While I'm on the subject

In the previous post, I mentioned public libraries. Public libraries are definitely in the "good enough" category as I've defined it. Where else can you get access to all of those resources for free? Not to mention the help of the librarians. I don't know about every town of course but in our town it's worth it to memorize the number of the reference desk at the library. Any time you have a tough question, try calling a librarian - they know where and how to find some of the most obscure answers out there. They're the unsung heroes of the information age!

"Good Enough" for reading

While I was browsing the bookstore the other day, in my annual check for books I should put on my Christmas gift list, it occurred to me: the reason e-books haven't caught on as well as people hoped, and the reason book sales seem to continue to do pretty well, is that books are, and have been "good enough". They have great resolution - better than an current LCD screen that I know of - and they're at least as portable as a PDA even though they're not always pocket-sized. The only way that e-books really have them beat is in weight and volume - you can certainly carry 200 e-books on your person, but 200 books? The price of books versus e-books is a matter of debate: you can get books for free at the public library, just as you can download public domain e-books for free. If you want to own one, books range from reasonable to outrageous ; I haven't checked e-book prices in a while but I'd guess they're cheaper - but as I just said, the advantage is nullified if you use your friendly public library.

Downgrading to "not quite good enough"?

This is an update to this earlier post about trying to downgrade to an organizer instead of a PDA.

I bought the organizer, and ordered the "free" (I had to pay shipping and handling of course) software that comes with it to back up organizer entries. The organizer works, and the software works, but it's just shy of being "good enough": there's no east way to convert my PDA address information into the backup format for the organizer.

I've played around with the file created when I backed up some test entries I made, and you can see where some of the fields go in the comma-delimited file, but there are a couple of columns that are put in the file whose purpose and meaning aren't clear.

The next step is one I'm debating, whether to spend $30 to see if their "desktop" software will work better for this purpose. I might do it, just to see, since 12.99 for the organizer and $30 for software is still way less than the PDA cost.

The other issue is the LCD on the thing, which is not the finest, but again for this purpose will work OK.

I'll let you know more if and when I find out.

Systems that are "good enough"

Bruce Sterling wrote a note about Clay Shirky's article about evolvable systems and the Web. The article is old, but definitely relevant to what I'm writing here.

The systems we all use daily, whether they be Internet, Web, television, telephone, or electricity; the ones we just assume are there (until they're not) - these systems all evolved over time, until they were "good enough" to be widely adopted, but not perfect. The key is that they continue to evolve - when something no longer is good enough to do what we want, extensions are created, grafted on (sometimes with bubblegum or duct tape), and we move on. Sometimes, we come back and make the extension work better, sometimes it evolves until it seeems part of the original fabric of things, sometimes extensions die out when something better comes along.

If you're old enough to have had a personal computer in the 80s (or even back in the 70s), think of your first personal computer, then look at everything on your current one. It's still a computer, still basically the same system. Possibly, it's still running an Intel architecture. But look again, or think again, and you realize how much it has evolved over time. Try to remember all of the extensions as they occurred, and the proposed extensions that didn't make it - it's an eye-opener in many ways.

No matter how the changes occur it's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, process that produces results that stand the test of time. The changes at any given moment are just "good enough" to do what we're trying to do, but with plenty of room for improvement. When you see those changes occurring, you're in a good place. When someone tries to give you a "quantum leap" or "completely revolutionary" change - watch out, that particular technology is possibly going to be a backwater eddy to the main stream.

"Good Enough" tech blog?

Alice and Bill want to know if they're good enough to win the Best Tech Blog of the Year award.

Given the title of this blog, I just had to comment. I can't say whether they're the best or not, I've not sampled all of the ones out there. But, they're definitely "good enough" in the sense I mean on this blog: they give you what you need, without extra frills and at the right cost. I think they're good enough to be considered one of the best, so I put in a nomination. I'm not making a suggestion - make up your own mind.

Downgrading to "good enough"

I've begun an experiment, of sorts, in the "good enough" vein. I think I've mentioned previously that I bought a low-end PDA to use for addresses and phone numbers. Low-end as it was, it still cost over $100. Now, I've purchased a $12.99 "organizer" and when the software is installed on my PC, I will see if I can download my current address book information into it. It's got a backlight, a minimal 4(?) line LCD, and a QWERTY keyboard. Other than address book functions it has the usual for these kinds of organizers including clock, scheduling, spell checking and calculator functions. There are less expensive models, but they don't have any PC connectivity and I'd really like to avoid re-entering my data again. I chose a keyboard-based one because doing the stylus hunt-and-peck for entering text was really getting old. If this works out, then I'll have successfully downgraded to something that meets my definition of "good enough" - it will do what I want, at the price point I want. Remember, my needs are not for a full PDA, I'm just going to throw this in the suitcase or car to use for looking up phone numbers and addresses, an electronic replacement for a little address book.

