Sorting it all Out

Software developer David's question was easy enough on the surface. I mean, it really didn;t seem like the kind of question that would inpsire deep conversations and government and language and politics and locales and so on:

I recently found some data for my component that had ‘Microsoft Corporation’ loc’d into Russian. I was told a long time ago that the company name and product names were never allowed to be localized. I’d thought that this string was never to be loc’d, but if the loc tools are letting it happen, how can I tag my rc file such that it won’t?

Now it would be easy to try and say that this is a branding issue, that you have to leave it English, and so on.

People such as myself and others explained that this was not always the case, though.

Which is of course helpful in general for people who are automatons with no real need of an illustrative example for an odd phenomenon that piqued one's curiousity and made one reassess one's assumptions.

Now I won't deny that such people might exist at Microsoft,

But we didn't have them in stock on this day. :-)

and luckily IPE Andrey had such an example -- not just any example, but the specific one relevant to the original question!

His words:

Let me try to explain this strange phenomenon to people who don’t speak Russian.

According to Russia’s laws, you have to use Cyrillic alphabet in products sold in Russian market whenever it is possible – hence “Microsoft Corporation” should become “Корпорация Майкрософт” in Russian texts. This is simple transliteration to Cyrillic of the company name – from Russian point of view this is not a change of the company name, it just makes company name readable to people who are not familiar with foreign alphabets. Unfortunately [from the standpoint of people who would like to see such terms not changed -- MSK], Microsoft can’t prohibit the usage of the native Russian alphabet and say that it is not allowed to use in Russia – we own our products, but we don’t own Russia’s language and laws.

Just imagine if, say, Sony Corporation would tell you that in your English text you should use instead of “SONY” a couple of strange-looking Japanese hieroglyphs that you don’t even know how to pronounce for their company name - and can’t use Latin letters instead of it.  Would you like it?

That does put it all in perspective, doesn't it? :-)

And Russia is hardly the only place that has such requirements for software that is sold in their market.

Many readers of this Bloog, were I to say Japan or Canada or Taiwan or France or China would probably be able to name specific requirements that either the software developers, or the localizers, or oth, have to know about and heed.

Anyone out there have some favorite requirement they want to mention? Bonus points if you either know one outside of the above or know at least one in all of the above! :-)

This blog brought to you by М (U+041c, aka CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EM)

It recently occurred to me that I don't need to keep continuing the I SCOOT to iBOT blog series under that name, since I have a category now. :-)

I mean, it has been a while since I have had any real comparisons or contrasts with the scooter.

Although recently I had the pleasure of asking my insurance company about the rules for the scooters -- since I have a friend whose brother might really benefit from it were it not for the fact that his insurance company probably wouldn't cover it. I wanted to make sure I was not committing insurance fraud if I gave it to him.

Her exact words?

"You wouldn't even be committing insurance fraud if you sold it to him. Once we give it to you then its yours to do with as you will."

Now I am mildly ashamed to admit that my first thought was about the check made out to me for $26,100 that I endorsed over to Independence Technology. Though even had I known I still wouldn't have pocketed the cash -- I am finding the iBOT to way too useful, way too empowering, way too life-altering to want to go down the road of trying to make money instead.

It was just a momentary thought as one more weirdness of insurance companies was explained to me. :-)

If my friend's brother can use the scooter I'll just give it to him, I don't need to make money off my friends or their family. Better to just be helpful!

Amazingly enough, the above is not what this blog you are reading is about,

Everything until now has just been an "Aimee Mann on stage" style digression, something that happens from time to time.

This blog is about what happens in a few hours.

I am taking a few vacation days, going to Las Vegas. Not for work, for a trade show (I am kind of an invited expert or something like that).

But that isn't the cool part. Or at least not the cool part I'm talking about here.

This is:

It is my first time traveling with the iBOT!

I am flying there and going until Sunday night via the iBOT the whole time, presumably much of that time in Balance mode.

I'll try and get some pictures, and I'll be writing about whatever iBOT experiences I have from the beginning of the trip until I am back in my apartment again.

You may wonder if I am nervous about this, and I think I am, a little. But I am mostly very excited.

Armed with some clothes, a toothbrush, a MacBook Pro, a Zune, and an iBOT, I'll be taking said iBOT out on its maiden out-of-town voyage....

I'll probably blog a bit from there when I have time, and I'll tell people if anything interesting or exciting happens with the iBOT....

