After my message to Senator Hutchinson regarding offshore drilling (which I received a very generic who-cares lets lower gas prices e-mail from), I thought I’d try again with another bill that is set to move through the Senate tomorrow. This one is a bit less controversial. I can’t imagine why somebody would not support it, unless they feel that perhaps it doesn’t go far enough. Or unless they simply hate any bill created by somebody outside of their party.

Dear Senator Hutchinson,

I would like to request that you please vote in favor of the National Bike Bill that is being presented tomorrow morning before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. I apologize for not putting in this request with more advanced notice, but I was unaware that such a bill existed until this afternoon.

As somebody who bikes to work now on a near weekly basis, I can see the direct benefits of doing so. It does sadden me to see how much more improvement there could be in bicycle safety, awareness, and infrastructure, and how little emphasis is placed on making bicycling an enjoying and accessible method of transportation, while so much money is poured into massive multi-lane highways for automobiles to sit in congested, polluting traffic.

Yes, I also drive a car. Unfortunately, bicycles cannot completely replace the automobile, but for many small-trip purposes, they can. However, as long as local governments cannot afford to nor are given incentives to make bicycling more friendly, many Americans will choose the automobile for a 1/2 mile trip rather than a bicycle.

The small cost of enacting this bill is certainly worth it. It helps with our nations health issues, energy issues, climate issues, and creates more pleasant communities and recreation.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

-Brian Saghy

I believe this is my first political, environmental, and energy related post. The subject of offshore drilling is something which I feel very strongly about. Enough so that I wrote a letter to both of my senators from Texas. I urge you to do the same in your state.

Beach View - Photo by Lance and Erin

Dear Senators Hutchison and Cornyn,

Having recently read President Bush’s plans on offshore drilling, I became quite alarmed that our country may be too quick to take actions which will have, if any, a delayed and very temporary effect on our energy crisis.

In a time when the world is being threatened by global warming and pollution, when our coral reefs are dying from contaminates and increase in water temperature – it seems that allowing offshore drilling near our Texas coastline would be simply irresponsible, nearsighted, and selfish.

Yes, our energy costs have gone higher and I understand that for everybody it makes life more difficult. However, for the first time in a long history of environmental skepticism and indifference, we are beginning to finally see a cultural shift in the United States where more people are actually thinking harder about their own personal energy consumption. Higher gas prices does have a benefit. Unfortunately, it seems many people will not consider what vehicles they drive, their commute distance, or to not leave their automobiles idling for 15 minutes at a time unless it hits their pocketbook. Corporations have no problem shipping items and food across the entire country (or from Mexico and Canada), even when goods can be produced locally, until it affects the quarterly balance sheet.

The real US Energy crisis is not a current low supply of oil, but a mentality that energy supply should be cheap, unlimited and constantly accessible, and that we deserve such a supply no matter what consequences it may have to our country or the rest of the world. Offshore drilling will only push that necessary cultural mind shift off to a point in the future where it may be to late.

Texas is hot enough. Its beaches are already polluted enough. I do not, for one, look forward to basking in 115 degree weather in Galveston covered in a grey film of crude oil enjoying the smells of rotting fish that washed up on shore while enjoying a view of oil rigs littering the horizon. Compared to many parts of the Caribbean and Gulf – we’re not that far off from that nightmare in Texas already. Why further it along in the name of politics? I doubt this is what Texans truly want.

I beg of you to please reconsider your stance on offshore drilling to keep our Texas shores clean. I hope that you can see in your heart that it is the right thing to do, no matter how temporarily burdening it may be on our economy until we come up with alternative energy sources and adjust our way of life to be more sustainable.

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

Brian Saghy

Dear GSM mobile phone carrier,

Fix your network. Fix your communication protocol. I am sick and tired of hearing interference from every cell phone which is on your network on my speakers, on my headphones on my landline on the conference room phone, and seeing my monitor shake and shimmy every time my LG decides to talk phone home like ET to the mothership.

This is entirely unacceptable. How much money did you have to shove in the FCC’s pockets to get this horribly engineered, chattery wireless protocol approved? I was hoping that maybe with the update of the W-CDMA/3G protocol that you’d have this fixed. I guess that wasn’t an option? Or are you just lazy and ignorant?

How did Apple overlook this gigantic flaw when choosing AT&T as their sole provider of the iPhone? For being so concerned about aesthetics and pleasure of use, forcing your customer’s speakers blast digital chit-chat interference at them every 5 minutes is not going to boost your sales or reputability. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, because if I have to listen to this garbage noise then your music-playing phone is worthless to me.

Stop blaming the “poor” shielding on my [everything]. I’m sorry that not all of my electronics are wrapped in lead so that you don’t have to think for yourselves and come up with a protocol that doesn’t suck. Even Evil Verizon decided to go with a protocol that doesn’t suck.

I guess that means I’ll be switching back to crappy, Evil Verizon or maybe try Sprint. Thanks a lot.

Sincerely,

-Brian Saghy

The piezo-electric buzzer salesman is one of the most successful businessman of his time. Perhaps not economically, but he certainly got his product into more devices around the world than I personally would ever have wished for.