Good enough for me, maybe not for you..

At Lost Remote, an article referencing Wired's article about "the Long Tail" reminded of something I've wanted to post for a while.

Media, and especially television, has for so long has been about mass-market consumption, that they've forgotten how to sell to anything less than millions of people. You and I know, however, that none of us all agree, all the time on what's good television. I, for example, would buy DVD copies of Max Headroom episodes and certain commercials (Miller Lite sports-combos like sumo high-dive and full-contact golf, for one example). You probably want the entire "Edge of Night" soap opera and early Milton Berle. Television executives, however, only market DVDs of shows which were popular in the ratings sense; they market to the masses, not to the small niches.

If they'd wake up and market to the hundreds, or thousands, instead of the millions, they'd realize that they could sell this stuff they have on the shelf. Just digitize all of it, and wait for the orders to come in, which can be filled on demand - no shelf space, no warehouses, nothing but a few disk drives to hold the content and a few DVD burners for filling orders. The income wouldn't be huge, but hey - any income from something they didn't think would sell ought to be "good enough", wouldn't you think?

"Good enough" to be President?

You may or may not know, but I live in Florida. We've suffered through two major hurricanes recently (my parents and brothers and their families, thankfully, had some damage to their homes but not a huge amount) and are about to have a third, it looks like. Through all of the aftermath, Governor "Jeb" Bush has provided what appears to me to be pretty good leadership. While I'm a state employee, I am not directly involved with the crisis situation, so this isn't one of those "he's my captain right or wrong things". In fact, some of his policies make me nervous for the future of my job or of my colleagues', and his politics and mine differ quite a bit. But I have to say that I admire the way he seems to be handling this crisis - he's in there leading, doing stuff, not on the front page every day with a new proclamation. When a false rumour about gas rationing started, he had to make a statement - and he said we had way more imortant things to do than to get hyper-excited about rumors. He chose, after Hurricane Charley, to not go to the Republican Convention even though I'm sure he would have enjoyed being there to cheer on his brother. There has been speculation, supposedly substantiated, that the GOP wanted JEB to run for President in 2000, not his brother, but that an unexpected loss in Florida's gubernatorial election of 1994 ruined those plans. I have to say, I think he is "good enough" for the job. I might not like his policies any better than some of his brother's, and I probably wouldn't have voted for him - but I think that he'd have been more thoughtful and less dogmatic about them, and less likely to be listening to whoever is pulling GWB's strings. I think JEB is more his own man. If he runs later in life, he'll have a real shot at winning.

"good enough" disaster response?

Yes, I'm in Florida but no, I wasn't in the area affected by Hurricane Charley. You can find plenty of other reports of damage, suffering, and the like. What I want to mention is the disaster response. Since Hurricane Andrew hit south of Miami, the various responding agencies from federal down to local, have done a lot more planning and learning, and it is evident in how they have responded to this disaster. They were there quickly, and were very prepared. They can't, of course, foresee everything, nor can they be everywhere to handle every issue, or to be on top of every dumb yahoo that wants to drive into a disaster zone and get in the way.

To so many, who are hurting, the response will never seem "good enough", but in fact it has been really good in an objective sense.

"Good Enough" transportation?

Can electric vehicles ever be "good enough" for daily transportation? I ask myself this whenever I'm considering how often I am driving to work, a solo driver in a car with an internal combustion engine. I know there are electric cars which can cover the distance to and from work, with some lunchtime errands thrown in - but is that only in flat terrain, not up and down hill like my trip to work? Can they keep up with the local traffic which averages 35 MPH the entire way (the speed limit is 35 MPH, but in my town at least most of the traffic is going 5-10 MPH over that)?

If I could find a car that would meet those criteria, then I'd still have to deal with the cost - most electric cars are somewhat expensive (I am not referring to the hybrids, which are priced close to the price of their gas-powered counterparts). I don't know why that is, whether it's low demand or something else. The problem is that with current technology you'd have to have two cars - one (the electric) for daily commuting, and another (gasoline, diesel, or hybrid) for distance travelling.For that to be "good enough" the electric has to be fairly inexpensive.