If you are in Vegas and you see a guy in two wheels in wheelchair, check the license plate -- it might be me! :-)

This post brought to you by ♿ (U+267f, a.k.a. WHEELCHAIR SYMBOL)

One can really never get enough of puns about the BOM (Byte Order Mark) and TSA.

And when I say one, I mean I. :-)

Just think back to blogs like Don't sneak a BOM in on someone who promises to ignore free space or Everyone seems averse to the BOM these days; Should we blame TSA? :-) or How to get yourself imprisoned [by/for talking about Unicode].

See what I mean?

I was reminded of this when Pritam asked:

Is there any tool or code available to verify Byte Order Mark signature in XML files?

Of course sniffing out a few bytes is easy enough. Abhinaba provided the full chart of valid BOM values:

Easy, right?

Okay, anyone want to make a try at writing the minimal code BOM detector?

Think of it as a way to play your part in airport security!

Points awarded for clearest, or for most concise, or for briefest, or for most clever, or for the sake of maintainability, most smart.

If you can write something able to handle other, non-standard byte orderings of data, then you probably went to Cal Tech! :-)

This post brought to you by U+feff, aka ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE)

It was like that scene out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the one about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch:

Particularly important is the counting to three after the pulling of the triggering pin (the surmounted cross), complicated by King Arthur's mental block on counting. The instructions for its use are in the fictitious Book of Armaments (Chapter 2, verses 9-21), parodying the King James Bible and the "Athanasian Creed".

“ ...And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy." And the Lord did grin and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats and large chu... [At this point, the friar is urged by Brother Maynard to "skip a bit, brother"]... And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." Amen.”

Arthur then holds up the Holy Hand Grenade Of Antioch and cries out "ONE! TWO! FIVE!" Sir Galahad corrects him, shouting "Three, Sir!" Arthur then yells "THREE!" and hurls the grenade at the killer rabbit. The Grenade soars through the air, accompanied by a short bit of choral music, then bounces once and explodes. The killer rabbit dies in the explosion, and the Knights subsequently enter the cave that it has been guarding.

You can also see the scene here on YouTube.

So, why did I think of this?

Well, I was over in the good old Windows Character Map, looking at SimSun, that great font used for Simplified Chinese.

The one from Vista.

In particular, at the small Roman Numerals, you know the ones from U+2170 and so on:

Okay, let's count along with King Arthur.

Be sure to watch the text at the bottom of the dialog and the text of the actual character being highlighted!

Ready?

Here we go.

One:

Two:

Three:

Four:

Did you see it?

That must be a fluke.

I'll click on that U+2172 a few times.

Crap.

This font has a bizarre form of that same disease King Arthur has!

I wonder why the grid shows one thing but the detail view shows another . Something to with this being a TTC and there being some shared data across several included fonts.

I'm honestly not sure.

But my inner Dr. House needs more information.

We had better get a second opinion.

Page the Word 2007 Insert Symbol dialog on Vista!

Crap.

Good thing that wasn't the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

If it was, the blog might be on fire after the explosion.

Like last time, if you recall.

Crap.

Is there a typographer in the house? :-)

This blog brought to you by ⅲ (aka U+2172, aka SMALL ROMAN NUMERAL FOUR.... "Three, Sir!" THREE)

Regular reader Pavanaja U B asked over in the Suggestion Box:

In Word 2003 and prior, there was an option "not to display the font name in that font". This was very useful while using hacked non-English TTF fonts which were using the ASCII codes meant for English for chars/glyphs other than English. This featture is not found in Word 2007. Is there some way to do that in Word 2007?

TIA.

-Pavanaja

In case you aren't sure what option he is referring to, I'll show it in Word 2003.

If you look at the font list, each font uses the actual font to display the name:

You can go to the Tools menu:

and choose Tools | Customize....

From there go to the Options tab:

If you unclick the List font names in their font checkbox.

Once you do that, the font list shows up with just one font used:

Ok, cool.

Now for most people this is just a performance optimization (slower machines with a huge number of fonts found this option to be pretty important).

If you are in the situation Pavanaja is talking about where you have a font that puts characters on top of the ASCII letters, this feature becomes much more important though -- since the font name will look like gibberish (possibly semi-readable gibberish if the font's mappings are phonetic, but pretty much gibberish nevertheless.

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes more than a feature to be useful to keep it from getting taken out of the product.

And this feature has been removed from Word 2007.

As a workaround, you can launch the large Choose Font dialog provided by Word 2007 by hitting CTRL+D.

The font list in this dialog does not use the fonts themselves like the list in the ribbon does.

This is obviously less than ideal since it ignores the ribbon and all, but we do what we must.

