This is what Nettle looked like in 1997 when it was launched.

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this may sting a little

Technology Ideas, Brainstorms, and Commentary
by Brian L. Dear

Inflation
19970708 IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, AT LEAST MATCH 'EM
The real excitement with the Mars Pathfinder mission isn't on Mars, it's in cyberspace -- where things are really heating up.
At first, the Mars Pathfinder mirror web sites listed Silicon Graphics as having the highest "load capacity" (which they define as "hits per day") at around 10 million. Sun, CompuServe, and Digital Equipment all clocked in with lower ratings in the table of "Corporate" mirror sites. Then there are the "Public Sector" sites (such as NASA JPL, NASA Ames, NCSA, and UCSD), mere weaklings in comparison, with just a few million hits per day capacity.
It didn't take long for somebody (no doubt a marketroid) at the corporate weakling sites to upgrade their capacity (or perhaps just type in a bigger number?). Soon, SGI's site was proudly listing itself as handling 15 million hits per day, still out in the lead past the other three corporate contenders.
As of today, however, they've all outdone themselves. SGI, CompuServe, Sun, and DEC all are listed as handling 20 million hits per day. Isn't the free market wonderful?
Of course, savvy Mars websurfers out there probably noticed that little NASA JPL's site had the most up-to-date information. But, it's been nearly impossible to get in to the JPL site. Alas. Information: widespread or up-to-date. You can't yet have both, it seems.

Observation
19970628 WHAT TO GIVE THE DIGERATI WHO HAVE EVERYTHING
A glance at the recent "Pray" issue of WIRED (5.06) finds a surprisingly large number of watch ads, with the times of 7:55, 10:05, 10:07, and six watches on a 2-pg Raymond Weil watch ad set to 10:08. Strangely, every single watch is analog. So much for the digital revolution.

Juxtaposition
19970620 FUN JUXTAPOSITION OF THE DAY
Seen on Yahoo's (broken) stock quote pages today:
"Our Apologies: Our quote supply process has experienced a failure, and current stock quotes are not available. We are working to restore the service, but can not estimate when this will occur."
Followed by a link entitled:
"COOL JOBS @ YAHOO"

Wish List
19970620 A TRANSCRIPTION TOOL
Take PC-based Digital Audio recording and playback technology and blend it with a word processor. Yes, a word processor. Why? Because it would be a godsend for all those people who have to type transcripts of interviews, recorded meetings, and depositions, it sure would be nice if the audio could be digitized onto the hard disk for instant random access. Instead of taking one's hands away from the keyboard to reach the tape recorder each time one needs to PLAY, PAUSE, REWIND, FAST FORWARD, or STOP, it would be so much nicer if one need only press Alt-F for Fast Forward, Alt-P for Play, Alt-R for Rewind, and Alt-S for Stop (you wouldn't need Pause anymore). This would make the transcriber's job so much easier. All of the basic technology exists for this kind of application. The question is, has anyone written it yet? Is it commercially available?

Net Peeve
19970618 PAPAJOHNS PIZZA
Well, I bought my first Papa Johns pizza (Nasdaq: PZZA) last night. There's a new Papa Johns in Pacific Beach near where I live, here in the San Diego, CA area. So I called them.

PapaJohns is a growing national pizza store chain that's been getting rave reviews from diners and investors alike. Now that there was a store nearby, I figured it was time to investigate.

A young woman answered, I told her I wanted to place an order for pickup.

She asks for my phone number. (Get me into the database no doubt). Then she asks for my name. (More database info).

Then she asks for the order. So I order a large pizza with jalapeno and mushroom toppings. She asks if I have any coupons. No, I do not.

She then asks if this is for delivery or pickup.
What is it about order-takers not listening to you?
This happens whenever I order food in San Diego. For example, I go to a Jack in the Box. Walk up to the counter and clearly and slowly dictate, "I would like to place an order TO GO, please." And then the order-taker will say, "Ok, what would you like?" and then I give my order, and the order taker inevitably replies, "For here or to go?" (To be more accurate, they reply with a musical 4-syllable Spanglish word, "fo-hee-tu-GOH". And when I order my Grilled Sourdough Burger from them, it gets turned into the delightful phrase, "GLEED Soo-doo BOO-gah.") Sigh. :-/

But anyway, back to the Papa Johns experience.