When I was learning to drive, and gasoline was 25 cents a gallon, Volkswagen Bugs sold inexpensively ($2995 I believe, it could have been slightly more). They got good gas mileage for the times ($2.00 drove me to work for at least a week, sometimes more). They were easy to work on, too (low maintenance cost). Those factors all combined to make the VW Bug one of the most popular vehicles for young people.

What we need now is an electric version of the VW Bug, accessible to first-time car buyers, with the same ease of maintenance. That would be "good enough" to start a change in commuter habits, I think. But - is it possible? That, I don't know.

NOT good enough!

What's not good enough for me, lately, are the various calendaring things around me. Various pieces of software have various features, but of the few that I own, not one has all of the features I want to use. This, despite an IETF RFC describing calendar objects - RFC 2445, also known as iCalendar - which has been out for a number of years. Here are some of the currently frustrating examples of calendar "failures":

• Palm Desktop- my wife and I use this at home to coordinate schedule information for ourselves. She's more of a planner than I, but I still participate. This product will NOT open, import nor export iCalendar information, instead continuing to support the earlier standard, vCalendar. If I find iCalendar files (usually an .ics extension) somewhere that I want to add to my personal calendar, I'm out of luck. Why a company so focused on personal information management hasn't done this is beyond me... and it's worse than that, because iCalendar is a superset of vCalendar, so managing to implement just the backward-compatible part of it would only mean that they have to check for "VERSION: 2.0" in their code instead of "VERSION: 1.0" to "get by".
• Lotus Notes - can import .ics files from attachments but not open them directly. This is the choice for mail and calendaring where I work, and the same limitations as mentioned above apply - I'd like to be able to click on the .ics files and add schedule information. I believe Outlook can do it, but I don't have Outlook to try it out - Outlook Express doesn't do calendaring that I know of.
• Event listings on the Web- far too many do not provide iCalendar versions of the event calendar, though this is improving, probably due to the support in Apple's iCal (and Microsoft's Outlook?) for the iCalendar standard.
• Band touring schedules! Not only do many of them not supply iCalendar files, I've noticed that an awful lot of them don't include the time of the engagement. If I'm driving to a concert, say from West Palm Beach to Miami, not an unusual occurrence when I was living down there, I need to know when to arrive, wouldn't you say?

These things are bound to improve. There's work going on to improve iCalendar and related standards, and software publishers (except maybe for Palm!) look like they're improving their support for the standard. It would be nice if more of the Web publishing tools like FrontPage, ColdFusion, and the like, provided easy ways for people publishing event listings to provide the support too.

The "good enough" line is changeable...

We bought a 27" Color TV about 3 years ago. At the time, we rarely rented movies, and we don't play video games (being of the generation where our mothers told us to "go outside and play"), so we didn't consider A/V or S-Video inputs as necessary. In other words that TV was "good enough". Then, I decided to buy a DVD player. I got an inexpensive one (that was "good enough" of course), but then I had to add an RF modulator to connect it to the TV, and of course the picture quality isn't anything like what you see in the store. The TV, without any failure on its part, had suddenly become not "good enough".  I write this to illustrate the point that the point where something is or is not adequate to the task can change over time, it's not a constant thing.  It can change again and again as the environment and variables surrounding it change. For example, I would now like to look at another TV, but if I buy one now it won't be "good enough" when the ATV standards (Advanced Television - which includes High Definition as part of its concepts) are mandatory. Buying a new, HDTV-compatible set right now, however, is beyond the "good enough" line in our household - they're too expensive for the limited additional benefits. So, I guess we will do what is often necessary: live with something  not quite adequate, and wait. Most people with a budget end up doing this several times throughout their lives - we're never the "early adopters", the people who buy the latest, neatist things when they first come out. We're the ones that wait for the second or third wave, the less-expensive "knockoffs", because those are "good enough" for us. I believe, also, that the "good enough" crowd constitutes a fairly large market out there, and I think (or hope) that the retailers and manufacturers are including us in their plans. One hopeful sign: the DVD player went very very quickly from an expensive new device to a commodity item, driving sales into the millions and also rippling into other markets, DVD rentals are now more prevalent than VHS tapes, I believe,  DVD sales are pretty strong from what I hear, and DVD recorders are almost ready for the third wave crowd.

