I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. [...]]]> One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google.

I’m impressed.

It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.

Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. When will you be home? Is Joe coming to the meeting? Please call me back. Hi, this is Joe Blow, and I’m running for Congress.

There are two huge advantages to transcriptions.

1. You can read them on your computer or SmartPhone — and people generally read a lot faster than they listen.
2. Reading is silent; there is little more annoying than people in a conference room or shared office trying to listen to voicemail.

Transcription isn’t perfect. However, when there is low clarity, you can go back to the voice version… which isn’t always all that clear either.

We’ve come a long way since Garry Trudeau singlehandedly killed off the Apple Newton!

It started with this one.

There were more in the series, but this is considered the classic.

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has [...]]]> I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features?

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has worked really well. (I’m proud to say that the deck for my presentation in NYC Wednesday contains only a single slide with bullet points, a list of takeaways on the final slide.) Still, they’ve added a number of things that make it a “must” upgrade for me.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are also a few items that enhance it for relatively inexperienced users who just want to make their presentations a bit better.

So here are ten high-value items new to PowerPoint 2010:

1. Embedded video. Now, when you put video into your presentation and then move it to another machine, the video moves with it.
2. Fine-grained control over complex animations. Most PPT animations are not worth the bits they’re printed on, but if used well they can really clarify a point. Now you can make motion-type animations, such as moving an object along a path, a lot smoother. This is pretty nitpicky stuff… unless you really sweat over your presentations, which I do. I hate stuff that breaks the illusion and calls attention to the presentation itself, and this new feature lets me avoid some “corners” that I never felt comfortable with.
3. Save presentation as video. Use your presentation to create an actual playback video. You can even add narrations and timings.
4. Create sections of files, akin to headings in a Word doc. Now in a long PPT, you can find the individual parts easily. This feature is especially useful when people collaborate on a presentation. Given that PPT is often used in business for creating reports, businesses will find it a lot easier to pull these together from multiple people. (Is PPT the best way to present this info? That’s a different question. Nevertheless, like bullet points, this is a common usage, and PPT 2010 has improved the experience.)
5. Include video from YouTube or other online sites. Now you can include YACV (yet another cats video) in your presentation… or even some useful content. You do need a live Internet link to run the video — which makes sense in terms of copyright.
6. Place titles and other objects on top of video. Video used to run on top of everything else. Now you can add titles, pointers and arrows, and other objects in the standard bring-forward/send-backward manner. (You can also put the video in a non-rectangular frame.)
7. Video controls — brightness, contrast, recoloring — akin to what you can do with pictures.
8. Remove background from a picture. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough for most people on many pictures. For years, I’ve been doing this by the very complex method of drawing a closed Bezier curve around the object (that’s the tool that looks like a square with some rounded chunks taken out, called “freeform”); clicking Edit Points to adjust the curves to fit the object better; copy (Ctrl+C) the picture; right click the outline you drew and select Format Shape; select Picture Fill and Fill from Clipboard; trim as needed with the Offset controls. I still have to do that on complex pictures, but I’ve found I can nail about half of them using the new Remove Background feature, a huge timesaver. (Wednesday’s presentation has about 25 pictures from which I’ve cut out the background, from a watch replacing the head on a $500 bill — hourly billing! — to a stamp that says “Done” to a plate with a pretzel. You’ve got to come to the seminar if you want to know how a plate with a pretzel illustrates the concept of managing scope.)
9. Better cropping tool, which “ghosts” the cropped part of the image as you work, so you can see what you’re cutting out as well as what you’re leaving in.
10. Trim and fade video and audio. No longer do you need a separate editor to cut the end off a video, or fade it in or out.

There are 50 or more new features that add value.

As always, few people other than professional designers will use every feature. However, each user works with a different feature set; that’s why there are so many features in these kinds of programs. The trick is to (a) find the features that make sense for what you’re doing and (b) when you think, “I wish I could do that,” it’s ever more likely that you can do that.

======================

I took part in some ask-the-customer design sessions for Office 2007. Two things struck me that many critics don’t think about, because they don’t play well with the whole bash-Microsoft shtick. (There are lots of legitimate things to get on Microsoft’s case about, but there are many things the company does very well.)

The context is that we had about 15-20 law-firm CIOs and tech leaders in a room; they were asked about what they wanted to see in the next version, then called “Office 12.”