So I went down to Pacific Beach and there were 5 cars and pickups in the parking lot adjacent to PapaJohns, and they all had Papa Johns Pizza signs attached to their roofs, and they were all lit up, like taxi signs. The engines were running in some of the cars.

I went into the store, and my immediate reaction?

Jiffy Lube.

I say that cuz whenever I've been to a brand-new auto tune-up franchise, everything is spic-and-span clean, and there appear to be, at first sight, too many employees, and then I immediately think, all this fancy stuff and all these paychecks mean my bill is gonna be higher than elsewhere.

There were no other customers in the store, but then there wasn't much room for them anyway. You walk in and there's the counter and that's it. This place is pickup and delivery only. There were 4 or 5 computer terminals at the counter, and red Meridian phones everywhere.

There was a girl behind the counter talking on one of the phones. I walked up to the counter and stand there. She looked at me but continued talking on the phone. The rest of the employees were milling around, looking busy, nobody offered to come to help me even though they all knew A Customer was waiting at the counter. Further evidence for my rapidly-formulating theory that this operation is much more delivery oriented than customer pick-up oriented.

So the girl on the phone ended her call, and looked up to me, and asked what I'd like to order. I told her I'd called and placed an order for pickup and at that very moment one of the red Meridian telephones in front of me started ringing so loud I thought I'd done something wrong!!! I mean, this thing rang loud enough for people down the block to hear. And it kept ringing as I tried to tell her my name. She was only 2 feet away from me and she could not hear what I was saying cuz the phone was so loud! Anyway, someone else answered it (I would have been pretty distraught if she'd answered it, so 2 points to Papa Johns for training their staff to stick with the customer who's already in the middle of a transaction). She typed some stuff into the computer and found my order and told me the amount, which I couldn't hear cuz the phones were ringing again. Finally I heard the amount. Something like $14.75. A bit pricey, considering I usually buy the very same pizza at Pizza Hut for about $4 less, and that even includes two cans of Mountain Dew.

The pizza was ready and I paid and she gave it to me and I went home. It smelled good in the car, but the big test would be: is it better than Pizza Hut?

Couple things I noticed: Papa John's pizza boxes are fancier than Pizza Hut's. Pizza Hut's are brown paper; Papa John's are white. That white paper has gotta be more expensive. Then there was this weird little container inside the Papa Johns pizza box, for "special garlic sauce". I didn't want that, but I guess I paid for it. There were also two real jalapeno peppers in one other corner of the box. Papa Johns had been very skimpy in putting the jalapeno peppers on the pizza itself. There was like one little slice right smack dab in the center of each piece. Then they throw in two whole jalapeno peppers on the side. What gives? Thank goodness I didn't order anchovies. I can imagine a few sprinkled on top, and a couple of fish lying in the corner!

So.... the big moment. Taste the pizza. I did. I immediately noticed the pizza crust is much higher quality than Pizza Hut's. Or to put it another way -- Pizza Hut's pizza crust (I always order the deep pan crust style) is so greasy it must be cooked in butter. But it sure tastes good! Papa John's crust --- more like pita bread in terms of dryness -- no grease or buttery sponginess at all.
The pizza itself? Not as good as Pizza Hut. I was *really* disappointed cuz I was really hoping for "a better pizza experience". Obviously the Papa Johns pizza is a "healthier" pizza, but I was not looking for a "healther" pizza, I was looking for, to tell the truth, "a Papa Del's experience".

You see, Papa Del's is, in my opinion, THE WORLD'S GREATEST PIZZA. Papa Del's is located in Champaign-Urbana, IL, home of the University of Illinois. It is the reigning, undefeated world champion best all-around pizza in the entire world, bar none, no questions asked, period. It really is That Good.

Unfortunately, Papa John's is nowhere *near* the Papa Del's level of quality and sheer gastronomic bliss.

So, to make a long story short, I'm putting Papa John's pizza in my "guilt pizza" category --- when I'm feeling guilty about eating the greasier, but tastier, Pizza Hut pizza, maybe I'll order a Papa John's. But most of the time I'll prolly continue to spring for Pizza Hut.

