historical or modern game, it seems like a waste of my time to go drawing maps that somebody has already drawn. I don't have time for that. So for modern games, especially modern games set in the USA, I've come to rely on Microsoft MapPoint. But for historical games, MapPoint has some problems: the borders have changed, and most of the cities and streets have changed drastically as well. MapPoint has very limited use in a 17th century game, other than coastal outlines.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection maintained by the University of Texas at Austin. They maintain a wide collection of online maps, including a great collection of historical maps. My gaming group is probably heading to 17th century Europe soon; and my job just got a lot easier. Thanks, UT!

Visitors to TabletUML.com shouldn't notice any difference (I hope); but as I predicted, I have abandoned my former Web host, Webstrike Solutions, in favor of Server Intellect. SI had loads of favorable feedback, particularly from fellow Microsoft MVPs in the ASP.NET group. Those are the people I would turn to with a really hard ASP.NET problem, and many of them just love SI.

I honestly had no problem with Webstrike's ASP.NET support; but lost emails were costing me time and money, and I just couldn't tolerate that.

Along with TabletUML.com, I moved over my other domain (MartinLShoemaker.com), along with my buddy Tom's site, L & M Precision. And so far, I couldn't be happier.

This post is actually for my buddy Epee Bill. Over the years, Bill has learned that all of my favorite stories end with "And eventually, I married her." In fact, I can now simply say, "And eventually...", and Bill can fill in the rest of the story for himself. But I realized that Bill still had heard only part of the story: that I knew of a case of a girl and a boy who made my stories look like almost random chance by comparison.

And so I thought Bill would appreciate this story; but then I also thought that I should put it here. As I recently wrote in another context: "When you say or write something nice about someone, it's simple respect that you should let them know. We always go out of our way to make our complaints heard, but how loud do we make our praises?" So the story is ostensibly for Bill; but it's also for two people who are very important to me.

The boy was born in late January at what was then Grand Rapids Osteopathic Hospital. The girl was born two weeks later in the same hospital: not in the same month, but in the same zodiac sign, for those of you who pay attention to such things. He was pretty much his parents' last chance at a child, after a number of tragic miscarriages. She was a complete surprise to her parents, who thought they were done having kids after her three brothers.

Their families lived about three miles apart in the same township and school district; but that district favored small feeder schools rather than a single large elementary school. So they went to different schools; but if he had lived six doors farther east, they would've gone to the same school. I should know: I went to the same school as her (she is my sister, after all); and a certain lady I've known for just a few years lived six or so doors east from him, and went to our school. (The lady still tells stories of how another of the girl's brothers came to visit their school picnic on his Arab pony; and the lady never misses a chance to see a horse, so she was right at the front to see the Arab, a feisty pony who refused to ever be second across the finish line. So imagine her delight when, twenty years later, she became the caregiver for that same horse — through marriage, of course, because eventually...)

The girl's brothers were both in Scouts, and her dad was a Scout leader. The boy's cousins (who all lived on the same street as him) were all in Scouts, and his uncle was a Scout leader. He was also briefly in the Scouts. So they probably ran into each other at Scout events (though the brother honestly doesn't remember him back then — two years is a huge age difference when you're ten).

Later, her dad's company closed their Grand Rapids plant, and he had to search for new work. He ended up at American Seating, where the boy's dad already worked. The dads had already known each other for years (since her dad never met a stranger). So naturally, the families ended up sitting together at a company picnic. Her brother still remembers the boy as being vaguely a pest, because the brother was in a bad mood that day (though he can't remember why), and the boy was in a rather boisterous mood; but the boy and the girl seemed to have lots of fun.

But in high school, the brother got to know the boy much better, and found a really good friend. They were both on the track team; and the boy and some friends decided to join the judo class taught by the two brothers. And unlike his friends, who were all into flash and dazzle, the boy took his judo seriously. (Today he's a certified Tai Chi instructor.) Since he was too young to drive and lived so close, he came to their house and rode with the brothers. And he started hanging out more often when he joined the brother's D&D group. They met in the brother's basement, and the girl often spectated and sometimes participated. The brother learned that the boy is one of the only people who reads even more than he does, and never forgets what he reads. The boy also has an incredibly annoying ability to practically read the brother's mind and leap straight to the mystery behind an adventure. Everyone always laughs at his speculations, but he's usually right. (And today, his son seems to have inherited the ability, which annoys the brother to no end.)

But then the brother went off to college, and the D&D broke off, except for occasional visits. So the boy took over as gamemaster; but the boy and girl also found other occasions to hang out. And then on one visit home, the boy asked the brother what he thought the girl might say if he asked her out. And the brother responded: "I think she'll say, 'Finally!' She has been wondering how long you were going to wait." The boy left in her locker a rose and an invitation to a dance; and they went to pretty much every high school function after that. One teacher actually told the girl's mother he was worried by this: the boy was barely a C student, and the girl was an A student, and the teacher was afraid he would distract her and drag her grades down. The mother said she knew the boy, and she knew her daughter, and she trusted them to be responsible. (The boy went on to attend a tough local college and get a chemistry degree with very respectable grades, and is now employed both as a chemist and as a blood center tech. Sometimes mothers can see what teachers can't.)

During the first Christmas of their college years, he proposed, and she accepted. Her mother's response: "Well, you'd better marry him. Otherwise, we'll have to adopt him, because he's already part of the family." (This despite the fact that he had bent her brother's knee backwards in judo the year before. Sometimes mothers can forgive just about anything. And to be fair, the brother probably shouldn't have been so stubborn, and should've let the throw go through. But "stubborn" is one of his defining characteristics.)

But everyone agreed that it made sense to wait until they were out of school and in good jobs, so they had a long engagement. In the mean time, they paid for various living expenses by both working at Toys R Us. (Her brother told a friend about this job — a certain lady he had known for some years — and the lady decided that toys sounded a lot more fun than burgers. She applied there and was hired right away; and since she and the girl were both talented artists and had shared art classes in school, and since she had been an aide for the wrestling coach and the boy had been a wrestler, everyone got along famously. And eventually...)

So it was over four years later when, on an uncharacteristically dry and sunny day in early May, they wed; but really, what's four years compared to the twenty-three years their lives had already intertwined? (And the girl made her brother doubly proud by inviting one of her former classmates and coworkers to stand with him in the wedding part. And eventually — a little over a year later, in fact — he returned the favor.)

