I filed a complaint against Westinghouse to the BBB, but two weeks later they haven't responded to it yet. Can't say I'm surprised. The good thing is that if they don't respond to the BBB, they get a big fat stinking black mark on their BBB profile. Might not do that much good, but it hopefully will let others know to avoid them.

I've gotten some posts from some people in the same situation of Westinghouse blowing them off and not sending them replacement items when their crappy merchandise breaks. Some people want to file a class-action lawsuit. I don't know if I'd go that far. I may take them to small claims court though. Before that, I'm going to write a letter to their corporate office, pointing out the existence of my website.

In the meantime, conclusions:

• Westinghouse doesn't give half a crap about its customers.
• Never ship anything expensive via UPS. They're happy to leave $500 merchandise sitting on your front porch (assuming it even made it to my front porch and the UPS guy didn't just keep it, how would I know? I never saw it).
• Beware buying things online. When they break, your options for getting them fixed or covered by warranty are limited, impractical, and prone to months of aggravation. Is it worth the time you save buying things online, when you have to spend six months going through the kind of bullcrap I went through over this monitor?

This is post is just a friendly reminder to everyone reading this, don't buy anything from Westinghouse, and tell everyone you know the same thing. I wonder if Westinghouse cares about all of the people whose business they flushed down the toilet by ripping me off?

(Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6.)

Ten days ago I complained that there were no good Lisp equivalents of ruby-forum or perlmonks. It looks like someone went and made one. What good timing.

I hope it's a success, and I hope it stays newb-friendly. The amount of fake watch and shoe spam on comp.lang.lisp has reached critical mass.

Speaking of mailing lists, maybe it's just me but I've never found mailing lists to be all that enjoyable to use. They have the benefit of being a sort of lowest common denominator (everyone has email, and you can slap an HTML interface on top of one). They also have the benefit of being distributed to some degree, because everyone who gets the email serves as an archive, and if the main server dies maybe you can recover things. And mailing lists do have less overhead than MBs when it comes to running one, especially a high-traffic one, I would imagine.

But the bad things about mailing lists vs. message boards:

• Message boards are accessible from anywhere that you have a web browser, which is everywhere. Email isn't necessarily accessible from everywhere, unless you use webmail or SSH home and use mutt or something, which not everyone can or wants to do. Or if there's a good web interface on the mailing list.
• You can't do anything more than plaintext, which isn't entirely a bad thing, HTML email is pure evil, but being able to cleanly post images or clickable links or formatted text on a message board is a nice feature.
• Threading never quite works correctly on mailing lists, because eventually someone will hit the wrong button in their mail client and break the thread; whereas on a message board it always works fine.
• You can move threads around between forums on an MB, you can edit threads, you can close threads, you can delete a post if you make a mistake; but mailing lists are write-only, and once you send a message off into the ether it's posted for everyone to see forever, and no one has much control over a list beyond moderating the messages that end up getting through.
• Avatars. Personal profiles. These things make people seem more like people and less like a nameless entity. It's friendlier and more inviting.
• The HTML interfaces people slap on top of mailing list archives are pretty horrible 95% of the time. Probably because most people are using email clients anyways so no one cares. Message boards generally look nice and have nice interfaces for reading and posting.
• Email sucks. Spam filters and bounced messages mean you never quite know if what you just wrote actually made it to the list. Reply to list vs. reply to sender vs. reply to all, etc. are all needless complications. How many times have you seen "UNSUBSCRIBE" sent to everyone on a list? The interface to mailing lists is not intuitive. Whereas you can always see immediately if an MB post worked or not.

And so on. I likes me my message boards.

There's an article on Slashdot about a US Senate hearing on laptop seizures at border crossings. This affects me, because I travel to Canada a lot and plan to move there within a year or so.

It's a problem because my job requires me to handle what amount to people's medical records as data files on my laptop. It's part of my job, and often I work from home. As of right now, I never take my laptop with me to Canada partly because I don't know what would happen if a border agent decided to inspect or copy all of my data. I can get in very serious trouble for breaching patient confidentiality. On the other hand I could get in serious trouble if I refused to allow a search for myself; at best I'd be turned way at the border, having wasted hundreds of dollars to travel there.

I really don't know what I'm going to do when I move. I'll probably have to wipe my computers clean before shipping them up there. Another option would be to encrypt all the data, upload it to the server that hosts my website, then download it all again after I move. It's insane that I'd have to do such a thing though. And shuffling sensitive data around to strangers' computers and servers isn't the safest thing in the world either.

How do lawyers and doctors and people with trade secrets and other people with classified or legally protected information handle border crossings? It's a bit of a conflict of interest.