So there you have it. :-)

Net Peeve
19970615
IGNORANCE IS BLISS
It's unwise to believe everything you read when it comes to Wired and HotWired. You might come away thinking MUDs weren't invented until the early 80s. Or thinking that the term "multimedia" wasn't coined until 1984, and by Apple no less.
Take the current "issue" of HotWired. There are two "stories" available on its main menu. One's entitled: "Where do browsers come from, and why is there more than one? A little history, in Web 101." VERY little history, they should have said. The article claims that Mosaic was "the first graphical browser". Forget Viola, among other browsers. Forget the fact that O'Reilly and Associates' 1992 "Whole Internet" book even has screen shots of Viola. Not one mention of Mosaic. HotWired: You've been listening to too much Gospel According to Andreessen.
Then there's another current article, entitled "The GUI made the personal computer a mass phenomenon - but where did it come from? In Webmonkey." One might argue that PC's were a mass phenomenon well before Mac and Windows, but is it worth the effort to argue with HotWired? Why bother, when they're on such a roll? If you believe HotWired, then believe this (excerpted from the HotWired story):
So where did the GUI come from, and who invented it?
In 1979 the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developed the first prototype for a GUI. A young man named Steven Jobs, looking for new ideas to work into future iterations of Apple computers, traded US$1 million in stock options to Xerox for a detailed tour of their facilities and current projects. One of the things Xerox showed Jobs was the Alto, which sported a GUI and a three-button mouse. When Jobs saw this prototype he had an epiphany, and set out to bring the GUI to the public."

Dare we break the news to HotWired that the Alto was well under development years earlier? Would it make matters any better?
For a publisher that's trying to be Rolling Stone for geeks, this historical errorfest comes across to me like bios of The Who on their early bar-band days in the Bronx, and U2 growing up in Philly. Sorry, Wired, your call did not go through. Please hang up and try the number again. If you need a clue, please stay on the line, and someone will assist you.
The past is no different than the future to the folks at Wired Ventures. "Past" and "future" are but theories, unproven at worst, and at best, highly speculative.

Trend
19970601 THE HAN DYNASTY
First there was the LAN. Watch out, here comes the HAN. Household Area Network. Multiple PC's, a shared printer, perhaps even a networked scanner as well.
Home networks, home servers, neighborhood networks. Household web servers. Neighborhood cache servers. It's all coming, and it's going to be a big business. Some links:

An article from June 1997 UPSIDE recognizing the market implications of HANs.
Here's another interesting article from OEM Magazine from April 1996.

Birdrock, Nettle, and This May Sting A Little are trade marks or service marks of Birdrock Media Corporation.