And so my sister gave me a new brother: an old friend who is one of the only people I know who reads more than me, who never forgets what he reads, and who can unravel my most complex game plots in a single inductive leap. I have a famously huge ego, and there aren't many people I will concede might know more than I do; but she and he are both on that list. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think. Sometimes he makes me infuriated, but that's what family does. And eventually, they gave me a nephew who may be smarter than both of them, and who has inherited his father's intuitive abilities; and a niece who is delightfully, proudly weird, who will never have any trouble being her own person, and who may actually love school more than her uncle did (talk about weird).

And eventually, she married him. It runs in the family.

So my sister-in-law Lynette, along with her husband Robert and son Wyatt, sent me a belated birthday card with a Best Buy gift card enclosed. And after my last birthday shopping expedition, I knew exactly where to head when I got to the store: the music section, and specifically the Putumayo titles. I agonized over their choices, finally settling on Putumayo Presents: Cajun. I was looking for something lively, and it's hard to get more lively than Cajun music. I've only heard samples of this CD so far (been too busy working and posting tonight); but I already love what I've heard. (You too can hear samples here.) This is another disk that I can listen to from time to time, and think of the relatives who made it possible. Thanks, Lynette, Robert, and Wyatt!

And there's a bonus: the lyrics are almost completely French (albeit Cajun style French). So there's one more incentive to keep up my French lessons!

While I was at Barnes & Noble last week (picking up Pimsleur Instant Conversation French), I picked up two other Putumayo disks: Mediterranean Odyssey: Athens to Andalucia and A Jewish Odyssey. I've been too busy with travel, business, and French to listen to the latter yet, other than samples. It has some klezmer-style songs, and also some songs with sort of a Middle Eastern style. And yet there are other songs on there which are reminiscent of classical Spanish works, including Spanish guitar (a favorite style of mine). And yet other pieces sound almost Slavic or Eastern European in tone. It's like you can hear the whole Diaspora in these songs.

And as for Mediterranean Odyssey, I listened to this on a trip to visit my in-laws. And what I found interesting in this one was how, even though the songs came from different cultures along the Mediterranean, there were familiar sounds that echoed from one song to another. The songs aren't alike, but bits of one will often remind you of bits of another.

So while A Jewish Odyssey showed musical variation within one cultural tradition spread out across different nations and times, Mediterranean Odyssey shows common musical elements shared by many different cultures that happen to be joined in commerce and other interchange by the Mediterranean Sea.

Building on my preceding post, I have what may be an obvious observation to some, but is quite enlightening to me: I'll bet that you can tell a lot about the historical interactions and progressions and travels of different peoples by looking at their languages and their music, and seeing what they have in common, what they borrow from each other, and how they respond to each other. Add in comparative literature and religion, and I'll bet you get a vastly more intimate view of history than you will just by looking at major events. These elements of a culture are shaped by the day-to-day interaction with other cultures, not just by wars and such.

Oh, and food. Gotta throw food in there. I have long suspected that I could draw a direct line of food relation from Japanese to Hunan Chinese to Szechuan Chinese to Thai to Indian to Persian to Middle Eastern to Turkish to Romanian to Greek to Italian. Yes, I've missed a few steps in there; but I've had all of those cusisines, and I haven't had any of the missing cuisines (Pakistani, Afghani, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and probably others). But what I find delightful (again, if obvious) is how two cuisines that I find similar in flavor and style will usually be close together in geography. It says something about the migration of people and ideas and traditions. I'm nowhere near enough of a scholar to really explore these interconnections, but I still find them fascinating.

So in preparation for my trip to Montreal, I asked my sister-in-law Lynette for help with a simple French apology, since she had taken French in college. She refused to help, based on one really important fact: in French, it's all about the accent. In this simple phrase...

Je ne comprends pas le français. (I don't understand French.)

...at least 7 out of 26 letters are either barely spoken or else completely silent. (At least to American ears. Linguists have demonstrated that before a certain age, children can hear and recognize phonemes from every human language; but as they start to develop language skills, they lose the ability to discern phonemes that aren't in their native language. Weird, huh?) That's over 25% of the letters that aren't pronounced. A written French phrase pronounced as an American would sound out the letters is almost completely unintelligible to a French speaker. Here is, as best I can transliterate, how that phrase should be properly spoken in French:

Zh' n' compra pah-l fra'say.

Even that is too fully voiced: the r's in comprends and français are so softly voiced as to be almost w-like or h-like. When I hear a native pronounce those words, I can tell I'm getting them wrong; but I can't quite make my mouth get them right.

And here is how an unknowing American might pronounce that phrase, based on its written form:

Gee nee comprends pass lee frankaze.

So Lynette was right: it's all about the accent. Well, not all, but quite a lot. She recommended that I go to Barnes and Noble and pick up some of their French language CDs. She said that she had some good luck with their Russian tapes; and she further said that the audience wouldn't expect too much out of me, but would appreciate me making the effort. (And she was right.)

But I'm kind of picky when it comes to language instruction. I've heard from many sources I trust a lot that Pimsleur is the way to go when you want to get functional in a language quickly. And having tried some Pimsleur in the past, I found it to be pretty good at conversational fluency. It works on a few core principles. One is brevity. Their research says that more than 30 minutes of study per day won't do you any good, because your brain saturates. Another principle is anticipation: where some language instruction methods work by having you repeat phrases, Pimsleur introduces the phrases and then later asks you questions, where the phrases are the answers. There is some repetition, but there's a lot more anticipation. And they like to blindside you: you'll be in the middle of lesson 3, and they'll ask you a question from lesson 2 or 1. And what's surprising to me is how often I'll know the answer when the question is asked out of the blue like that.

So imagine my delight when I learned that the Barnes and Noble disks are Pimsleur disks. I had no reservations after I saw that, and I bought them immediately.

I've been listening to these disks and working the lessons for about a week now; and though they didn't keep me from embarrassing myself in Montreal (a speaker who won't embarrass himself for the audience's amusement just doesn't understand the power of cheap laughs), I honestly feel like I understand more French today than I do Russian — and I spent two long, miserable, interminably frustrating years studying Russian in college. In fact, my Russian experience convinced me that I have almost no aptitude for languages; and yet now thanks to Pimsleur Instant Conversation French, I'm actually having fun learning a language. That's a new experience for me.

Now there is a downside to Pimsleur: it's based exclusively on spoken language, not written. The emphasis is on conversation first, just like children learn their native tongue. The problem with that, though, is that I honestly think I can already comprehend a lot of written French better than I can understand spoken French. Why? Because again: it's all about the accent with spoken French; but there's no accent in written French. When I look at that phrase...

Je ne comprends pas le français.