This whole issue, and this feature (which has become the only way to do stuff in Word 2007), puts a whole new spin on the issue I mentioned in 'But there's no Latins in our Divehi font, Duckman.' 'Well, they don't *speak* Latin in the Maldives, do they?', since clearly the only thing worse than not including Latins in a font is including something else masquerading as Latins. Some features just get too confused....

This post brought to you by ޝ (U+079d, a.k.a. THAANA LETTER SHEENU)

I am a little embarrassed.

For a man with no shame such as myself, this is quite a feat.

I was not trying to set any kind of record with this "accomplishment", for what its worth.

Nevertheless, I am a little embarrassed.

Perhaps I should explain.

You see, I have a Zune.

No, this is not why I am embarrassed.

To be more accurate, I have three Zunes.

And no, this is not why I am embarrassed, either.

The three Zunes are the 30 gb white one I first mentioned in I guess we're not exporting the Zune just yet, the more comfortably sized 80 gb black one that I can actually better fit music on, and the 4 gb too small fuscia one I mentioned in Doing a thorough brushing of the gift horse's teeth.

As an aside, the I guess we're not exporting the Zune just yet blog is the only one that I have written that I was ever told by Kieran that her husband thought was cool.

Back to me ring all embarrassed.

It is the individual Zunes that embarrass me.

You see, the 4 gb one, I am embarrassed about how openly I criticized a gift, which I finally did find a use for -- I simply put all of my Liz Phair stuff on it, and I can use it for any time I am in a Liz Phair mood. I think it also has an Aimee Mann sing or two on it, since there are a few that fit with Liz Phair moods.

But anyway, I am embarrassed about the whole thing.

And I am embarrassed about the 80 gb one for the reasons I mentioned in I guess we're not exporting the Zune just yet.

I am, quite simply, not cool enough for either a black or a brown Zune.

Buying a black one seemed to me to be as artificial a joining the The Association For Justified Narcissism Facebook group.

Which I admittedly also did. But that was only for a joke (I thought the Bill Clinton pic they used was funny) and it didn't cost me anything. Since I bought the black Zune, I feel like I paid to sit at the cool kids table or something. And that is embarrassing.

But the one that embarrasses me most is the 30 gb Zune.

It was just days ago that an old friend from way back (Todd) mentioned to me in a comment after I pointed out I was blowing of all my New Years Eve plans:

As long as you aren't doing anything, maybe you could go kick some Zune-group butt and make them fix the things.

Just a thought.

He was talking about the bug that popped up recently for 30 gb Zunes.

It happened to me too -- the unit, which had been charging, was basically frozen and could not be made to power down or play music or change modes or do anything. I scroaned and took it off the charger, figuring I'd look into doing something about it after the holidays were over.

Then after Todd's note, I went looking around and found out about the 30 gb Zune time zone bug.

Best described here, in an FAQ that was updated as comments came in to better answer the questions people had. This had an interesting side effect of making the upset customers who complained in comments look like retards who didn't read the FAQ before commenting -- something I should try here at some point. I like the effect. :-)

Anyway, here is the FAQ as of a few hours ago:

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used).  The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.

The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009.   We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on.  If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

Customers can continue to stay informed via the support page on zune.net (zune.net/support).

We know this has been a big inconvenience to our customers and we are sorry for that, and want to thank them for their patience.

Q:  Why is this issue isolated to the Zune 30 device?
It is a bug in a driver for a part that is only used in the Zune 30 device.

Q:  What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation?
This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q:  What’s the timeline on a fix?
The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q:  Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008?
There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

Q:  What is Zune doing to fix this issue?
The issue should resolve itself.

Q:  Are you sure that this won’t happen to all 80, 120 or other flash devices?
This issue is related to a part that is only used in Zune 30 devices.

Q:  How many 30GB Zune devices are affected? How many Zune 30GB devices were sold?
All 30GB devices are potentially affected.

Q:  Will you update the firmware before the next leap year (2012)?
Yes.

Now I embarrassed because I work for Microsoft, the company that sells the Zune.

I am not embarrassed by Microsoft's response, which has been very quick, and the people involved worked hard to isolate, investigate, and report on the issue very soon after it was reported, despite the fact that this happened on a holiday.

And I am not embarrassed that there are some others who do not seem to see the problem resolved just by waiting till after the 1st, as I know people are looking into that too.

And I also not embarrassed by the fact that the problem was not solved with a fix so much as a "just wait a day, all will be better" as bugs that will indeed be better in a day have no good update mechanism that will solve the problem any sooner. The right call was made here and I am not ashamed of it.