Inflation 19970708	IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, AT LEAST MATCH 'EM The real excitement with the Mars Pathfinder mission isn't on Mars, it's in cyberspace -- where things are really heating up. At first, the Mars Pathfinder mirror web sites listed Silicon Graphics as having the highest "load capacity" (which they define as "hits per day") at around 10 million. Sun, CompuServe, and Digital Equipment all clocked in with lower ratings in the table of "Corporate" mirror sites. Then there are the "Public Sector" sites (such as NASA JPL, NASA Ames, NCSA, and UCSD), mere weaklings in comparison, with just a few million hits per day capacity. It didn't take long for somebody (no doubt a marketroid) at the corporate weakling sites to upgrade their capacity (or perhaps just type in a bigger number?). Soon, SGI's site was proudly listing itself as handling 15 million hits per day, still out in the lead past the other three corporate contenders. As of today, however, they've all outdone themselves. SGI, CompuServe, Sun, and DEC all are listed as handling 20 million hits per day. Isn't the free market wonderful? Of course, savvy Mars websurfers out there probably noticed that little NASA JPL's site had the most up-to-date information. But, it's been nearly impossible to get in to the JPL site. Alas. Information: widespread or up-to-date. You can't yet have both, it seems.
Observation 19970628	WHAT TO GIVE THE DIGERATI WHO HAVE EVERYTHING A glance at the recent "Pray" issue of WIRED (5.06) finds a surprisingly large number of watch ads, with the times of 7:55, 10:05, 10:07, and six watches on a 2-pg Raymond Weil watch ad set to 10:08. Strangely, every single watch is analog. So much for the digital revolution.
Juxtaposition 19970620	FUN JUXTAPOSITION OF THE DAY Seen on Yahoo's (broken) stock quote pages today: "Our Apologies: Our quote supply process has experienced a failure, and current stock quotes are not available. We are working to restore the service, but can not estimate when this will occur." Followed by a link entitled: "COOL JOBS @ YAHOO"
Wish List 19970620	A TRANSCRIPTION TOOL Take PC-based Digital Audio recording and playback technology and blend it with a word processor. Yes, a word processor. Why? Because it would be a godsend for all those people who have to type transcripts of interviews, recorded meetings, and depositions, it sure would be nice if the audio could be digitized onto the hard disk for instant random access. Instead of taking one's hands away from the keyboard to reach the tape recorder each time one needs to PLAY, PAUSE, REWIND, FAST FORWARD, or STOP, it would be so much nicer if one need only press Alt-F for Fast Forward, Alt-P for Play, Alt-R for Rewind, and Alt-S for Stop (you wouldn't need Pause anymore). This would make the transcriber's job so much easier. All of the basic technology exists for this kind of application. The question is, has anyone written it yet? Is it commercially available?
Net Peeve 19970618	PAPAJOHNS PIZZA Well, I bought my first Papa Johns pizza (Nasdaq: PZZA) last night. There's a new Papa Johns in Pacific Beach near where I live, here in the San Diego, CA area. So I called them. PapaJohns is a growing national pizza store chain that's been getting rave reviews from diners and investors alike. Now that there was a store nearby, I figured it was time to investigate. A young woman answered, I told her I wanted to place an order for pickup. She asks for my phone number. (Get me into the database no doubt). Then she asks for my name. (More database info). Then she asks for the order. So I order a large pizza with jalapeno and mushroom toppings. She asks if I have any coupons. No, I do not. She then asks if this is for delivery or pickup. What is it about order-takers not listening to you? This happens whenever I order food in San Diego. For example, I go to a Jack in the Box. Walk up to the counter and clearly and slowly dictate, "I would like to place an order TO GO, please." And then the order-taker will say, "Ok, what would you like?" and then I give my order, and the order taker inevitably replies, "For here or to go?" (To be more accurate, they reply with a musical 4-syllable Spanglish word, "fo-hee-tu-GOH". And when I order my Grilled Sourdough Burger from them, it gets turned into the delightful phrase, "GLEED Soo-doo BOO-gah.") Sigh. :-/ But anyway, back to the Papa Johns experience. So I went down to Pacific Beach and there were 5 cars and pickups in the parking lot adjacent to PapaJohns, and they all had Papa Johns Pizza signs attached to their roofs, and they were all lit up, like taxi signs. The engines were running in some of the cars. I went into the store, and my immediate reaction? Jiffy Lube. I say that cuz whenever I've been to a brand-new auto tune-up franchise, everything is spic-and-span clean, and there appear to be, at first sight, too many employees, and then I immediately think, all this fancy stuff and all these paychecks mean my bill is gonna be higher than elsewhere. There were no other customers in the store, but then there wasn't much room for them anyway. You walk in and there's the counter and that's it. This place is pickup and delivery only. There were 4 or 5 computer terminals at the counter, and red Meridian phones everywhere. There was a girl behind the counter talking on one of the phones. I walked up to the counter and stand there. She looked at me but continued talking on the phone. The rest of the employees were milling around, looking busy, nobody offered to come to help me even though they all knew A Customer was waiting at the counter. Further evidence for my rapidly-formulating theory that this operation is much more delivery oriented than customer pick-up oriented. So the girl on the phone ended her call, and looked up to me, and asked what I'd like to order. I told her I'd called and placed an order for pickup and at that very moment one of the red Meridian telephones in front of me started ringing so loud I thought I'd done something wrong!!! I mean, this thing rang loud enough