What's the Common Lisp version of Perlmonks or Ruby-forum? I have yet to find it.

comp.lang.lisp is largely crap. 50% of the traffic on that list is spam about shoes and fake watches. The other half is equally split between:

• People debating tiny, silly semantic points of the Common Lisp Hyperspec.
• People stuck in the 70's or 80's, talking about the good old days, ruminating about Lisp history.
• Flame wars.
• New people asking for help. Some get good honest advice and helpful answers, many are flamed and ridiculed into next week if they even hint that they dislike the parentheses.

The Common Lisp community (if you can call it that) is a bunch of really smart guys, but they all live isolated in hermit shacks up in the mountains and they spend their time doing magic tricks with Lisp that few people ever see, and if you wander too close they throw rocks at you.

What's the Common Lisp equivalent of perldoc or rdoc? We have the Hyperspec. It's an impressive document, but it's a bunch of painful HTML that looks like it was created in the early 90's, probably because it was. It reads like a dusty, dry, technical document probably because it is. What it's not, is friendly or easily readable.

Perl has CPAN, Ruby has rubygems, what does Lisp have? Either a hand-rolled system definition script, or if you're lucky an ASDF install file. ASDF is the semi-standard Lisp way of installing libraries, except that it doesn't quite work in Windows, it doesn't check dependencies or handle different versions of a package very well, and it doesn't work the same on all Lisp implementations. Many people in the so-called community think it's not very good.

The fellow running Lispcast makes another good point. Where can you download Lisp? It's not obvious.

You could say "OK Brian, good idea, now get to work!" The problem is that even if I had the time or willpower, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I honestly don't think I could design and run and maintain a CPAN. And even if I did, would anyone use it? But I do know that there ARE plenty of smart, enthusiastic people using Lisp. Yet high-quality friendly code is largely not being produced.

Peter Christensen wrote about "langauge snobs" and the importance of community. One point made is that some really ugly, horrific languages have been extremely successful simply because they've been accessible and fun. An example given is the scripting language in Second Life, which has over 2.5 billion lines of code written in by tens of thousands of amateurs and has accurately modeled a realistic 3D environment with thousands of users at any given time. All in an ugly language some guy invented AND implemented in one week. The developers admit that the language is total crap, but it doesn't matter. 1) It has very good and accessible documentation, 2) it has a very newbie-friendly community, and 3) and it's easy to pick up, throw together some code and get immediate results. Three things Common Lisp lacks.

This is something I've said myself many times: an active, supportive, enthusiastic community is essential for the health of any programming language. Common Lisp simply doesn't have one and it's a shame.

I still secretly hope that Clojure or NewLisp or Arc turn out to be a huge success. They are the kinds of things Lisp needs today.

Friday a guy on the phone said he'd call me back Monday or Tuesday to give me an update on when / whether they're ever going to send me my monitor. Monday came and went with no call. Not really surprising.

I filed a complaint with the BBB today. We'll see how that goes. At the BBB Westinghouse has around 150 complaints in the past 36 months, but 133 of them were supposedly solved "satisfactorily" and Westinghouse somehow still has the highest possible rating at the BBB. I've read some things about the BBB not being an entirely neutral entity itself, but who knows. I'll start filing complaints with other consumer groups if I need to.

A good handful of people have left comments here at my blog saying they aren't going to buy anything from Westinghouse themselves, which is great to hear. I may mention my blog to Westinghouse next time I call them, if there is a next time. Is not sending me the monitor I paid for really worth losing a bunch of customers?

The sad thing is that I really do need a monitor with component and composite inputs, and they are somewhat rare (the local store had none except Westingcrap brand). However I have found a Gateway model that has them, so maybe that'll work out. I'd gladly take a refund from Westinghouse rather than a monitor at this point.

EDIT: Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6.

Following in the footsteps of Sean Potter I took a photo of my desk.

My desk itself sucks, but I'm moving again in a year or so and didn't want to invest in a good one yet. I'm missing one of my big monitors (thanks Westinghouse) and in the meantime I have to settle for that old Apple display as my second monitor.

My mousepad is an Icemat; can you believe the green ones were cheaper than all the other colors? That shade of green is clearly the best. And my keyboard is a tasty Saitek Eclipse II, which is one of the most comfy keyboards I've found to type on (and it glows in the dark). Nothing too exciting beyond that.

People are stupid. We're blinded by our own prejudices and biases and preconceptions. It's kind of understandable because no one has enough time to really collect enough information to have an informed opinion about everything. So we end up extrapolating or relying on expert opinion or turning to our gut feeling. Inevitably we end up being wrong some of the time.

