This morning I stopped on the way to work for some Halloween supplies. I went to a "halloween superstore", a seasonal business that sets up in an otherwise empty "Expo" center. It's Halloween morning, and there are dozens are cars in the parking lot. Inside there are four cash registers, but only one employee. The line of customers is about forty long, and did not move the whole time I was there because the employee was on the phone trying to fix a credit card-related problem. I'm guessing that the employee is warming up for the highlight of his year, working at the voting booth. I left without buying anything, and I assume others did as well.

And you want to know why it's an international crisis? I just tried to buy a commercial product from a Taiwanese company. A press release mentions the price, and links to a description of the product. The description has no mention of the price and no clue how to purchase one. I ran around the website for a while and could not find a phone number or email address. There is a contact form with six or eight fields, name, phone, etc, but no matter what I did, it always insisted a required field was missing. In fact, looking more closely, it's not even a working web form. It's just a mockup of a web form. That's an interesting business plan: create a detailed website site promoting your product, but don't actually sell it or make it possible for anyone to contact you.

Can we please just let the global economic system collapse, and take us all with it? I'm sure the cockroaches will do a better job.

In the US, Obama is dogged by rumors that he's a Muslim, which to many Americans is a compelling reason not to vote for him. (Colin Powell regains a tiny shred of self-respect with his comment: "Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim," Powell said. "He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America.")

In the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed is challenging the quasi-dictator Maumon Abdul Gayoom in what seems to be a relatively free and fair election. However, Gayoom has responded to the threat by spreading unfounded rumors about his opponent's religion:

"I do believe he (Nasheed) could spread Christianity," said Aishath Sulthana, a 32-year-old mother of five who planned to vote for Gayoom.

Surely this speaks for itself?

Flexcar was acquired by Zipcar while I was away; last weekend I had my first zipcar experience and also my first Prius experience. Related posts: Review of the Hybrid Flexcar, from 2003, and Hybrid cars, from 2008.

Zipcar

The nearest Zipcar location to Half Moon Bay is 25 miles away, near Stanford. It's in an industrial park, not close to any transit or commercial centers. I forgot to write down the exact address, so we spent ten minutes driving through parking lot after parking lot looking for the car. Finally I called the number on the zipcard. It went something like this:

Zipcar voicemail: please enter your user number and pin
Me: uh, what?  0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: Please enter your user number and birthday
Me: xxxxxx# xxxx19xx#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please wait for customer service ...
Z Human: how can I help you?
Me: Hi, I have a reservation for the zipcar in Stanford but 
I didn't write down the exact address.  Can you tell me where the car is?
[10-minute hold]
Z: Okay, Mr Aufrecht, I can move you to a new car
Me, gritted teeth: Can you give me the street address of the car that I have reserved?
Z: Yes, just a moment ... [ten seconds] it's 3145 Porter.
Me, gritted teeth: That was all I needed.  Thank you.

The car was filthy: some kind of white powder spilled across the back seat, thoroughly stained floormats in back, and a general tinge of dinge in front. Also, it had less than a quarter tank of gas, which is a big no-no. When I stopped at a gas station, the gas pump wouldn't take my member number for the gas card, so I had to use my own credit card. Aside from those problems (all of which Zipcar either addressed or apologized for after I reported them), it was fine. I rented the car for a full 24 hours for $60, inclusive of insurance and gas, and I paid an extra $0.30 per mile after the first 180 miles, so it was comparable in price to a rental car, and much less hassle. The only other Zipcar-specific problem was that Zipcar wants you to leave the key in the "ignition" slot, which means that the car is beeping at you whenever the driver's door is open.

Prius

The Prius has a TV screen in the middle of the dashboard for controlling the radio, CD player, and air conditioning. The Zipcar model didn't have GPS or mapping. The interface is one percent good, 99 percent bad. It's good in that some parts of the UI have been well-thought out, such as how to unobtrusively show a new CD track while the screen is in the energy mode. It's bad in that it's a touch screen in a car.