...I can see a lot in it. The "ne" implies negative (though I would never have guessed that "pas" also implies negative, and I would never have guessed that a language would commonly use two negative indicators in a single phrase). "Comprends" all but screams "comprehends". "Le" is "the", even I know that. And similarly, I've heard "français", but I probably could have figured it out regardless.

But when I hear the phrase...

Zh' n' compra pah-l fra'say.

...there's almost nothing there that I can recognize. "Fra'say" is about it.

Why do I understand so much of the written phrase? Well, I first learned the answer in a fascinating old PBS documentary, The Story of English, that first aired when I was in high school. (And boy, I'm thrilled to learn that's available on DVD! When crap like this makes it to DVD, it makes me worry about the future of a society that actually wants to dredge up such programs; but then when I learn that this amazing PBS documentary is also available, it gives me new hope.) Hosted by Robert MacNeil, this series provides an overview of the history of the English language. As much as I jumped on the Cosmos bandwagon with the rest of the geeks, The Story of English was actually a more significant PBS series in my life. Cosmos just told me more about the scientific world view that I already held; but The Story of English opened up a whole new world view for me, the world of linguistics, of language as history. One of the many things that had fascinated me about The Lord of the Rings was how Professor Tolkien had invented all of his own languages, and how he had in fact written his "histories" (in part) as a way to explain how the languages became what they were. Suddenly, The Story of English made me see that that was exactly how real world languages work: the language is what the history led it to be.

And then I learned the answer again from Professor Thomas E. Toon, one of the two best professors I ever had at the University of Michigan. (The other was Professor George Piranian, who I'm delighted to see is still listed on the Emeritus faculty of the Math department. Some day, I have to write down my George stories...) Professor Toon roped me in with a class on Tolkien. I mean, come on! Tolkien! I read Tolkien's books over a dozen times before college. It had to be an easy A, right? Well, it wasn't easy, but it was a lot of fun; and that was due in equal parts to Professor Toon's knowledge and to his wit. (When his son was born, he posted a notice in the English department for a "Name That Toon" contest.) And so when I saw the listing for his English 301 class, The Power of Words, I couldn't resist. Here was a class on one of my favorite subjects (the history of English) taught by one of my favorite professors. I had to take it. And I enjoyed every minute of it, despite the fact that my papers were graded by a rather humorless TA who just didn't appreciate my style. (For an assignment on humorous language, I wrote the whole thing in a format that consisted of block-quoted jokes, each followed by a one-paragraph essay inspired by the joke; and then the jokes and paragraphs were arranged in such a way as to form a larger rhetorical point. It would've made a brilliant magazine article, I'm telling you, with the jokes as call-outs and the text as responses. But the TA felt that the jokes should've appeared in-line within the paragraphs, and the paper should've been structured in a more traditional, more academic style. Terminally stuffy, I swear. No imagination, no sense of style at all!) I just kept writing my papers my way, regardless. And I felt vindicated when Professor Toon returned my final paper to me, said some very kind words about it, and gave me a retroactive A for four papers. That final paper — a rather prescient essay (if I do say so myself) on how the evolution of computer terminology and its expansion into general use is a microcosm of the evolution of the English language itself — is still kicking around my office somewhere. After Professor Toon's praise, I just can't let that essay go. (And after all that, I still went into computer programming instead of English. It's a disease, I tell you!)

So after those two rather lengthy digressions (if you don't want digressions, you've come to the wrong blog), what's the answer? For that matter, you may have forgotten what the question was by now, so I'll reiterate. Why can I more easily understand written French than spoken French? The accent is what makes the spoken French harder for me, of course; but what makes the written French easier than, say, written Russian? No, it's not the alphabet, though that's a good guess: Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which

Stop, Martin, stop! Please, please stop! Just get to the answer!

All right, all right, I'll stop digressing (yeah, right). The answer is the Norman invasion of 1066, in which William the Conqueror led a Norman force to conquer and occupy England. And when the Normans became the central government, the Anglo-Norman language became the official language of government. And since the English upper class wanted to curry favor with their new rulers, it became the language of the upper class as well.

And since Anglo-Norman is closely tied to French, that means that the English language gained some very strong French influences. In fact, English became something of a bifurcated language, with two words often standing for one concept: a word for the elite, and a word for the commoners. Professor Toon liked to point out examples from food, since food was one thing the two strata of society had in common: the commoners raised it, and the commoners and the elite both ate it. Thus...

• We raise cows, but we eat beef (from boeuf).


• We raise pigs, but we eat pork (from porc).


• We raise chickens, but we eat poultry (from poulet — though "chicken" is used on American menus a lot more often than is "cow" or "pig").

And so on. There are countless examples where English has two words for one concept, and the more "elite" word is derived very clearly from French. I know it might offend the pride of some Brits; but the language of their aristocracy has an awful lot of French in it to this day. And since American English derives from British English, the same is true here.

See? Language as history. Exactly what Mr. MacNeil and Professor Toon (and even Professor Tolkien) were trying to teach: language is never static (unless it's dead: nobody's inventing any new words or grammatical structures in Latin these days); and as a language changes and grows, it reflects the history and changes of the people who speak it. That, my friends, is very fascinating to me. It is a fundamental insight that changed my view of so much of the world, and still colors my approach to all sorts of topics. It made me, like Professor Tolkien and Professor Toon, a philologist: a lover of words, as Professor Toon explained. (Though the etymology is a little confusing: "philo" = lover + "logos" = knowledge leads to "lover of words"? But apparently "logos" also has a secondary connotation of "speech" or "words".) Oh, I'm strictly amateur in the subject. I have more of a Trivial Pursuit level of linguistics knowledge than any real academic knowledge. But still, the ideas fascinate me, and stick with me, and matter a lot to me. (Witness the length of this post!)

And as an amateur philologist and something of an avid reader, I like to think I have both a sizable English vocabulary and at least some familiarity with the sources for many words. I can recognize some degree of French roots, and Latin roots, and Germanic roots. (I can even sometimes recognize Slavic roots, thanks to those two years of Russian; but those are pretty uncommon in English.) But as those roots have been adopted, they have changed. As English has grown, it has modified in one direction; and meanwhile, despite the best efforts of l'Académie (hehehe), French has grown as well, but often in different directions. From my outsider's view, it sounds like the French language has evolved toward efficiency, toward saying more with fewer sounds by deemphasizing and even eliminating extraneous sounds in the words. The result sounds somewhat liquid or even melodious to me.