First, there were innumerable conversations like this:

Customer #1: I wish Word would do X in the next version.

Customer #2: It already does it. (Note — it was almost always another customer replying before someone on the Office team could say anything!)

These kinds of conversations sparked the Ribbon. What good are all these powerful features if people don’t know they’re available?

Second, it became clear from those conversations pretty much every feature in Office had fans that considered it essential, detractors who thought it was bloat or unneeded, and others who didn’t know it existed. (Note: Clippy was long gone from Office by this time.) All of those features do have their uses, because people do radically different things with the products. I know people who build reports in PPT, do complex slides, use it as a note-taking tool, even put together videos. All use different features.

Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me [...]]]> Software vendors are invariably after you to upgrade. Should you? If so, when?

Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me why I should update, other than their excitement as conveyed by that exclamation point: “We worked for weeks or days or hours on this version! Ya gotta do it! Now!”  Except…

1. It’s a minor upgrade to fix a small bug that doesn’t affect me.
2. The upgrade to the version before my current one had a serious bug that they failed to catch that led to the hijacking, corruption, and loss of the first year of NoCCrit, including about 250 posts and innumerable comments.

This message staring me in the face for a week, coupled with my beta testing of Office 2010 and discussions with a couple of client folks, got me thinking about when to upgrade. There are, I think, three different upgrade approaches vendors use:

The Big-Release Upgrade

Most server and desktop systems from large vendors follow the Big-Release methodology. Every two to four years, these vendors issue a major new release. Microsoft, for example, released Windows 7 last year, and they’re planning to release Office 2010 in a few months (June, according to word on the Web).

Should you upgrade?

Pros:

• These upgrades are generally safe and competently tested, despite the so-called words of wisdom suggesting you wait until the first service pack.
• They have new features that are likely to be useful, though you may not “get” them until you’ve worked with them. After all, what can Microsoft add to Word at this point that (a) isn’t already in there and (b) you might actually need? Surprisingly, there’s still a lot of room for growth, from little touches — moving the highly valuable Document Map to where users might actually find it and renaming it Navigation Pane — to new ideas such as the online/web version that competes directly with one of Google Doc’s strengths.

Cons:

• It costs money. (It’s a different calculus if you’re on an enterprise-wide license.)
• It takes time and effort, people think. It does take a bit of time while your machine grinds away, but you can do it during lunch. As for effort, Microsoft rolls out new versions to 50,000 people a night internally with virtually no glitches or hassles. If your corporate IT department can’t figure this out, suggest they talk to their Microsoft rep and ask how Microsoft does it. I assure you, there’s no magic, just an IT group that’s got this part of their act together.
• It will break some existing apps built atop the current version. If that’s the case — and I know it often is — then your IT team isn’t learning from experience. Stop doing this! Build on published APIs, not hacks. And then test with the beta versions. Even Microsoft occasionally gets this wrong internally, but it’s usually because a developer tried to do something extra-special and pushed into unsupported territory. That said, occasionally big companies change the underlying model in an unanticipated way, such as the file-formats change in Office 2007.
• You believe you know better than the users what they need. ‘Tain’t so.

The Annual Upgrade

Some companies do annual upgrades as an ongoing revenue stream. I use some music-creation software that used to dun me for annual upgrades, at about $300-400 a year in total. It’s an economic model users hate… but it’s a model that keeps the companies in business, instead of selling maintenance contracts or the like.

Software — mostly — isn’t free. If you have a solution you like that is free, great; go for it. WordPress, for me, is such a solution. On the other hand, I couldn’t have written my book Legal Project Management in anything other than Word (I tried Open Office and Google Docs to see if they’d work).

But often you pay in ease of use, or lack of testing, or intrusive (or hidden) advertising, or no support. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch — TANSTAAFL, as Robert Heinlein put it. It’s a trade-off, one you should make carefully. Sometimes free is the answer; sometimes it isn’t.

If you don’t take an annual upgrade, you’ll likely pay considerably more for your next upgrade, almost as if you were purchasing new again. Sometimes you can find opportunities to join the “welcome back to previous customers” program and minimize those costs; keep your eye out for them.

The Quick-Turnaround Upgrade

The WordPress 2.9.2 upgrade falls into this category; so do many SaaS/hosted solutions, where they push upgrades out whether you want them or not. Many are insufficiently tested. If you can, resist them for at least a few weeks to see what problems other guinea pigs are turning up; check the support boards, Google for answers (can you Bing for them?), and exercise caution.