However...

I am embarrassed that this problem was even there at all, in the first place.

After the huge code scrub and set of actions taken by all of the people at Microsoft involved with time zones after the DST 2007 problems, the notion of anything being released by Microsoft that has trouble with the fact that not every year has the same length, that just embarrasses me.

Now don't get me wrong, I am glad they are committed to updating the firmware before the next leap year.

But you see, there are two kinds of bugs:

• The bugs that, once they hear about them, the responsible devs and testers understand how it got missed, and
• The bugs that, once they hear about them, the responsible devs and testers shake their heads and say "Damn, we should have found that!"

Perhaps the fine details of the bug (not released) place it in the first castegory, but without those details I put this one in the second.

So absent proof that this could have been found, I'm conditionally embarrassed, for now.

As an employee of Microsoft, I get to hear people complain about stuff, and I have the inalienable right to make this determination (as long as I agree ti be allowed to be convinced otherwise if more information would inspire such a change!).

Though either way, the team is now on notice -- because no matter which category that bug is in now, any future occurrence is definitely in the second category. This is now a permanent test case to add to the product....

I hope they do discuss the problem more widely, so others can add it to their test cases, too!

Geez, I'm embarrassed. :-)

This blog brought to you by 𒀁 (U+12001, aka CUNEIFORM SIGN A TIMES A)

So over in the Suggestion Box, typography comrade Josh asked:

I wonder if you could explore a bit of font naming history and discuss the "Ming LiU" font(s) that is included with Windows. Notice the uppercase 'U' at the end of "LiU"...it is not "Liu", even though many people pronounce it that way.

My semi-educated guess is that it really was intended to be "Ming Li", but was called "Ming LiU" with a capital 'U' as in "Unicode" in order to distinguish it from the original (Big5) version, which may have shipped concurrently with the Unicode version at one time in order to provide HKSCS support. Or maybe it was a developmental/test font that somehow made its way into a release. Or maybe something completely different.

In any case: the current name seems like a mistake on *some* level. If "Liu" was intended, why wasn't it spelled "Liu", with a lowercase 'u'?. If "Li" was intended, what is the deal with that uppercase 'U'? I suspect looking into the Chinese-language name strings in the font may shed more light on this, which I will attempt to do while eagerly awaiting a response from you :-)

Here goes some of my idle speculation/barely professional style research, Josh! :-)

The font in question, MingLiU (and its proportional cousin, PMingLiU)

are the Traditional Chinese staples of Windows.

Of course the ideographs are not proportional in PMingLiU ut the Latins are, as you can see when you look at them side by side:

Okay, getting back to the question in question, after a small descriptive segue....

The Wikipedia article on the Ming typefaces probably explains the characteristics best:

Characteristics
This typeface is characterised, among other things, by the following:

• Thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes
• Triangular ornaments at the end of single horizontal strokes called uroko (鱗, literally "fish scales") in Japanese, comparable to serifs 
• Overall geometrical regularity
  

...

Possessing variable line weight and characteristic decorations at the end of lines similar to serifs, this type style is comparable to Western serif typefaces, as opposed to the Gothic styles which are comparable to sans-serif.

Often there are number of different ways to write the same Chinese character, they are collectively referred to as variant Chinese characters. Some of those differences are caused by character simplification or word choices, while others are purely orthographic differences such as stroke styling. The styling of the strokes used in the old Song and Ming fonts came from the style used in Kangxi dictionary. After the postwar Kanji reforms in Japan, the most of the Kangxi style characters were considered as Kyujitai (old style), causing newer dictionaries to incorporate two letter styles, or to simply reject the old styles. In modern China, the government uses the new orthographic style, which is incorporated into MingLiU version 5.03 or above. In Japan, dictionary entries offer both new and old fonts. In Korea, popular fonts such as Batang are based on Kangxi style.

Okay, now let's get back to the name. :-)

Although I do have somewhere a Traditional Chinese version of Windows 3.1, it is packed away in a box and even if I did find where it is likely on 5.25 floppies which I don't have a drive for. So I took a look on the network over at MS and found four chunks of file that when spliced together produced a file known as MINGLI.TTF, which the True Type Font Extensions had a few choice things to say about:

now the lack of information may have more to do with the unconventional way I spliced the files together, as is the way it looks in Character Map:

 or the way it shows up in the Fonts folder:

or the Font Picker dialog:

or finally the way the viewer shows it:

We'll leave aside the weirdness where one technology was able to dig out the English font name while the others were not despite the fact that the locale and UI language settings of the machine were English -- or the fact that it picked a PRC encoding rather than a Taiwan one. There is probably a bug or three in there somewhere, though I'm not sure how supported the scenario is! :-)

Note that the name in Chinese for MingLi43 is

細明體

which is also the Chinese name for the MingLiU font in Windows.