So when I see written French, it strikes a chord: I recognize a lot that's there, even though I'm still just beginning my study. But when I hear spoken French, that liquid efficiency undercuts all my knowledge. Sometimes when I hear a sentence on the Pimsleur disks, I have this strange feeling that if I just saw it written down, I would puzzle out the meaning. Practically the first sentence Pimsleur teaches is "Je comprends le français." (I understand French.) Three out of the four words there I can puzzle out with little effort when they're written down: "comprends", "le", and "français". That leaves only one word, "je"; and it's short, and I remember that short words are usually simple, fundamental concepts. In this place, I would guess a pronoun: he, she, you, or I. From movies and books, I know that you is "vous", so I would be left with three choices. I'm betting that I would guess I from context.

But "Zh' compra-l fra'say"? When I hear that, there's nothing I can easily pick out, especially when the speaker speaks at a normal conversational speed — and especially with those softly voiced r's. The first time I heard it, it sounded like "Zhucompal fra'say." All the English vocabulary in the world doesn't help me to recognize that.

So while I'm enjoying the Pimsleur disks, I'm supplementing them a lot. In particular, Babel Fish is my friend: it has done most of the heavy lifting of translating for my Ink in 60 Seconds talk, and for this post. I usually listen to the Pimsleur lessons while I'm driving; but when there's something I just can't get, I translate it on Babel Fish later, and it often clears up the confusion.

I think when I get a little farther along, I'll try to pick up some French books (or maybe comic books). I'll say it again: for the first time, I'm actually having fun learning a language. I know I'll get busy with a lot of things, and it will be hard to stay with this; but I hope I can manage it. It would be nice to say that I finally learned another language.

Hehehehehehehehehehehehe! (Warning! The movie in that link may be loud, and may also cause embarrassment if your coworkers hear it.) Oh, if living well is the best revenge, then Mr. Shatner is truly enjoying a dish best served cold (to mix some metaphors and throw in an obscure Star Trek reference).

And yet I suspect he's not. Seriously. Under the comic, self-effacing front, I suspect that he's a restless, insecure man who's never satisfied. Or at least that's the impression I get from these lyrics (some of the more somber lyrics from his latest album):

When is the mountain scaled?
When do I feel I haven't failed?
I have to get it together, man.
It hasn't happened yet.
It hasn't happened yet.
It hasn't happened.
People come and say hello.
OK, I can get to the front of the line,
But you have to ignore the looks.
And yet --
I'm waiting for that feeling of contentment
That ease at night when you put your head down and the rhythm slow to sleep.
My heads sways and eyes start awake.
I'm there not halfway between sleep and death.
But looking into,
Eyes wide open,
Trying to remember
What I might have done,
Should've done.
At my age, I need serenity.
I need peace.
It hasn't happened yet.
It hasn't happened yet.
It hasn't happened yet.
It hasn't happened.

Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe! Oh, that is just perfect! I tell you, the man knows how to milk his own reputation.

Oh, and I finally got a chance to watch this show (i.e., the History Channel special linked above) yesterday. And I have to tell you, it's pretty close to on target. Oh, it stretches the point a bit; but really, Star Trek has been a big influence now on two to three generations of geeks who became engineers, doctors, astronauts, and scientists. It helped ignite and maintain that sense of wonder that makes us believe we can do things if we try hard enough, and we'll do them through our brains and our creativity. Oh, the world will still laugh at us; but they'll do so while paying big bucks for the technologies we produce. And the grim-and-gritty crowd will still complain how technology never really solved anything and only makes things worse; but whereas in the past, they would have scribbled their Luddite fantasies on papyrus with crude ink, today they'll post those fantasies on blog sites — and never once appreciate the irony of that.

Oh, and Mr. Shatner is very amusing throughout the whole special. He has developed ironic self-effacement into a high art.

So while I was in Montreal, two different restaurant menus that I saw listed an item called "Hamburger Michigan". Now I have to tell you: I've lived in Michigan all my life; and as far as I know, there's nothing unusual about how we serve hamburgers here.

So I was curious; but other things on the menu tempted me. I didn't want to end up with either a plain hamburger or something unrecognizable. So instead, I had a gyro platter from Kostas Souvlakis for Wednesday dinner, and a smoked meat sandwich (another popular menu item) at Orly's Restaurant (can't find a Web site for that one). The gyro was one of the finest I've ever had (so good that I called them back to offer my compliments to the chef, and I've never done that before), and the smoked meat was tasty; so I don't mind my choices. But that still left me curious.

And a Web search left me even more curious, because a search for "Hamburger Michigan" turns up incredibly few hits. A Google search for the exact phrase turns up only 71 hits. (Of course, that will be 72 when Google gets around to indexing this entry.) And most of the ones that it does turn up are restaurant menus. Most of those in French. Most of those from restaurants in Montreal. And none of them define what Hamburger Michigan is. It must be one of those things that if you're from Montreal, you just know, and nobody need bother to explain (I'll bet he would know); and if you're not from Montreal, you would never have heard of it, and so you would never think to ask.

The best possible answer that I found came from all the way down on the third page of the Google search. It led me to an entry on Cooks.com. Now the entry had moved over time; but a search on Cooks.com led to these entries for "Michigan Sauce". They all seem to be recipes for what sound like sloppy-joe-like sauces of tomato paste and crumbled hamburger, to be served on hamburgers or hotdogs. (Meat sauce on meat. Go figure...)

I also found a comment thread somewhere (but now I can't find it again, naturally) where people discussed Michigan Sauce and traded recipes on it. No one there seemed to know why it might be called that.

So I'm at a loss. Is this what they mean by Hamburger Michigan? I guess I'll have to go back to Montreal to find out. Why have I lived 43 years in Michigan and never even heard of it before now? And why is it called that? That may be one of those rare answers that just isn't to be found on the Web.

And while I was in Montreal, I was in fact presenting right on the very edge of McGill University. The Microsoft office there is in fact only a block away from the University on Avenue McGill College. So I was rather amused to be presenting there.

What's that? You mean you've never heard of McGill University? What sort of a geek are you? Don't you recognize the alma mater of one of the icons of the geek world? Doesn't everyone know where he went to school? Well, OK, I didn't until the Biography Channel ran an episode on him, which included a cross-country bus ride to McGill. That was shortly after he won his first Emmy. First, meaning he won another one. Some people say, "I don't mind. They're not laughing at me, they're laughing with me." Other people say, "You're a fool. They're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you." He seems to be saying, "Let them laugh, as long as I get to work. And I'll have the last laugh, all the way to the bank." He has made a third (or is it fourth? or fifth?) career out of mocking himself the way his critics have mocked him in the past; and he's still working, while many of them are still going nowhere. Or as the man himself says:

I've heard of you
The ready-made connecting with the ever-ready
Yeah
The never was talking about still trying
I got it
Forever bitter gossiping about never say die
May I inquire what you've been doing mister?
Jack
Never done Jack
And you partner, what's the News of the World, Dick?
I don't say dick
Don, of all the people you must be the Tattler
Two thumbs up
What are you afraid of?
Failure?
So am I
Has been implies failure
Not so
Has been is history
Has been was
Has been might again

I can only hope that at his age I can still be working in my field and having a ball doing it. And if people laugh at me, I hope I have the grace to laugh along and the wits to turn it into an opportunity.