The other end of this scale is the semi-automatic upgrades pushed out by Microsoft, Adobe, and other large companies for your desktop software. In an ideal world, I’d put many of these off too, but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world with sufficient bad guys who like taking on high-profile targets not just because it’s somehow cool to beat Microsoft’s engineers but because they are actively trying to rip you off if they can get past your computer security. Thus I think there’s little choice but to take upgrades in a timely fashion for popular software such as Windows, QuickTime, and Flash; it’s a matter of security.

These companies have reputations to protect and so they test the heck out of these rapid upgrades. That doesn’t mean they’re foolproof, but it does lower the risk so that taking the upgrade is safer, all told, than not taking it.

Finally, there are the antivirus companies that suck innumerable cycles from your machine with their daily upgrades. Again, the bad guys are truly out there, and so I think you have to accept these daily updates. My main cavil is that not all of these vendors properly throttle down the amount of bandwidth they use to push the updates, so that it can interfere with your use of the computer.

Other

Like any classification scheme, this one isn’t perfect. Where, for example, would you put the every-other-year major service packs for Windows releases? Still, it’s a good framework to think about how and when you want to upgrade, rather than leaving it to chance.

To be, or not to be…. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!

(This passage must set the record for titles derived from a single chunk of text. [...]]]> If there’s nothing certain, as Ol’ Ben put it, but death and taxes, Hamlet wrestled with only part of the question in his most famous soliloquy:

To be, or not to be…. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come!

(This passage must set the record for titles derived from a single chunk of text. Off the top of my head: What Dreams May Come, with Robin Williams. The Undiscovered Country, Star Trek. To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny. Perchance to Dream, a book by the late Robert B. Parker. And I’ll bet there are at least a few more.)

Anyway, so Hamlet spoke on death. He covers taxes, too:

This heavy-headed revel, east and west, makes us traduced and taxed.

But it was another tax I’ve been thinking of lately, the tax to browse content on the Internet.

Advertising.

I have no problem with advertising per se. It’s a trade I’ve been willing to accept: Pay for my content by positioning ads where I can see them. Up to now, I’ve been content with that trade.

However, in the past few months, advertisers have, I believe, failed to uphold the implicit bargain as we struck it some years ago:

1. There are an increasing number of interstitial ads, ads I must wait out or dismiss before seeing the content I clicked on. I don’t like it, but I understand it.
2. The on-page ads have begun increasingly to use Flash, suck up bandwidth, and delay access to and responsiveness of the page I sought.

The latter has caused me to reach a breaking point — minor as it may be — and do something I vowed a year ago I wouldn’t do.

I installed Firefox so that I could use AdBlock Plus.

I pay Comcast for significant bandwidth already. That’s okay, because that’s a fair exchange; if I don’t like their rates, I can go back to Qwest, for example. But I’m tired of advertisers raising the cost of my clicking on content without offering an alternative.

So I have installed my own alternative.

I don’t like Firefox, frankly. It’s clunky compared to both Chrome and IE, though faster than the latter. (Why the heck can’t Mozilla make Ctrl+Tab work? Is it because it’s a Microsoft idea and Not Invented Here? Please!) But AdBlock Plus seems designed for Firefox, and so I’ll trade the inconvenience of Firefox for the convenience of seeing a page before my kids graduate college.

I hate doing this. I feel like I’m breaking a bargain… but I’m not the one who broke the bargain first. If we go back to a world where advertising is lightweight, or if I have alternatives to pay for ad-free content, that’s a different deal. But to the advertisers of the world, I say: Give Me Back My Bandwidth and Responsiveness.

And so, at least for now, advertising is no longer “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now back to our regular scheduled programming.

There are lots of good reasons to knock the iPad, starting with the no-women-in-the-Apple-hierarchy name. Is single-tasking one of them?

Multitasking is a computer’s ability to run multiple apps at the same time. In [...]]]> One of the repeated knocks against the iPad has been the lack of multitasking. You can run only one app at a time.

There are lots of good reasons to knock the iPad, starting with the no-women-in-the-Apple-hierarchy name. Is single-tasking one of them?