With the names in Chinese identical and the older font stuck in an era almost before Unicode and not claiming to be encoded as a Unicode font like pretty much all fonts do these days, the "U" in MingLiU is pretty clearly all about Unicode.

A native Chinese person probably doesn't even realize any of this is an issue, since for them it really isn't -- they have no silly suffixes at the end of the name, something that has been true since the earliest versions of Win9x and NT that sold a Traditional Chinese version (I unpacked those fonts too but they didn't provide a lot of new information).

This naming history figured out above pretty much matches what the Wikipedia article describes:

'Ming Light' (細明體) - Default interface font for Windows 3.0 to Windows XP, derived from DynaLab's DLCMing font family. Originally distributed as raster font in Traditional Chinese version of Windows 3.0, then it was available in TrueType format as 'MingLi43' in Traditional Chinese version of Windows 3.1. Starting from version 2.00, the font was internally sorted in Unicode sequence with Big-5 codepage, and carried the English name 'MingLiU'. In version 2.10, the font file also contained PMingLiU (新細明體). MingLiU was distributed with Traditional Chinese version of Windows 95 to Windows 98, all regional versions of Windows 2000 or later, PMingLiU Update Pack (新細明體更新套件), Traditional Chinese font pack for Internet Explorer 3, Microsoft Global IME 5.02 (Traditional Chinese), Office XP Tool: Traditional Chinese Language Pack. 

So I could have saved the time had i just gone there in the first place, this time at least. But I was on vacation so I'm not too worried. :-)

The last bit I'll talk about is the extra character added for the proportional font. It's Unihan data is interesting:

Calling something that is proportional and that has been around for over 15 years new and fresh and modern is kind of amusing, though perhaps that's just me. After all we still call it New York and New Jersey despite how old they are, so it is no harm if we use such a thing for a font. :-)

This blog brought to you by 新 (U+65b0, a CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH)

And I am back, after my end of the year "vacation" from blogging.

I hope you didn't miss me too much.

You may not have even noticed I was gone. This is not a bad thing.

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with a colleague of mine, and we were talking about a particular blog post that had cheesed off someone or other. And he paused to say, almost self-consciously, that he really hadn't ever seen my blog before.

Which is not a shock to me -- billions of people in the world, I imagine the percentage of people who have even heard of this blog would be pretty small. There is no reason why anyone should have to read it,...

Truly.

You don't even have to feel guilty if you haven't read it lately. If there is something you ought to see I'll probably tell you about it anyway.

Like the old friend from back when I was in high school who I'm having lunch with tomorrow (assuming the weather does not force us to reschedule; we are kind of retarded here about rain and such). I'll be shocked of she has even heard of this blog, let alone read it. We are pretty obscure here, even when we do stay on topic (which I will, starting with the next blog I write, which I know for sire is true because I have actually already written it!).

Anyway, I had put together a poem I was writing, to set up a huge joke -- the joke in the title.

It was about a woman baring her soul for her audience in a musical performance.

Everyone was just mesmerized at the naked display of emotion and how much she was revealing about herself.

And then at the climax of the song, everyone fell silent.

They were all shocked speechless, you see.

You could have heard a pin drop.

Because her G-string broke.

But the poem was pretty rough and as i tried to clean it up I realized the joke really wasn't that funny.

So I kind of stopped.

I was showing this blog to someone who was convinced the picture was wrong, that it wasn't the G-string that was broken. He even showed my web pages to prove it and then suriously looked around till he found a non-standard tuning (I think it was the EADGCF that Stanley Jordan used).

So I had to explain that those chords are written from the bottom up, so he did not have scour the Internet looking for a tuning with a G as the fourth note; the regular old EBGDAE in standard tuning works just fine.

Never mind the fact that I doubt Stasnley Jordan's style of playing would work well on the above guitar anyway -- his research was simultaneously such an impressive and asinine feat that I hated to kill it with a minor flaw when I had the major one to embarass him with. :-)

Anyway, so you can imagine the poem was very clever and funny and endearing with a great smile at the end since that was the direction I was aiming.

If you do that then it saves me the trouble of inspiring all that. Next time, when I have a more worthy topic, I'll do the work....

Welcome back to Sorting it all Out!