This leads to two problems. One is that being a person myself, I'm also stupid, meaning there are almost certainly some beliefs I currently hold that are wrong. The second is that from my perspective, I appear to be right about everything. This is trivially true of everyone; as soon as a person decides they're wrong, they change their mind right away and become right again. The problem then is how can I tell when I'm wrong and when I'm right? I quick objective glimpse at reality suffices most of the time, but sometimes we're still tricked.

Those two things in combination are a problem for everyone. I think the best anyone can do is to realize that this is the case, be open to being wrong, and to take some efforts to rectify it. At least minimize the damage, try to be as right about as many things as you can.

This is why e.g. I started learning Emacs even though I love Vim, and why I stick with it even though it's unpleasant at first. A lot of smart people say good thing about Emacs. My opinion of it is much different now than before I'd used it a lot. I think many things people say about it are wrong, but many are also right. There is some good stuff there.

For the same reason, I've decided to learn Python. I've been wanting to for quite a while anyways. In spite of the pain I've had trying to use it in the past, and my generally low opinion of the language, there may just be something worthwhile there. A lot of smart people say good things about it, and a lot of good programs are written in it. The community is large and active and enthusiastic.

My first shot was to try some of the stuff at Python Challenge. It's an interesting site full of puzzles that you need a programming language to solve; many of them are geared toward Python or toward libraries available in Python, but you can use any good language for many of them. I got through 17 of the puzzles last night, but I did look at "hints" on the forum for about half of those. A lot of them require sort of specialized knowledge apart from knowledge of Python, on a wide variety of subjects, so it's pretty fun.

My first pet peeve (of many to come, I'm sure): why doesn't python --help or python --version work? Instead you have to use python -h and python -V (capital V). This is non-standard. It worries me when people do things like this differently. But we'll see.

Way back in March I sent in my L2410NM monitor for RMA to Westinghouse. This is June and I don't have it back yet. Last I heard they sent my case to their corporate office. I called again this week, call #16 or 17, I lost count, and I was told that they put in a request for a "status update", but having heard any update on it. I'm always promised a return call, but I've yet to receive even one of those. As of now they've promised to send me a new monitor and have given up hope of ever recovering my legendary lost monitor, and supposedly they even created the order in their system that will initiate the monitor-sending process, complete with a long string of letters and numbers representing my fates.

I almost wish they would say "Ha ha, just kidding, screw you customer, you're not getting anything from us" so that I'd feel justified in filing a complain with the BBB. But no, they keep the carrot dangling in front of my nose, inching closer and closer to resolving this issue. Likely I'm going to do so soon though. Not sure if it'll actually help anyways.

I've already ensured that my friends and family will never buy anything from them, nor will my place of employment, and hopefully some people reading this will also refrain. The real problem is, what company is any better? I keep a mental list of companies that have screwed me over, but that list is becoming so large that I'm running out of companies I can actually buy things from. I can at least prioritize according to the level of suckiness. Westinghouse tops the list at the moment.

EDIT: Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6.

I worry about my hands. I play with computers for a living, and part of the reason someone would want to hire me is that I get a job done quickly. And being able to type fast is a necessary (not sufficient) ability for that to happen.

When I was in high school I started getting horrible pain on my wrists and hands. I had to wear a wrist brace for weeks at a time. I don't know what caused it, but too much keyboard time and bad posture and good old repetitive strain injury was and is my best guess. (This was before I'd even heard of Vim. Not sure what text editor I used back then. Probably some Notepad clone, ugh.)

But then I trained myself to type more comfortably, and I haven't had any pain for years. I hold my arms at the proper angle, and I don't bend my wrists or stretch or strain my fingers. My hands bounce over the keys nowadays, on and off the home row constantly. I don't use my pinky fingers to type at all, in fact. When I need to type a q or a number or a tilde, I move my whole hand up and hit it with my ring finger. When I'm vimming, I hit ESC with my middle finger. With practice this is just as fast as keeping your hands on the home row, but I find it far more comfortable. I still do it fast enough that people remark that I'm a fast typist (though I know plenty of people who are faster).

Thus we come to Emacs. Emacs is the king of key chords. I'm OK hitting Ctrl. I pick up my hand and hit Ctrl with the side of my pinky like I'm karate-chopping it with a half-closed fist, or use my pinky and ring finger both. The Alt key I can usually reach with my thumb. But anything that requires Ctrl + Shift or to a lesser degree Alt + Shift is a killer on my hands. I don't know a good way to quickly type Ctrl + Shift + another key in a comfortable way. Caps lock remapped to another Ctrl is the solution many websites list, but that doesn't cut it for me either, it's just pinky-stretching in another direction (and what do you do when you have to hit Ctrl with your right hand?).