for people down the block to hear. And it kept ringing as I tried to tell her my name. She was only 2 feet away from me and she could not hear what I was saying cuz the phone was so loud! Anyway, someone else answered it (I would have been pretty distraught if she'd answered it, so 2 points to Papa Johns for training their staff to stick with the customer who's already in the middle of a transaction). She typed some stuff into the computer and found my order and told me the amount, which I couldn't hear cuz the phones were ringing again. Finally I heard the amount. Something like $14.75. A bit pricey, considering I usually buy the very same pizza at Pizza Hut for about $4 less, and that even includes two cans of Mountain Dew. The pizza was ready and I paid and she gave it to me and I went home. It smelled good in the car, but the big test would be: is it better than Pizza Hut? Couple things I noticed: Papa John's pizza boxes are fancier than Pizza Hut's. Pizza Hut's are brown paper; Papa John's are white. That white paper has gotta be more expensive. Then there was this weird little container inside the Papa Johns pizza box, for "special garlic sauce". I didn't want that, but I guess I paid for it. There were also two real jalapeno peppers in one other corner of the box. Papa Johns had been very skimpy in putting the jalapeno peppers on the pizza itself. There was like one little slice right smack dab in the center of each piece. Then they throw in two whole jalapeno peppers on the side. What gives? Thank goodness I didn't order anchovies. I can imagine a few sprinkled on top, and a couple of fish lying in the corner! So.... the big moment. Taste the pizza. I did. I immediately noticed the pizza crust is much higher quality than Pizza Hut's. Or to put it another way -- Pizza Hut's pizza crust (I always order the deep pan crust style) is so greasy it must be cooked in butter. But it sure tastes good! Papa John's crust --- more like pita bread in terms of dryness -- no grease or buttery sponginess at all. The pizza itself? Not as good as Pizza Hut. I was really disappointed cuz I was really hoping for "a better pizza experience". Obviously the Papa Johns pizza is a "healthier" pizza, but I was not looking for a "healther" pizza, I was looking for, to tell the truth, "a Papa Del's experience". You see, Papa Del's is, in my opinion, THE WORLD'S GREATEST PIZZA. Papa Del's is located in Champaign-Urbana, IL, home of the University of Illinois. It is the reigning, undefeated world champion best all-around pizza in the entire world, bar none, no questions asked, period. It really is That Good. Unfortunately, Papa John's is nowhere near the Papa Del's level of quality and sheer gastronomic bliss. So, to make a long story short, I'm putting Papa John's pizza in my "guilt pizza" category --- when I'm feeling guilty about eating the greasier, but tastier, Pizza Hut pizza, maybe I'll order a Papa John's. But most of the time I'll prolly continue to spring for Pizza Hut. So there you have it. :-)
Net Peeve 19970615	IGNORANCE IS BLISS It's unwise to believe everything you read when it comes to Wired and HotWired. You might come away thinking MUDs weren't invented until the early 80s. Or thinking that the term "multimedia" wasn't coined until 1984, and by Apple no less. Take the current "issue" of HotWired. There are two "stories" available on its main menu. One's entitled: "Where do browsers come from, and why is there more than one? A little history, in Web 101." VERY little history, they should have said. The article claims that Mosaic was "the first graphical browser". Forget Viola, among other browsers. Forget the fact that O'Reilly and Associates' 1992 "Whole Internet" book even has screen shots of Viola. Not one mention of Mosaic. HotWired: You've been listening to too much Gospel According to Andreessen. Then there's another current article, entitled "The GUI made the personal computer a mass phenomenon - but where did it come from? In Webmonkey." One might argue that PC's were a mass phenomenon well before Mac and Windows, but is it worth the effort to argue with HotWired? Why bother, when they're on such a roll? If you believe HotWired, then believe this (excerpted from the HotWired story): So where did the GUI come from, and who invented it? In 1979 the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center developed the first prototype for a GUI. A young man named Steven Jobs, looking for new ideas to work into future iterations of Apple computers, traded US$1 million in stock options to Xerox for a detailed tour of their facilities and current projects. One of the things Xerox showed Jobs was the Alto, which sported a GUI and a three-button mouse. When Jobs saw this prototype he had an epiphany, and set out to bring the GUI to the public." Dare we break the news to HotWired that the Alto was well under development years earlier? Would it make matters any better? For a publisher that's trying to be Rolling Stone for geeks, this historical errorfest comes across to me like bios of The Who on their early bar-band days in the Bronx, and U2 growing up in Philly. Sorry, Wired, your call did not go through. Please hang up and try the number again. If you need a clue, please stay on the line, and someone will assist you. The past is no different than the future to the folks at Wired Ventures. "Past" and "future" are but theories, unproven at worst, and at best, highly speculative.
Trend 19970601	THE HAN DYNASTY First there was the LAN. Watch out, here comes the HAN. Household Area Network. Multiple PC's, a shared printer, perhaps even a networked scanner as well. Home networks, home servers, neighborhood networks. Household web servers. Neighborhood cache servers. It's all coming, and it's going to be a big business. Some links: An article from June 1997 UPSIDE recognizing the market implications of HANs. Here's another interesting article from OEM Magazine from April 1996.

Technology Ideas, Brainstorms, and Commentaryby Brian L. Dear

Technology Ideas, Brainstorms, and Commentary
by Brian L. Dear