A touch screen is modal. The defining feature of a modal interface is that it behaves differently in different modes. But this requires attention. When driving a car, you don't want your attention diverted from your surroundings to figure out why touching something doesn't do what it's supposed to do. An ATM can have a touch screen because you are staring at the ATM screen. A car should have lots of knobs and dials, with distinctive tactile properties, that your fingers can memorize so your eyes and brain don't need to bother.

The energy flow picture that is supposed to show you the gasoline vs electricity balance at any given moment is way too complicated.

The Honda design is much better; in the picture below, it's the thing to the left of the speedometer; the bars go up from halfway if you are using up battery and go down from halfway if you are charging the battery.

The scrolling graph of mileage, in five-minute chunks, is reasonably cool, and certainly what I left the screen on most of the time. But it takes an extra step to get to it. First, you push a button (a real button) to see a screen with three choices. Two of the choices are settings, which you will use rarely. Each time you finish changing the temperature a degree up or down, you need a button push, look at the screen, and then push a virtual button just to get back to what you were doing before your toes got cold.

Despite the high technology guts, the Prius is lacking some other small refinements in the cabin. The CD player won't eject CDs with the engine off. The digital clock looks cheap. It doesn't have daytime running lights. My normal catalyst to turn on headlights has always been when I can't see the instrument console clearly, but that was thrown off by the touch screen and I accidentally drove deep into twilight without turning on the headlights. The far side of the dashboard displays the printed text "Passenger", and below that it lights up with "airbag". This is to tell you that the airbag is off. I figured this out when a passenger got it and, next to "airbag", it lit up "On". So that's bad design, since you don't know what it means until after you've seen all the possible states. Why not "passenger airbag off" and "passenger airbag on"?

The gearshift is simplified, in a bad way. Reverse is up and Forwards is down. There's a button for "park" mode, but the car automatically goes into park when you turn it off. I guess you might want that if you are stopped and want to leave the engine on (so you can eject CDs) while taking your foot off the brake, but since Park has been a part of every automatic gear sequence that I've ever seen, why move it from the gear to a button? There was also a gear for "B", which I did not try because I didn't know what it was.

When you put the car in reverse the touchscreen turns into a rear view camera, which probably helps not run over children, but its distorted perspective is useless for parking. And the annoying beep the car makes while backing up is annoying.

The car drives fine; it was adequately powerful for city and freeway driving. I went over 200 miles, mostly freeway, and got just over 50 mpg. Visibility was adequate, even out the funky rear window, and it was as spacious as any other compact car. It's just a shame that the experience is marred by such trivial, easily avoidable mistakes in the cabin user interface.

This weekend was extremely clear in Half Moon Bay, culminating in a gorgeous nearly full moon overhead tonight. I took Kona down to the beach for her night walk, and it was lovely. Moonlight is roughly 500,000 times dimmer than sunlight, but the beach and the surf were very clear. It was like being in the afterlife in an Ingmar Bergman movie: everything is visible, crisp and distinct but grey and dim; it's very cold; and a crashing and roaring.

More human rights:

Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Friday that gay couples have the right to marry

And the Iowa election market may be the only market in the world with a positive trend over the last few weeks. I continue to walk around with crossed fingers, hoping for the election to be over and Obama to be victorious so that we can return to a state of merely being disappointed by our elected leaders instead of being betrayed, bloodied, and exploited for criminal gain.

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the release of 17 Chinese-born Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , a day after a landmark decision required them to be freed to the U.S.

[...] In court papers, Justice Department lawyers attacked Urbina's ruling ... The lawyers said that Urbina's decision "directly conflicts with the basic principle" that the executive branch, specifically the Department of Homeland Security, has sole discretion as to whether to admit foreigners into the U.S. —Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Newspapers

Excuse me while I go digging in the constitution for that basic principle.