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.

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.

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?

So for some reason, I can't send email to Richard Hale Shaw. Sometimes I can, but mainly I can't. This makes it a lot harder for him to book UML, Tablet PC, .NET, Compact Framework, or VSTS classes for me.

With a little help from Richard and from Josh Holmes, I've gathered some diagnostic data. I have three currently active email addresses. Josh has two, and Richard has one. Using my Tablet PC, I sent a test message from each of my three email addresses to each of my three email addresses and also to Josh's two and to Richard's one. I also used my iPaq to send from two of my addresses (it's not set up for the third) to all six target addresses. And then they let me know which ones they received. Here are the results:

		Received by
		Tablet UML *	Martin L. Shoemaker *	Earthlink	Josh Holmes *	SRT Solutions	Richard Hale Shaw
From Account	From Machine
Tablet UML *	Tablet PC	X	X	X	X	X
Martin L. Shoemaker *	Tablet PC	X	X	X	X	X
Earthlink	Tablet PC	X	X	X	X	X
Tablet UML *	iPaq	X	X	X	X	X	X
Martin L. Shoemaker *	iPaq	X	X	X	X	X	X

Addresses marked with an asterisk are all on the same hosting service. I don't think it matters, but one early hypothesis was that messages were passing fine within the host but not outside it. From the table, that's clearly not true.

The one consistent pattern is that I can't send messages from my Tablet to Richard, but I can send them from my iPaq. Up until a week or two ago, I had no such problem. I can't think of anything that changed, so I'm hoping someone reading this can suggest what would block outgoing messages to one particular address.

Update: Solved, thanks to the excellent sleuthing of Josh "Sherlock" Holmes. After testing and rejecting a number of hypotheses, he dug deep into the headers of the messages from both machines; and he noticed a very large discrepancy between the Received From headers. And as soon as he pointed that out, I said, "Well, of course, they're different. The iPaq is connecting via T-Mobile GPRS, which is a 56K cell connection; but I'm at a Hampton Inn for the night, so I'm using the HHonors WiFi on the Tablet for a high speed connection."

And then, of course, a little bell in my head went dingdingdingdingding! My messages usually reach Richard just fine; but when I'm home (in that quaint little tech backwater a colleague once describes as Middle Earth), I use a T-Mobile GPRS card for my Tablet connection. So I dropped off the WiFi, jumped on the GPRS, sent Richard a message from the Tablet, and bingo! Reached him without a hitch.

Now since the messages that failed to reach Richard did reach both Josh and myself (all five email addresses between us), it seems safe to assume that HHonors isn't blocking the messages. So if there's a blockage happening, the logical conclusion is that it's on Richard's end. Richard's ISP uses some very strong, very sophisticated spam fighting tools. My hypothesis: somebody with a virus or spambot on their machine (unknown to them, of course) hooked up to HHonors once; and HHonors got on a blacklist that Richard's ISP is using. Maybe the spambot was unleashed on HHonors in general, and the whole chain is now subject to blocking; or maybe the spambot was local to this hotel, and only this hotel is being blocked. Frankly, I wouldn't know how to figure it out; and since I have a workaround, I have better things to do than chasing this down.

But this does point out a major flaw in the "blacklist" approach to spam blocking: sooner or later, infected machines are going to taint every single public WiFi access, and public WiFi will become an email dead zone for anyone relying on blacklists. In this particular case, the loss of email caused some confusion, and made it hard for us to conduct business. It also cost me a day at home: I extended my stay by a day to talk to a potential client; but since Richard never got my email, he assumed I was on my way home, and he canceled the client meeting. And there was some minor financial cost in extending that stay by a day. Not to mention the time that I and Josh and Richard spent chasing down the problem. And I only noticed the lost messages because Richard and I communicate a lot, and he expected some answers to some questions, so he called. Who else might have missed my messages? I may never know.

But in other circumstances, that loss of email could've cost us a training gig, and thousands of dollars. That's pretty expensive spam blocking.

I've long been suspicious of the blacklist "solution" to spam. I knew the cost of a false rejection could be pretty high. But that was all theory; now I've just seen the reality, with a hit to my calendar and my pocketbook.

There's a market incentive for blacklist companies to improve their accuracy; but it's a skewed incentive, because many of those affected by flawed blacklists will never know the important messages they missed. And some of those affected by the flaws — myself, for example — aren't their customers, so we can't take our money elsewhere as a way to express our dissatisfaction. (We could sue, of course, but I'm temperamentally opposed to suing in most circumstances.) So it's harder for the market to work to improve the "product".

The best I can do, I think, is to work indirectly. I'm going to have to complain to the Hilton company (parent company of Hampton Inn), since they're the ones with whom I have a customer relationship. Now in my opinion, they have little blame here (arguably, they could put in place some sort of spambot filters that blocked egregious messages before they got out and landed HHonors on the blacklist; but I don't know if that's technologically feasible); but they're the only ones with whom I have any leverage. I'll have to let them know that in the future, I will have to consider HHonors to have something less than full Internet access in their rooms, and that I will therefore have to give preference to other chains which have full access. And that will give them the incentive to try to get themselves off the blacklists, and to put in place measures to keep themselves off the blacklists. It's not exactly fair to them, but it's the only power I have in a market economy.

And again, I'm temperamentally opposed to lawsuits; but it wouldn't surprise me if a number of public WiFi providers were to decide to take legal action against the blacklist companies, just because that's how things are often settled in the corporate world. It would be an ugly public row; but it would also shed light on the fact that the only real solution to spam is going to be ending email anonymity, and making spammers pay for their spam. While I'm far from an AOL fan, I think they're on the right road with their Goodmail plan; but it will only really have an impact when every ISP is using the same approach. Each email user should be able to send some reasonable number of email messages per month at no charge (or rather, at a charge already covered as part of their Web access); but after that, you have to pay a tiny fee per message. The economics of spam is simple (though I won't get the precise numbers right): it costs a spammer $1 to send a spam message to ten million users; one persom in a million is dumb enough to fall for the spam, and send in $19.95 for fake viagra or something; and that means that ten people fall for the spam, and the spammer makes almost $200 on an "advertising" budget of $1. As someone with a product to sell, I can appreciate the incentive for spam there. (I just have too much self respect to fall for it. Spammers don't have any self respect, but they figure they can buy some with their mountains of cash.) If instead the spammer had to spend 0.1 cents per spam message, those ten million messages would cost one million cents, or $10,000. And suddenly there's no money to be made for the spammer.

There's a lot more that this plan needs to make it work; but I'm too busy to get into details right now. I have to go back through a week of email and figure out which ones I have to resend, so I've got no time for world-saving. Thanks, blacklist, for ruining my evening.