Unfortunately, my pilgrimage wasn't quite complete. I didn't make it to this place. Oh, well. The name's not official, anyway. McGill just calls it the University Centre. But I have to believe he finds it more amusing this way.

This is a little late, because I've been doing post travel stuff, and then getting ready for the new VSTS class coming up. To the fine folks in Montreal, I say: Pardonnez-moi, svp, mes amis!

So on Wednesday night in Montreal, I gave my presentation to GUMSNET: Ink in 60 Seconds. Despite my rather hideous attempt to apologize in French for not being able to speak French, they were most gracious hosts. (And darn it! I rehearsed that apology over a dozen times on the trip, until I had it down pat; and then I fell apart when I actually had to give it. Here's what I meant to say: Bon soir, monsieurs! Mon nom est Martin L. Shoemaker, et je ne comprends pas le français. Pardon, si vous plais. Je suis un debutante en français. Mais mon Tablet PC comprend le français!)

I got caught in a lot of Montreal traffic, and also had to fight to find parking in Centre-ville, so I was just a bit late. And then my machine had to reboot. But we finally got rolling, and I started writing little Tablet PC demos, with a 60 second clock running. There were occasional laughs at my expense when I missed the 60 second mark; but on the other hand, many of the demos were done in under 30 seconds. The Tablet PC API is just that powerful. By the time we were done, we were drawing pictures, editing them, erasing them, saving them, loading them, and exporting them as images. We were also drawing shapes that the Tablet PC recognized and identified. We were converting handwriting to text, in both English and French. And we even wrote some text by hand and then had the Tablet PC speak it out loud. We finished with ten ideas for great Tablet PC apps just waiting to be written. I hope that I inspired someone in the audience to go write one.

There was one hang-up in the presentation; and I promised the good folks from GUMSNET that I would blog about it, including what I learned afterward. Late in the presentation — right about the time I tried to do handwriting recognition, when I needed really good ink collection — my wonderful Gateway CX200X Tablet PC started exhibiting dead spots that were strangely reminiscent of the bad old days of Toshiba. The dead zones weren't as consistent, but they were irritating. And they always seemed to be right where I was writing text en français to try to show off the multi-lingual power of the Tablet PC. The audience was forgiving for this, but they did insist on knowing the answer when I learned it. Well, here's what I think I have learned. I noticed that the pen seemed to behave better when I held it at different angles; and then I remembered that when we broke for dinner, I dropped the pen. And as far as I can recall, there were no dead zones before the break, only after. I suspected that maybe I had jammed something in the pen tip; and with a little experimentation, I found that rotating the pen around its axis or relative to the screen could sometimes make the dead zone go away. Suspecting a pen problem rather than a screen problem, I pulled out my spare pen. And I have had no dead zone problems since.

All in all, Montreal was a delightful place to visit, and I hope to return some day when I have a little more time to visit. And the folks at GUMSNET were a great audience. I ran about 40 minutes over time (gee, there's a surprise); and they were all alert and attentive right to the end. We would probably have stayed longer, but the Microsoft employee who was keeping the facility open for us wanted to go home!

Of course, Richard would have my hide if I didn't mention that Ink in 60 Seconds is the opening segment of our Tablet PC Programming Workshop, where you can learn all this and much, much more about building your own Tablet PC applications. In the class, you won't just watch: you'll build a full-featured Tablet PC application yourself, and learn the Tablet PC from the inside. I hope we'll be adding a public Tablet PC class to our schedule first, but you can always bring us to your site.

Spam is an annoyance. Lost email costs me business. — Josh Holmes

I'm now predicting that spam-blocking will be the death of email. Not spam, spam-blocking. This "service" is already making email less useful, and it gets worse every week.

Email was never truly guaranteed delivery, of course, but it was pretty close. And that made it a decent substitute for the telephone. In fact, it has some advantages over the telephone: it lets you compose and refine before you deliver your message, it leaves a written record for reference, and it lets both sender and recipient process at their leisure. And it has an advantage over postal mail in that it's a whole lot faster and more convenient.

But all of those advantages are worth nothing if delivery goes from "not quite guaranteed" to "it's anybody's guess whether some server in the chain is going to reject it as 'spam'". Spam-blocking is sometimes based on content filtering: if the message contains the right combination of bad words, it's blocked. But that just leads spammers to speel thoze badd wurds craetievly, in an effort to slip past the content filters.

So the blockers have adopted a broader interdiction strategy: block based on where the message comes from. But if you block based on email address, there's a problem: spammers lie. The internet protocols allow pretty much anyone who knows them to fake the sending email address, or to be anonymous in other ways. (This is just wrong, but I'm too tired for that debate right now.) And spammers are also known to create and dispose of email addresses using automated tools, so that blocking individual addresses is even harder.

So the spam-blockers have yet another new strategy: blacklisting domains where spam has originated in the past. This has already cost me time and money; and today, it's biting me again. Only last time, it was Richard Hale Shaw's server that chose to block email from a public server; today, it was my own host, Webstrike Solutions, blocking my own email. They jumped on the blacklist bandwagon in the past week; and not only do they try to "protect" me by blocking mail sent to me, but they also try to "protect" the world by blocking email from me if it seems to come through a "suspicious" domain. So I was sitting in my favorite WiFi hotspot, Panera Bread, and I sent an email message; and I got this response:



I followed the instructions provided, and got this message:

Displaying MXRate Results for Address:  64.241.37.140
Recommendation:	Suspicious - Probability that this is a spam source is 100%
Hostname:	Host name not found (0)
Organization:	SAVVIS Communications Corporation
Country of origin:	United States
First reported:	470 days, 7 hours ago.
Last reported:	0 days, 0 hours ago.
Last spam reported:	0 days, 0 hours ago.
Analysis:	Probablilty is greater than 80%

Now I'm sure that somewhere, some Panera customer did indeed send spam. I don't know if it involved forwarding messages, as in this "explanation" from MXRate:

Generally, the most common reason an IP address is falsely listed in the MXRate database is when one of your users forwards all their mail to an account on a server protected by Alligate. Unfortunately, this usually includes all the spam and viruses they receive, and your server may be identified as the sending server.