This blog brought to you by G (U+0047, aka LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G)

A couple of days ago, I went out with the iBOT into the still uncleared snowed-over sidewalks.

It was a test -- I had some Christmas day plans (a bunch of Seattle orphans sans travel plans all heading to Amy's places the top of Capitol Hill for Jumbalaya and wine and conversation) amd I wanted to make sure the iBOT would be able to navigate through the snow successfully.

You know I can count on one hand the number of white Christmas years I've seen in Seattle since O first git here in '96 on one hand and have as heap of fingers left over, so this is all quite weird.

Anyway, the test was a success -- I was able to move around and up an down the street with minimal difficulty.

I let Amy know I'd make it and I even practiced on the stairs at my place so I'd feel comfortable with the whole "strange stairs/weird handrails" type cases that might confront me once I got there.

I was ready.

We heard about some rain being forecast, which is the usual way that the snow goes away.

The old question I recalled "when did Noah build the ark?" and its answer "Before the rain, before the rain" were in my mind, and I figured with rain coming then things might not even have needed me to do the extra practice.

No worries, I still felt ready.

And then the rain came.

After that came a bit more snow.

The end result was a slushy, crappy mess.

Heading out at 2pm for a 2:35 bus that usually took just a few minutes to get to, I felt like I left adequate time to get to the bus stop.

I made it out of the Cambrian with minimal effort, but once I hit the street (well, the sidewalk next to 40th), I was in a world of hurt.

I was stuck within ten feet.

It took me 16 minutes of moving back and forth, turning, and mode changing (up into balasnce and then jumping down to 4-wheel proved to be particularly useful at moving out of a slightkly stuck position!) to get turned around and back into the Cambrian.

I called Amy to let her know I was going to miss the Jumbalaya. She shared with me that I was not the only one bailing -- several others were worried about the trip to the top of Capitol Hill too. She might endcup with the lion's share of the food.

It also means canceled plans last night and today and probably tomorrow and maybe the day after that and...

It kind of sucked realizing that I was basically trapped in my apartment for the time being.

I have food and I have power and I have heat and I have Internet connectivity, so being stuck here is not such a bad thing.

But the realization that I was stuck here for who knows how long is a depressing one.

Of course I know that the scooter wouldn't have even made it out of the Cambrian -- so the iBOT has opened many doors here. But short of getting chains or studded snow tires on it, the iBOT is not going to get me through every door. Certainly no the door to the top of Capitol Hill....

Maybe I should look into tire chains for the iBOT tires? You know, for just in case? :-)

If you were expecting me to pop by the office tomorrow then consider this your notice that it ain't gonna happen. We'll try again next week, maybe.

This post brought to you by ♿ (U+267f, a.k.a. WHEELCHAIR SYMBOL) 

As the end of the year approaches, I guess it is a time for reflection.

Oh, I suppose resolutions for the new year. For those you can paste in mine from four years ago, as I am still striving on them.

2008 was kind of my worst year for as long as I have been alive.

The year Liz died (ref: Burying the lead, aka A weekend perfected not by art but by mortality for the magical last time I saw her and It's not (aka She's not) for when I first talked about her passing).

I feel like I am much less than I was before she died, like maybe just a shell of that person.

How can someaone who I talked to only occasionally and saw even less than that have such an impact?

I've talked to her sister a few times since then. I now know that Liz really did imagine we'd end up together eventually, that she had been carrying a torch for years. She called up her sister and cried when she heard I was engaged (especially to someone she didn't approve of but even so...). And she actually threw a party for her friends with the theme of "Dong Dong, the Wench is Gone!" when we called it off and we subsequently broke up.

That last trip, spending time with me here, was (reportedly in her own words, according to her sister) her "Hail Michael pass" -- a pass at me, one that she wanted to make at me. Her last chance, so to speak.

Calling the weekend a Hail Michael pass would probably have been the coolest back-formation ever (for a Hail Mary pass) were it not for the fact that because of my block the pass was incomplete.

Of course when I think about that, I just feel stupid -- how could I have missed it? We shared so much and knew so much about each other, how could I have misread her in this one area to such a degree?

Non-strategic blindness would have also made a good title for this blog. The weekend, in retrospect, feels to me like the ultimate collection of the mother of all tactical mistakes.

Since then I have found many new friends, people who by the simple fact that they live in or at least hang out in Seattle have dran me out of what would have been a shell due to the huge collection of people leaving town and leaving entirely looking now like a serious changing of the guard in terms of the people I spend at least some if not a huge horking bunch of my time with.