For some reason I'm highly amused yet slightly horrified that there really is a condition called Emacs pinky. And that Richard Stallman and other Emacs gurus have famously experienced wrist injuries due to years of using Emacs. How many people in the world can say that their favorite text editor has physically crippled them?

Even if you admit that heavy dependence on the modifier keys is necessary, some of Emacs' keybindings seem ill-chosen to me. See this quote from the Emacs tutorial:

You can use the arrow keys,but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.

I don't know what kind of creature finds those keys more efficient than the arrow keys or pageup / pagedown, but I don't think it's a human being. (But admittedly, same goes for hjkl in Vim.) Sure, you don't have you move your hands from the home row. You just have to contort them into pretzels. Try hitting up up up down left left right quickly, then try to do the same using those keys.

Same is true of other commands. delete-indentation, which I find myself doing a lot, is M-^. When editing Lisp you may get to experience wonders like C-( and M-J.

Anything multi-chord is also just a little bit torturous for me. How do you execute a command more than once in Emacs? e.g. move down 3 lines? You can either type M-3 C-n, which requires me to hit Alt with my right hand and 3 with my left, then hit Ctrl with my left and n with my right. Or you can do C-u 3 C-n, which actually requires me to alternate hands on the modifier keys three times instead of two. This for something so ridiculously simple as moving the cursor, something I do hundreds of times a day.

This kind of crap leads you to try to hit M-3 or C-u or C-n with one hand instead of two. If I can manage to hit M-3 with my left hand, I can hit the down arrow with my right. M-3 is possible with one hand, but M-8 or M-9 would not be without dislocating a few joints. Down this path leads permanent disability.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of remapping every keybinding or nearly every keybinding in Emacs to something sane. But aside from thoughts such as "Why the heck should it be necessary for me to do this?" or "Why would this possibly be worth my time?", I'm unsure I could come up with anything better. I'd still be limited to using lots and lots of modifier keys. Emacs has had decades of refinement after all, and it's still in this sorry state.

I have tried the Vi and Vim keybindings in Emacs, and they don't work right. They don't work in all buffers, for example a SLIME REPL buffer. Even when Vim mode is working, many of the Vim commands are present, but not all. These huge, massive Emacs-customization hacks always seem to work well maybe 95% of the time for me, but text editor bindings and behaviors are really something you need to work perfectly 100% of the time. Every time Emacs does something ridiculous or one of these third-party scripts mangles my buffer, and I have to kill and reload the file, it completely breaks my stride and throws off my concentration. The text editor needs to get out of your way and let you focus on what you're doing.

When I was in college, one of the guys in one of my classes was an older fellow who'd been working in the Real World for a while, and he asked me one day what kind of job I wanted after I graduated. I remember saying "I have no idea. Pretty much anything. If Microsoft drove up to my house with a truck full of money, I'd go work for them."

Looking back now, I was wrong. There really are more important things than money. I couldn't do a job I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Not for long anyways. I don't make as much money doing what I'm doing right now as I could be making elsewhere, but I like it. I like the atmosphere of working in a research setting. I can't imagine working in a corporate setting.

I feel really bad for people who work jobs that they hate. When I got out of college I worked for six months doing tech support over the phone for a residential satellite dish company. If not for the fact that I needed money to survive, I wouldn't have. Near the end I was considering going to live under a bridge somewhere. If faced with the choice, I'd probably rather dig ditches for a living than do that again.

If hell existed, for me hell would consist of being eternally bored. I've had jobs that required no thought, just mindless repetition of tasks that were slightly too complicated to get a computer or machine to do. I can't imagine a worse fate. I can feel my brains start to leak out of my ears after an hour of a boring task.

When you have a job where you have to play with data, as I do at times, it can sometimes start turning into that kind of boredom. But then I start writing programs to do all the mindless repetition for me. Instead of spending lots of time solving little problems and doing little tasks, I solve bigger, harder, much more interesting problems that incidentally solve lots of little problems at the same time.

Computers are useful tools for everyone. But in one sense, a computer is often a waste in the hands of anyone but a programmer. The way most people use computers is like using a powerful microscope as a hammer to pound in a nail. Any time you find yourself copying and pasting a bunch of things over and over for an hour, there's something wrong. Any time a human being is forced to do a linear search through a long list of ANYTHING on a computer screen, someone along the line has failed. There are so many of these little problems in most people's lives that a programmer can solve for people.