Or maybe it was a customer who had a spambot unknowingly installed on their machine. That happens sometimes with "free" software that you download, and also with viruses and such.

Or maybe even it was a deliberate spammer, using the Panera service as a way to get around some block somewhere.

But I don't care how it happened. What I care about is that this led MXRate to punish every single Panera customer for the actions of some unknown number of miscreants. Oh, the MXRate page gave me instructions for reporting an erroneous message block; but frankly, that's forcing me to do work for them because they did their job so sloppily. The simple fact is that their domain-based blocking failed, and somehow I'm supposed to fix their problem for them.

Now some will argue that this is Panera's fault: that somehow they're supposed to block the spam before it goes out. Oh, and how are they supposed to do that? Content filtering? No, we already know that doesn't work. Email address filtering? Ditto. In essence, blaming Panera is a way of trying to force them to provide — for free! — the service that MXRate is charging for providing, but is in fact failing to provide properly. It's only a matter of time before spammers send spam from every public WiFi spot, and thus public WiFi will become significantly less useful.

In statistics, they talk about Type I and Type II errors. I can never remember which is which; but one is falsely accepting a hypothesis that's untrue, and the other is falsely rejecting a hypothesis that's true. And one thing all statisticians learn is that you can never eliminate either Type I or Type II errors; and while you can make one of them less likely, you can only do so by making the other more likely. The design of experiments and sampling methods that reduces the probability of both Type I and Type II is exceedingly difficult.

Well, in the email world, the blockers have decided to "solve" the spam problem by making the "guaranteed delivery" problem worse. "Spam is an annoyance. Lost email costs me business," to quote Josh Holmes. When email stops being guaranteed, I'm going to have to conduct business by telephone. But before I go that far, I'm going to try a simpler approach: Webstrike is going to turn off this "service" on my account, or I'll find a host that will.

Update: Scarcely had I posted this when MXRate updated their list for Panera, and they started letting my messages out. Kudos to them for fast service! But I don't think that changes the fundamental problem. What happens next week, when I go to Beaners, or Espresso Royale, or McDonald's, or the Gerald R. Ford International Airport, or Comfort Inn, or Starbucks, or Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or MicroTel, or Exel Inn, or Hampton Inn, or Hawthorne Suites, or London Grill, or any of the other places where I rely on WiFi as part of the value of the business? Am I going to have to go through this rigamarole at every single hotspot I use? No, thank you! Webstrike and MXRate aren't providing me a service, they're giving me a job — and I'm paying them for the privilege. That's unacceptable.

Blacklists are not the solution to spam. Spam is an annoyance. Lost email costs me business.

Update II: Now Webstrike is blocking outgoing messages to anyone. I sent a complaint to Josh, who administers my site, and immediately got this bounce message:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: FW: YOUR SPAM DIGEST FOR TODAY
Sent: 3/17/2006 6:09 PM

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

'Josh Holmes' on 3/17/2006 6:10 PM

450 Try again later

And the subject of that complaint? Well, see, the new spam-blocker is supposed to send me a daily digest of blocked messages, so that I can unblock them. So far today, they have sent five "daily" digests to one account, and four to another. And they also sent one to Richard, letting him know that they have helpfully blocked a message from me, and giving him cryptic and tedious instructions for how to unblock it.

And since I can't email this complaint to Josh, I'm reduced to the telephone, as I predicted. Except Josh isn't answering his phone. Maybe I'll get lucky and he'll read this post.

Oh, and just to show how completely incompetent the spam blocker is: the one thing that's definitely still getting through to my email boxes is lots and lots and lots of spam.

I like to think I'm a patient man, but my patience has reached its limit. Webstrike will immediately drop all spam "protection" from my domains, both incoming and outgoing, or I'll immediately switch to a new host. And if I find they have cost me anything more than lost time, I'll be holding them liable for the loss.

So why aren't you writing Tablet PC applications with .NET yet?

Do you think it's too difficult? Do you think you're too busy to learn the Tablet PC API? Well, I say you're wrong.

Or do you just not see what sort of Tablet PC app you might build? Do you think that there's no great Tablet PC applications out there for you? Well, I say you're wrong again.

And I'm so sure you're wrong, I'm going to prove it to you at the Groupe d'utilisateurs de l'archutecture Microsft .Net de Montreal by building some simple little Tablet PC samples — samples you can easily adapt into your own applications — each written in under 60 seconds. (Note: In order to meet that time limit, I'll be writing these in C#, the language I know best. Every single one of these demos could be written in 60 seconds in VB.NET, but only by a better VB programmer than me!)

Then after each sample is running, I'll explain to you what I did, how I did it, and how you might expand on it. Some of the samples I'll build include:

• 60 Seconds to Ink: Capturing Ink in a window in your application.


• 60 Seconds to Ink Anywhere: Capturing Ink in any window in your application.


• 60 Seconds to Programmatic Ink: Adding Strokes programmatically to an Ink surface.


• 60 Seconds to Saving Ink: Saving your drawings.


• 60 Seconds to Loading Ink: Loading your drawings.


• 60 Seconds to Saving Some Ink: Saving part of a drawing.


• 60 Seconds to Loading Some Ink: Loading a drawing into an existing drawing.


• 60 Seconds to Exporting Ink: Savinging your drawings as images you can share with non-Tablet PC users.


• 60 Seconds to Selecting, Moving, and Resizing: Manipulating the Ink that you draw.


• 60 Seconds to Erasing: Erasing the Ink that you draw.


• 60 Seconds to Drawing Attributes: Drawing with multiple colors, transparent Ink, and different shapes and sizes of pens.


• 60 Seconds to Clipboarding: Really simple Ink clipboard functionality — and why it doesn't work!


• 60 Seconds to Simple Handwriting Recognition: Simple handwriting in a form.


• 60 Secondes au Français: Identification d'écriture en français.


• 60 Seconds to More Handwriting Recognition: Handwriting recognition mixed with typing.


• 60 Seconds to Handwriting Recognition Anywhere: Handwriting recognition from any Ink surface.


• 60 Secondes à Plus Français: Plus d'identification d'écriture en français.


• 60 Seconds to Text-to-Speech: A simple talking application.

And just in case those samples don't inspire you to devise a great new Tablet PC application, I'll finish the presentation by spending 60 seconds (probably more) describing each of ten different killer Tablet PC applications that I'm just too busy to write myself, but which I think somebody should be writing.

So fasten your seat belts. This is gonna be one heck of a fast ride!