Tomorrow I'm heading to Seattle for a dinner for all the Emerald City orphans, and I am going so far as to say maybe to invites for New Year's parties though I haven't accepted any yet. Doing something festive on THAT holiday is a bit too soon for me, I think. Some of the parties sounded cool, but there is always some other year, some day.

The Casey at the Bat imagery is in my head and I can't shake it except by thinking about the Aimee Mann song (It's Not) which is actually worse from a mood standpoint. When I am around people it is not so bad, but I can't be around people all the time, so....

and thus it ends, with the fixed up version of the final verse:

Though I keep looking in her eyes as I search for answers
go through motions although I really can't say why
could I have fixed it all or done something different?
No way too say anything but goodbye.
and I can't close my eyes to pretend she's still there
'cause she's not.
I know she's not.
no she's not.

Not necessarily better, but at least the worst of the scansion problems are gone (since the orginal song had no problems, the difficulties did distract me). I have probably composed more verses to this song in my head then I will ever admit to anyone, ever.

And maybe a re-jiggered last verse of the Ernest Thayer poem:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
Yes lovers are kissing somewhere, no end to love in sight,
And somewhere, couples smiling, laughing as they all meet;
But there is no joy in Michael--- not since Liz's pass was incomplete.

I don't know. It I know only when I stop to think about it that I feel that awful, and I am busy enough to make sure that isn't so very often.

Maybe I should fly somewhere -- out of town, out of state, out of the country. I probably won't, since it wouldn't make anything better. But the sight of people glad to see me and be with me on that night would probably just make me feel bad that the iBOT has just a 15.5 mile range. I feel like I need to be much farther (and further) away....

This blog brought to you by ⧜ (U+29dc, aka INCOMPLETE INFINITY)

After reading It isn't really RED versus GREEN, Cheong asked:

I've searched for a while in charmap.exe and yet to find a font that'll display these characters in WinXP. That brings me to a question: Is there a font that ships with Windows (not necessarily WinXP or Vista... just any version. Maybe even a future version. :) ) that'll display most non-user-defined range of Unicode characters? Or at least that'll display most of the "sponsor characters" in your blog?

Sorry if this question has already been answered, because I've been yet to come up with effective keywords for this question.

For good measure, after a less than 24 hour wait he asked over in the Suggestion Box:

I'm refering to article titled "It isn't really RED versus GREEN"

I've searched for a while in charmap.exe and yet to find a font that'll display these sponsor characters in WinXP. That brings me to a question: Is there a font that ships with Windows (not necessarily WinXP or Vista... just any version. Maybe even a future version. :) ) that'll display most non-user-defined range of Unicode characters? Or at least that'll display most of the "sponsor characters" in your blog?

Sorry if this question has already been answered, because I've been yet to come up with effective keywords for this question.

Now I am not making fun of him, it was actually the Suggestion Box comment that reminded me about the question.

So what was done here was the right thing to do, at least insofar as right and wrong can be determined by whether a blog is inspired.

Don't look now, we are heading into an über-metablogong topic -- Blog morality! Where right and wrong is only defined in terms of the content of a Blog!

I'll revisit that topic again some day, since although it has the risk of playing out really dumb, I think I'll probably enjoy it. Though for now I'll go back to Cheong's actual question.... :-)

There is no font that ships with any version of Windows currently available that will handle any possible character that an ornery person like me sets up sponsorship details with.

On the whole, I have found that due to limitations like the one I described in The importance of Tagalog to Burmese, aka "Of course I'd lie to you, I'm a font!" that for many of the ranges outside the ones listed in the table in that blog, Firefox seems to do a better job finding fonts that will work than Internet Explorer does.Not so much that I'd yet claim such blogs on this Blog are "optimized for Firefox" because I still have an ECMA Script bug to track down. But maybe one day....

In he meantime, I find that for most of Plane 1 if you have a font that supports the character on your machine that Firefox seems to find it more often than IE does -- even IE8.

IE seems to be optimized for the fonts supporting languages that Windows claims support for, which one again suggests that a browser less interested in its idea to its OS has the opportunity to do better here. But that is just a theory.

My IE team advice would be to either take over MLang so you can update it, or dump it like a bad habit and find a way to support features that require forward looking thinking, like the aforementioned Tagalog/Burmese/Mongolian bug.

But to get back to Cheong's question.... :-)

I also do not know of future plans for such a font. Though with each version coverage gets better it is harder to imagine coverage of very obscure historic scripts with limited user communities a being a priority.

So I'd guess that, given the way I often to go to the more obscure parts of Unicode, you could not claim that Windows is optimized for this Blog, either.