"good enough" for a dead person

I haven't been posting, because I've travelled to my father-in-law's memorial service.  Now, I've always thought that cemeteries were a waste of space, though I do understand some of the health reasons behind embalming. What made me write this post, however, is what is sort of the "norm" at the church he attended.  Members there are usually cremated and then inurned (thanks to my brother-in-law, who says that inurnment is the correct term), in a cardboard box.  They are then placed in the ground in the memorial garden - and this is why the cardboard box is "good enough" - where the biodegradable container breaks down, nature (bugs, worms, etc.) do their inevitable thing, and it all cycles back. I don't know what value ashes add to the garden soil, but it's got to be better than a lacquered wood box.

Another "good enough" tool...

I bought the low-end Sony Clie SL10, and use it to carry around an electronic version of the address book we use - my wife still prefers her paper DayTimer-type thing, but this is good for trips. At the time, this was the cheapest PalmOS PDA I could get, it uses AAA batteries, and as long as you stay on top of the battery level it's "good enough" for what I use it for. I don't carry it every day, and I don't run my work life via PDA, etcetera, so I don't need the latest-and-greatest. The Palm Desktop software is "good enough" too, pretty much - it handles the address book and the calendar in a Windows environment; I can HotSync the PDA to the Desktop on both of our PCs over our network and it works OK. The only quibble I have is the lack of import capability for iCalendar files, which is a "nice to have" not "have to have" feature.

I _have_ been thinking of downgrading, to an "organizer", which would have longer battery life, but I'm not sure the display is adequate and I'm unsure of how we'd synchronize and what we'd synchronize to. If you've experience with one that connects to a PC with Windows, let me know what you think.

Is a Kerry/Edwards ticket "good enough"?

While I consider myself in the "Anybody But Bush" camp - I wonder, is the Kerry/Edwards ticket strong enough to win? I haven't seen a lot of pizazz, nor a lot of smoke and thunder, from the Kerry camp. That may, however, just be good enough strategy: when your opponent continues to do stupid stuff all the time, just hold back until later in the campaign. The Bush camp seems mired, now, in the misfortunes of our poor military in Iraq. I feel for those soldiers - I didn't believe in the invasion, but I'm not in the military and I have the luxury of sitting home. If you're a military guy, you don't have that choice, and when your commanders send you on a mission out of stupidity and/or for misguided personal notions, you're bound by oath to try to comply. The result has not been pretty. I'm sure you've seen statistics of all of the American deaths, and if you're diligent, you may even have found the number of American injured, which is many many more. For parents, co-workers, siblings, and friends of these guys, it certainly is not "good enough". As long as the administration continues in this manner, the public will continue to lose faith, and Kerry and Edwards can wait before going into "major campaigning" mode. It may not be a matter of their being good enough, but rather of the Bush administration not being good enough.

Lights, Camera...

Some time ago, I bought a Radio Shack Flatfoto camera. It was "good enough" at the time, for what I wanted it for at the time: a camera I could always have with me, to take shots which I'd e-mail. The VGA resolution (640 x 480) works pretty well for e-mail and posting to the web, but the camera doesn't take great photos unless the light is just right. There's no flash, no memory card, and the USB driver for the camera is built into the photo-downloading software for the camera, so you can't download the photos in other ways. I'm not sure that it's "good enough" any more. That means I'll probably start looking into a "real" digital camera soon, I guess. I won't be in too much of a rush, since we own a couple of decent point-and-shoot 35mm cameras and one old SLR we inherited, so we still have the Photo/Picture CD (what is Kodak's preferred name for that, anyway?) option when we want digitized photos - which definitely is "good enough".

Why it's here

I intend to use this web log as a place to post thoughts and opinions about things which are "good enough". For example, I am posting this using a 366Mhz machine -"light years" behind current technology in the PC world. It's been upgraded somewhat - more memory, a second hard drive. Why haven't I bought a new machine? Simple - this one is good enough. I use it for e-mail, Internet surfing, some programming, XML, PaintShop Pro, burning CDs, and some other stuff. It's perfectly adequate for what I'm doing, so why should I spend money on a superfast machine? This is what I mean by "good enough" - something is "good enough" when it does the tasks you want, for a price you like, without hindering you in significant ways. There are other definitions, of course, for other situations, but we'll save those for the appropriate time. For now, I hope this explanation itself is "good enough".