And no, I'm not doing this talk just for the free pizza from INETA and the free trip to Montreal. I certainly hope that some of the attendees are so excited that they'll want to take our Tablet PC Programming workshop, where we'll go places you just can't reach in 60 seconds.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, today we have a very rare sighting indeed. So rare, in fact, that some of you younger readers may never have witnessed its like before. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about an almost extinct species: the full service gas station. The BP station at 2400 28th St SW, Grand Rapids, MI 49509 actually has no self-service pumps. A young man pumps the gas, washes your windows, checks your oil if asked, takes your money, and gives you your change. You never leave your car, and you never get gasoline on your hands.

You young folks may be further surprised to learn that at one point, all gas stations were like this!

Now such service is not without its cost: the gasoline cost 15 cents per gallon more than at the Speedway across the street. But if you know the area and know what traffic is like at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, you'll understand why I was willing to pay extra to not try to cross the street in that mess.

So I was wandering through Barnes & Noble. My in-laws had sent me a $20 gift card for my birthday, so I figured to pick up a graphic novel. Or maybe a nice SF hardcover. I wanted something that would be a little above the ordinary, so that whenever I read it, I would think of them.

But some days, you just have no luck. Yes, there were plenty of books there that I would like to read, but nothing that really stood out as something special. And so I wandered back and forth, picking up some books, but nothing I could really point to and say, "There. I got that, thanks to you, and I'm really happy about it." I just kinda forlornly stared at covers — not at all a natural state for me in a book store, let me tell you.

But I just couldn't stay forlorn, not with that music playing in the background. It had a nice Latin beat, but kinda laid back. It was really good music. And then the next track came on: some woman singing in Portuguese, with a smooth, swinging feel reminiscent of The Girl from Ipanema. And I knew what my in-laws were getting me. I went straight to the information desk and asked: what's playing, and do you have it in stock?

And the answers were: Putumayo Presents: Brazilian Lounge; and yes, but it took a while for them to find it. I picked it up, and I'll play it for my in-laws when we visit this weekend. It's a great disk, and it was released this month, just in time for my birthday. Now when I listen to it, I'll think of them.

If you would like to learn more about world music but don't know where to start, I highly recommend Putumayo. They've done the research for you, so you don't have to. They've gathered and published great music from around the world, and so you can find these "greatest hits" on their disks. Then when you find something you like, you can use the Internet to find more by that artist. For instance, that song that caught my attention was Parece Mentira by Katia B. (You can listen to a sample here.) Then simple click on her name from the B&N site takes me to this page, where I can see that B&N carries one CD by her. (And they'd be glad to sell it to me, of course.)

So far, my Putumayo collection includes:

• Putumayo Presents: Brazilian Lounge


• Asian Groove


• The Caribbean


• French Caribbean


• Sahara Lounge


• Arabic Groove

From what I can tell, the "Groove" series features upbeat tunes often with a fusion of traditional elements and modern instruments. The "Lounge" series, meanwhile, features more mellow tunes. There's also the Playground series of kids' music. And then there are discs that don't seem to be part of any series, and cover a wide range of styles from a given culture.

Give Putuyamo a try. You'll be glad you did.

P.S. But one thing I can't find at Putuyamo is a song I heard on a world music show on public radio one night. It was the theme from Shaft, but redone with just a slight Arabic twist. It was really, really good, and I would love to track it down.

So I went back to the same restaurant. I ordered the delightful Chicken Bacon Dijon Pannini, substitute the small fruit cup; and of course, the Chai Tea Latte. The cashier priced the order right and handed me my fruit cup. Because I asked, she handed me a fork. Then when I got my sandwich, there were no chips (which was correct), but there was a fork. Bravo!

And now for a great meal while I get some work done.

OK, let me first acknowledge right up front: this project is eminently impractical. For one thing, there’s the price: replacing a paper process with at least four Origamis (plus other support hardware) is just a bit pricey. And for another thing, many of the target end users are just a bit suspicious of and even opposed to technological solutions. They think the paper processes are working just fine, thank you very much. (Though as someone who occasionally has to process their paperwork, let me tell you: it ain’t easy, and often their handwriting and habits complicate my job.)

Still, inspired by Epee Bill, I had this vision. And I really do think it would be a vast improvement over the paper processes, if people would accept it. Just imagine...

Mr. Vesper stands beside the fencing strip. In his hands is an Origami: somewhat heavier than the clipboard he once would have carried, but not much larger. On the Origami screen are the names of two fencers. He calls them: "Up next. Mr. Smith. Mr. Bolakowski." The fencers enter the strip, Smith on the right and Bolakowski on the left, and hook up to their wires. Then they present their weapons to Mr. Vesper. He tests each one, and then with his finger makes two "check" gestures on the Origami to indicate that the weapons passed inspection.

Mr. Vesper returns to the sideline and calls out: "Fencers ready..." The combatants assume their en garde positions. "Fence!" The wireless microphone he wears picks up this command and starts the fencing clock, as the fencers approach each other. (If Mr. Vesper preferred not to wear the mike, he could also start the clock by pressing a button on the Origami.) The fencers engage. Beat, beat, beat, feint, attempted parry, disengage, lunge! The scoring box lights up with one light, and Mr. Vesper calls "Halt!" Ideally, the scoring box automatically stopped the fencing clock; but since most scoring boxes aren’t capable of that, Mr. Vesper can also stop the clock via voice or button. Mr. Vesper calls the action, and then records a touch left by making a downstroke gesture in a box near Mr. Bolakowski’s name. The Origami acknowledges by announcing, "Touch, Bolakowski. Score is 1, 0." Meanwhile, the Origami uses WiFi to update the tournament server; and then the server posts the results live to the tournament’s Web site. One of the tournament workers is also wandering around between the strips, using another Origami to record live video and stream it to the server and from there to the site. Fencers and fans from all over the world can follow the tournament in real time. A tournament monitor near the bout table shows the live results. It has a touch screen (in fact, it’s really a larger Tablet PC device being used as a kiosk) so that spectators and fencers can navigate to different pages and check current standings. (This will, I hope, keep them from coming to the bout table and distracting us from our work by asking, "So if I win my next bout, who will I face after that?" Or "So is this an A tournament?" [Like I know how to answer that.] On the other hand, this system will do so much of my work, so I may have time for questions.)

Mr. Vesper repeats, "Fencers ready... Fence," and the clock and the action start again. Thrust, retreat, thrust, retreat, ballestra-lunge! And the scoring box lights up with one white light. Off target. Mr. Vesper calls the action and records the off target by making a downstroke in a different box (colored white to match the white off-target light). The Origami announces, "Off target, Bolakowski. Score is 1, 0."

