People Who Are Too Lazy To Write Two Additional Numbers When Dating Things

Remember the Y2K "bug" hysteria we had a decade or so ago?  Remember what caused it? I do:

People (specifically programmers in this case) who listed the year as MMDDYY instead of MMDDYYYY (those of you in Europe can switch the M's and the D's, of course).

Two weeks ago, I saw more of this same mindset. I woke up to "OMG! It's 11/11/11!"  It was on the news. There were thousands and thousands of weddings and births.  One website claimed it would likely be "the only binary date of your lifetime."

Sadly, they were all two thousand years too late for 11/11/11.  Two weeks ago was 11/11/2011. Nine hundred years ago was 11/11/1111.  A few weeks back was 11/02/2011 - a truly palindromic date. And the last. we'll see until ... um .. 2/10/2012. Unless I'm wrong, which I sometimes am.

It's funny to me - just over a decade ago, the fact that we were using two-digit years in our date format caused mass hysteria and panic. And we've fallen back into that same pattern of laziness that caused the problem in the first place.

Does it really take that long to write two more numbers?

Forum Threads with Useless Titles

It should come as no surprise to you that I spend a lot of time on the internet.

In fact, I spend a fair amount of time browsing the Amazon Kindle forums. As I write this (more than a month before you will see it), there are eight threads whose titles are simply, "Kindle Fire."

One of them wants to know if future models will have 3G capability. One of them wants to know if the speakers are any good. One of them is wondering if it will have an SD card. One person wants to know if he can download movies onto his Fire (if he decides to order it). One of them is loudly decrying the Fire's lack of camera and microphone.

Leaving aside that all of these questions are either unanswerable until the Fire itself starts shipping (if all goes well, I should have mine the day before you see this post) or are covered in detail on the Kindle Fire product page,, I'm really only trying to pay attention to one of them.  Yes, I could subscribe to the thread and have Amazon e-mail me updates, but the e-mail address I have the most access to isn't the one tied to my Amazon account. So I need to actually click on the thread to see which one it is.

It's as if I just titled every post here, "Complaints," and didn't bother tagging the posts. And then set Blogger to only show you the title until you clicked on the post. Would you keep reading?  Maybe. I don't know. But if I had a post you especially liked, you'd probably get frustrated trying to find it again.  Especially if my usual weekly schedule was screwed up because I misread the Blogger calendar again.

When I post a thread to a forum, I try to be a bit clearer - "Kindle Fire: 3G Version in the Future?" "Kindle Fire: Why No Camera?" "Kindle Fire: SD Card Slot?" "Kindle Fire: How Do The Speakers Sound?"

It's a shame that the rest of the world doesn't follow a similar policy.

Calendars That Start With Monday

When I was in first grade, we learned the days of the week. I think there was some horribly sappy little song to go along with it, but I've blocked that memory.

But what I remember clearly was that Sunday was the first day of the week. The vast majority of wall-hanging calendars I have dealt with over the years list Sunday as the first day of the week.

So, when I'm working on writing for this blog and I hit the "Schedule" button to the right, I keep trying to schedule posts for Saturday, because the Blogger calendar isn't configurable and starts with Monday. I've also scheduled New American Things posts for Fridays and Talking Game posts for Thursdays. All of which required a great deal of correction and panic once discovered.

I don't know if it's this way in other countries or not.  Here in the US, it's a holdover from our Judeo-Christian heritage.  After creating the Earth and everything on it, God took a day off. The seventh day, or Sabbath.

If you ask someone of the Jewish faith what day they take off, it's Saturday. Saturday is the seventh day on their calendars. The Fourth Commandment was to take the day off. So they do.

In fact, Sunday is the first day of the week for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic calendars. It didn't start to shift from first to last until fairly recently.

ISO 8601 standardized the calendar for ... well, people who worry about ISO documentation. Mostly computer-oriented folks and economists and other "detail-oriented" folks, but it's been gradually trickling down. ISO 8601 set Monday as the first day of the week.

This has the result of more and more calendars shifting Sunday to the end of the week on the calendars, which is why - every so often - one of my posts here will go up on Saturday instead of Friday.

I'm not an ISO adherent, and I very much dislike the Blogger scheduler that forces Monday to be the first day of the week, without the ability to configure it.

The Loss of Saturn as a Brand

My current car is a 2007 Saturn Vue. My wife and I both love it. The car I owned before that was a 1996 Saturn SL1. Before that, I drove a 1993 SL2. I loved both of those cars.

My old SL2 now belongs to my younger brother.

In fact, my family has owned more than a dozen Saturns. Our first Saturn was a 1991 Saturn SL1. It was notable because it was one of the cars impacted by that early recall that turned a PR nightmare into a success story.

We've only had one car die on us - it'd been poorly maintained (by me), and the engine seized after the oil pump failed. So long as we kept up with the maintenance, however, the cars have done very well for us.  We just drive a lot as a family. And Mom keeps getting T-boned and rear-ended.

To save money in 2009, GM discontinued the entire Saturn brand.  My family is painfully aware of the fact that our current cars may be our last Saturns.

I never want to drive anything that is not a Saturn, but I will eventually not have any other choice.

And I hate that.