The buzzer is a simple device – a piece of flexible crystal which flexes itself when an electrical current is applied. Turn the current on and off in rapid succession, and you get a frequency. You attach that frequency to a spasming piece of metal or plastic, and you get movement of air. You move air, and you get a blaring obnoxious noise entering your ear, waking you up at 6:30 in the morning as a construction worker decided to put his vehicle in reverse not too far from your bedroom window.

Is that really necessary? I wonder to myself, head covered in a pillow – trying to fall back to sleep. Why on earth would some engineer decide it was a good idea to make a truck beep when it is moving backwards? Safety seems to be the first reason to come to mind, but what exactly are we worried about? Isn’t the truck moving in reverse indicated by the fact that the truck is, well, moving in reverse? A moving truck is a moving truck is a moving truck.

Imagine any vehicle beeping on and off, once per second, blaring down the highway – driving forwards. Warning everybody in the vicinity “Hey, I could hit you. Hey, I could hit you. Oh, and you over there, I could hit you too!” This would be considered obnoxiously unacceptable, so why do we accept it when the truck is moving backwards?

Trucks aren’t the only machines that we use that make unnecessary noise. A simple digital watch, for instance, can be even more obnoxious. Why was it decided that a beep was a good way to let me that I have hit a button on the side of my watch? Perhaps to let me know… to be honest, I have no idea what it is trying to communicate to me. “Hey, you who pushed the button. Just wanted to let you know that when you changed the mode to stopwatch, it was ‘cuz you pushed a button. In case you didn’t know thats how modes change on the watch”.

Or maybe it’s trying to say “hey, the guy who programmed this wristwatch was too lazy to fix a bug where he accidentally tied the buttons to the piezo-electric. That’s why I only cost $10”.

Or could it be “Hey, yeah you, fumble fingers. You hit a button. Maybe you didn’t want to do that. Do you know how serious this was? You are now in (gasp) stopwatch mode. I just thought I’d warn ya in case you didn’t mean to do it on purpose, to prevent you any grave danger because of your clumsiness”.

I’m really worried about possibly hitting a button accidentally, especially when the airplane passenger in the seat next to me is trying to sleep while I turn off a running stopwatch. Thank you, watch, I now know that when I pushed the button that it was really pushed, and so do the 6 people surrounding me. You know, the only time it would be useful to be warned with a beep is when I accidentally hold the “set time” button down for too long, possibly altering the time and making me late for a very important appointment. Naturally, my watch is silent during this (and only this) transition.

Even my alarm clock beeps. Not when you’d expect it to. It beeps when I’m trying to wind down and go to sleep. It beeps when I set the alarm from “off” to “on”. I suppose the well-drawn little light with a bell symbolizing “alarm 1 has been set” is apparently not enough to get the point across. Nope, it needs to beep at full volume at me, irritating me in my sleepy state. The affect is even worsened if somebody is on the floor next to the bed in a sleeping bag, already asleep. Then they get to wake up by the alarm clock’s announcement “Hey, yeah you already asleep on the floor, I just wanted to let you know that I’m gonna wake you up again in 6 hours. In case you were worried you might get a good night’s rest.”

The only time an alarm clock should beep is if it is trying to raise me from the dead of 7am.

Ah yes, and then there is the computer beep. At some point in the early days of the Unix OS, some brilliant computer programmer discovered a most brilliant way to utilize that little piezo-electric buzzer that the salesman sold the motherboard manufacturer of his computer. “Sure, its a good idea to have a buzzer” said the salesman, “there are plenty of useful things that could be communicated through sound in a computer”.

Trying to delete a non-existent character is not one of them.

I’m at a unix console, and I realize that I started typing a filename incorrectly. I hit backspace, holding it down until all of the characters are gone. But, to my surprise, I get chastised and scoffed at by the PC when there are no more characters left to delete.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP…

What? What did I break? Is the computer going to melt down? Is it dying? Is it erasing all of my files? Oh, no, its simply and harshly trying to tell me that when I hit backspace and no more characters disappear from under the cursor that there are no more characters to delete. Because that wasn’t obvious by the visual display that there are no more characters.

Let’s extend this feature to a text editor, please. I really want an entire classroom of focused students to know every single time I hit the delete key one too many times. Because that’s really, really, really important for everybody to know. I like everybody in my surroundings to be annoyed with my completely average butterfingers.

I don’t mind if a computer beeps to tell me “Hey, moron, you forgot to install a processor in me”. “You are about to delete the entire contents of your hard drive, as well as blow the face of Alaska off the planet.” is a pretty good time to beep. Maybe even twice, for that second part. Even “Hey, I’m rebooting because Windows is a piece of garbage and crashed” is acceptable. But please, don’t beep at me to tell me something which is otherwise mundane and obvious.

Hell for the programmer who made this initial decision and standardized it for years to come should be placement in a black room with nothing but a white “>” prompt. The only hope of entertainment of any sort or escape from this room is, in fact, the only object in the room, which is a backspace key. The backspace key only makes a beeping sound and causes the cursor to blink. Take eternity in that, sadistic programmer.

The piezo-electric salesman may have had his way with our electronics, but there is no need to continue this way. With a small amount of engineering effort and prototype testing, life with machines could be so much more tranquil if they are designed to yell at us at only the most appropriately important times.

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