"Fencers ready... Fence!" Taking a more aggressive tact, Mr. Bolakowski almost immediately leaps into a fleche. But his timing is off, and he ends up colliding with Mr. Smith. Mr. Vesper calls, "Halt! Red card." And he makes a downstroke in a third box (colored red for penalties). The Origami needs more information, so it pops up a list of possible reasons for the penalty, and Mr. Vesper checks the one that says, "Corps a corps." The Origami announces, "Red card. Bolakowski. Score is 1, 1."

Chastened, Mr. Bolakowski falls back into a more defensive mode. He and Mr. Smith trade thrusts and parries and occasional points back and forth, but the action slows. Eventually, the fencing clock runs out, and the Origami announces, "Time." Mr. Vesper calls halt, and then says, "Victory to Mr. Bolakowski, 4-3." The Origami has already figured this out for itself; but since no result is official until a director confirms it, the Origami presents the results to him. He makes a check gesture, and the official results are sent to the server and the Web. Immediately his Origami screen displays the next bout, and he calls it out: "Fencing, Emerson, Jones." Mr. Jones is not immediately available for some reason, so the Origami begins a countdown clock. If he doesn’t arrive in time, he’ll forfeit.

When the last pool bout of the event is complete, the server immediately produces a seed page and also an elimination table. It also pushes the list of elimination bouts out to the directors’ Origamis. The software on the Origamis knows that these are elimination bouts, so it changes the way it keeps time: elimination bouts run to 15 points, and are stopped every three minutes for a one minute break.

Now again, I know this is impractical, probably for more reasons than I have identified. (Flashing blades and computer equipment may be a bad combination.) And while I do think Microsoft could be interested in unusual showcases for their devices as a way to get publicity, I’m not sure that getting involved with fencing is the way to do it, at least not in America: in a country where competitive hot dog eating is actually broadcast on ESPN, fencing can’t get any air time. But boy, would I love to see it in operation! And I could write practically this whole system by myself, without a whole lot of work; and I could teach a team how to write it in under a week. I just have no confidence I’ll ever persuade anyone to let me. But I can dream...

Of course, there are other sports that could make good showcases. I’m thinking that the American biggies – football, basketball, and baseball – would make poor showcases. The fields of play are too large, and officials are too distant from the action, so no one would ever see the Origamis. So that hints at what would make a good showcase sport: one with a smaller playing field, with probably only a small number of participants (two, or maybe four), and where the officials are fairly close to the action so that the Origami will be in the camera shot quite often.

Tennis, anyone?

UPDATE: Fixed the score, thanks to Epee Bill.

So at the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing, one of the participants said (very loosely paraphrased): "You folks don't know how to market. You don't get cool. When Apple released just another MP3 player, not much different from any other, they called it iPod. That means nothing, but it's simple and catchy. It instantly creates a brand awareness, to the point where many consumers now think iPod was the first MP3 player out there. It's the only name they know. But somehow, I just know that when you finally release Windows Vista, somebody in marketing will have renamed it 'Windows Multi-Platform Operating System, Vista Edition, with Tablet Enhancements, Version 2006, Plus Extraneous Other Stuff'."

Everyone laughed, because we knew exactly what he meant. Despite what ill-informed critics say, Microsoft marketing is absolutely awful at trying to reach consumers. These are the same people who created this new brand, .NET, as a way to label all of their new managed code and Web technologies; and then proceeded to slap the .NET label onto absolutely everything in sight, so that it lost all meaning. Microsoft actually had to retreat from the .NET label in all sorts of areas. And yet now they're making the exact same mistake with the "Live" brand.

And now the worst of it, from my biased view. They actually had a cool code name for a project: Origami. Now there's a name with cool. With cachet, even. It has this connotation of something moving and intricate folded into a very small space, which is exactly the right feel for a small, light weight Tablet PC.

So what does Microsoft call it when they release it? An Ultra-Mobile PC. With that simply abominable abbreviation, UMPC. And they've just proven the guy's point: Microsoft Marketing just can't get cool, no matter how hard they try.

Well, I've decided to save them from themselves, and I want you to join me. Don't give up the Origami name. Don't use that boring label, Ultra-Mobile PC. And whatever you do, don't use that abominable abbreviation.

Microsoft just can't do this job right, no matter how great their technology is. So it's up to us.

From Mom: A travel tray for my car. Pretty clever design: it will hang from the steering wheel or from the front or back of most seats, and provides a flat, horizontal surface no matter where it hangs.

From my sister Anita, brother-in-law Buck, nephew Cory, and niece Kira: a book of space images and facts. There are some cool photos in there. Plus a couple of cheery phone calls during my travels.

From my brother Steve: a nice phone message on my voice mail. I was in outer Long Island, which is an absolute T-Mobile dead zone, so we didn't get to talk directly. (Yes, that island really is long! We were more than an hour's travel east from Manhattan, and there was still more than a third of the island to go.)

From Richard Hale Shaw and Josh Holmes: A pair of amusing e-cards.

From my training clients this week: a surprise visit to an excellent Turkish restaurant, complete with a birthday candle in a slice of baklava.

And from Sandy: Some shorts, a pair of sweats (she called this bag of gifts "the boring bag", but I can use them); and then she decided to completely ruin my productivity for a while. Not only did she get me the final Star Trek DVD set, but she also found the first season DVD collection of Adventures of Superman. I've seen bits and pieces of this series over the years, but I've really never got to just sit down and watch it. And this collection contains "Superman and the Mole Men", the theatrical film that inspired the series. I've been reading about that all my life, but never got to see it. So I can't wait!

Bonus Superman trivia: Adventures of Superman was shot in black and white (of course, since it was 1951). When they created a blue costume and ran test shots, it came across as black in B&W. So the actual costumes worn by George Reeves were all green. The only blue costumes were for public appearances.

Bonus birthday quiz: over two decades ago, I read a trilogy of books that left a really strong impression on me. I reread them multiple times, and still reread them now and then. I thought they would make great movies; and in fact, they made it to TV at one point. Two questions: how old was I when the first book finally became a major motion picture? And how many books were in the trilogy?

...but Microsoft says it so much better here. As some reports have hinted, Origami devices (now known as "Ultra-Mobile PCs") are small, light, highly portable Tablet PCs.

And for developers, there's a lot more on Ultra-Mobile PCs here.

And of course, if you want to learn how to write programs for UMPCs (boy, is that an ugly abbreviation, or what?), I would like to suggest that you start with our Tablet PC Programming Workshop. (If your organization plans to deploy a large number of UMPCs, Microsoft's SSP program recommends our course.)

UPDATE: Epee Bill (famed member of the Ann Arbor Dueling Society) asks:

And i