Of course you have to realize that this argument is quite a specious tail-wagging-the-dog type argument, and not only because claiming that the reason one reads this blog is for the sponsoring character is like the person who claims to be reading Playboy for the articles (with the exception of Microsoft employees and I believe the July 1994 issue!).

This blog brought to you by ᜀ (U+1700, aka TAGALOG LETTER A)

YAIB -- yet another IBOT blog -- feel free to ignore if they aren't your thing...

Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

This blog is going to be about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

As the title indicates, the three items will be covered in that order.

First, the GOOD.

Now I know the title of these blogs have implied a rolling comparison/contrast between the old world (scooting) and the new world of the iBOT® 4000 Mobility System.

And mostly I stopped bothering, since it was just better in every way and I was getting tired of beating up on the scooters that had been serving me so well.

In fact, I was wondering what I should do with the scooters now, and I was going to write about my thoughts on that subject -- but hold on to that thought, I'll get back to it in a moment!

There was a snowstorm in Seattle.

Now growing up in Beachwood OH, snow was never such a big deal. If a foot of snow hit the ground overnight, it just meant the snow plow drivers had to get up an hour earlier. The only time they used "snow days" at school was when teachers who live out of town could not make it to the school!

I'll talk more about my theories on Beachwood another time, for now I'm not going to get into it.

Anyway, there was a lot of snow in Seattle.

Most people were either trapped at home or unwilling to brave the roads; the campus was much emptier than usual and I myself stayed home Thursday and Friday, working from there.

I did have a lunch on Friday with a friend/colleague over in SQL Server so I braved the roads around noon or so. And once again I was amazed by the ease with which the 4-wheel mode handled the snow that was really still on the ground and the streets and the sidewalk.

I realized that if I depended on the scooter (either scooter), I would not be going anywhere -- the scooter wouldn't be able to take any of it.

Even on the Microsoft campus, where the roads and even sidewalks had paths more or less cleared, the scooter wouldn't have worked so well. Because the people clearing sidewalks had cleared the corner of every street only at the tip of the corner, ignoring the cutouts.

Had I not been in a wheelchair capable of handling curbs so easily, I'd be pretty screwed.

Iris and I were even talking a bit about the iBOT on our way to the cafeteria, and how cool it was even over rougher terrain. It was doing awesomely. I was playing it safe in 4-wheel mode but around my apartment I did a little balance mode stuff and it did a wonderful job of catching itself from dropping me.

Once again, I found myself being amazed at this truly wonderful device.

iBALANCE rocks.

Which brings me to the next part.

Next, the BAD.

I received a letter via FedEx next day air on Friday.

It actually came on Monday, but FedEx has stopped leaving notes on doors when they drop things off at the leasing office. So I didn't find out about it until Friday.

The FedEx envelope contained a single letter. I have scanned it here for your enjoyment (my apartment number obfuscated to maintain the myth of privacy in our world today):

So that's it.

Independence Technology, the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that markets, sells, and services the iBOT is going to stop the marketing and selling in January of 2009 and then stop the servicing in 2013.

My first thought was about the fact that anytime I watched a TV show when it was originally aired rather than recording it to watch later, the show got canceled. Could this iBOT news be related to the fact that I was given one? Geez I hope not!

My second thought was "good thing I still have the scooters!"

Now of course that was specious; the iBOT would have been out of warranty then anyway, but it is still quite disturbing and annoying as it pretty much makes the whole thing feel less stable even though there is little overall change in the stability of the platform that would impact me.

Did you know that the company that sends out someone to do on-sight service my iBOT is one of the same companies that sends someone out to do on-sight service for my Dell laptops?

Literally even the same engineers, sometimes.

Thus the specifications for repair will exist even after Independence Technology is gone, and obviously someone will be able to step up to do out-of-warranty service. With people like me stocking up on parts like tires and batteries and lights and such for those anticipated potential future visits, I'll feel pretty covered. Even moreso than most since I'll hoard my spare parts in case they become scarce at some point.

The only thing truly missing are the cases when the iBOT goes into a warning mode after recovery from a bad situation that requires a phone call communicating error codes and release codes to clear things up. That will need a solution too, whether it is just publishing the codes (my preference) or giving them to those service companies (the next best thing).

I was already planning on hacking the iBOT to pimp my ride after the warranty expired anyway, so perhaps I'll just go that route a bit too. We'll see -- pulling out the challenge/response table for error situations may be the only thing I steal off the computer if it isn't published somewhere when Independence Technology closes its doors. I see no need to much more to the co