Multitasking is a computer’s ability to run multiple apps at the same time. In Windows or the Mac, you might be running a browser while working in Word, with EMail in the background too. On a SmartPhone, the most obvious manifestation is background checking for new mail while playing solitaire or making a call.

In addition, under the covers, the operating system — you know, the thing Google thinks we don’t need — is managing printers, the mouse on your computer or finger touches on a phone, and a bunch of other stuff that’s both seriously complex and not something most users need to think about anymore.

The reality is that many — I’d venture most — computer users don’t need overt multitasking. Indeed, it keeps many users from using a computer in the first place, because it’s “too complicated.” For those of us in an office or work environment, we can’t imagine living without it, but that’s not the iPad’s or even iPhone’s core market.

The iPad and iPhone keep it simple. Very simple. And for most potential purchasers, that’s a plus.

The Kindle is a single-purpose, single-tasking device. So is your toaster, home phone, microwave, and heating system. I don’t have a kitchen appliance that is a refrigerator one moment and an oven the next. Perhaps the closest item in a kitchen to a multitasker is a stove/oven that has a separate kitchen timer — and I can tell you, having an older version of such a beast at our island place north of here, neither my wife nor I, long-term technologists both, can operate it properly 100% of the time. (At least the one in our Seattle kitchen has totally separate buttons for the timer.)

I think Apple recognizes that the sweet spot in their market isn’t on-the-go-go-go technology mavens but ordinary people. Sure, lots of people with a technology bent are buying the iPhone because of its elegance or coolth or even the it’s-not-Microsoft-ness, but Apple would have Windows Mobile-like market penetration if it chased that audience as a primary target.

I’m not saying Apple won’t at some point develop multitasking for the iPhone and iPad. Rumors suggest that the operating system update expected later this year will include it, though rumors in AppleVille are just that, not the leaks that often dribble out of Redmond.

===================

The reality of multitasking is that it doesn’t really exist. It’s an illusion, whether the purported multitasker is a computer… or a human being.

We do a combination of background processing and context switching. In humans, there are three levels: the autonomic nervous system, which keeps us breathing and our blood circulating; a series of low-attention processes, such as walking or casual driving, where we don’t pay conscious attention to the mechanics of consciously learned actions unless something surprising or difficult comes up; and our foreground processing. (There’s also a bunch of subconscious thinking and so on, but this isn’t intended to be a piece on human neurology, where I am certainly no expert.)

As I’ve written before, we can normally foreground-process only one thing at a time. If we’re texting, we’re not actually listening. If we’re glancing at EMail, we’re losing focus on our main task.

In addition, context switching among these tasks is very costly. If you think you’re spending half your time on X and half your time on Y while switching between them more than every 20-40 minutes, you’re wrong. You’re spending perhaps a third of your time on X, a third on Y, and a third rebuilding your mental pictures after each switch.

We function best when we can give undivided foreground attention to a single task. Is that a tiger in the bushes? Stop whatever else you’re doing until you figure it out. Those who tried to keep up their conversational grunts — prehistoric texting — got eaten before their genes made a splash in the pool.

Reading is engrossing. I don’t need EMail on the iPad while I’m reading; in fact, it would likely lessen the reading experience, and thus indirectly make me think less of the device itself.

In other words, I don’t think multitasking is particularly necessary on the iPad, and I doubt few other than the pundits would miss it if Apple never introduced it.

=================

By the way, I don’t attempt to multitask myself. I didn’t look at EMail, another website, or the proposal I’m also working on after I began this 800-word post, although I did do some research before I began. I do not allow my EMail app to pop up notices that I have new mail, tweets, or whatever else might be happening in the recesses of my computer.

Multitasking is inefficient.

Maybe it’s just that Apple is convinced they know what’s best for us. That’s sort of been their attitude anyway, and they often have it mostly right.

I do take issue with one blanket statement, however: “The projects your senior managers worked on were much simpler than the products you’re working on now.” This statement assumes either that the IT [...]]]> Johanna Rothman has an interesting post on why senior managers seem to like waterfall project management, or, as she puts it, serial lifecycles.

I do take issue with one blanket statement, however: “The projects your senior managers worked on were much simpler than the products you’re working on now.” This statement assumes either that the IT and project worlds have gotten more complex in the past 20 years or that senior managers tend to be political hacks who are promoted because they play games rather than because they were smart. The former is untrue, and the latter is untrue often enough to fail as a generalization — though I’m sure we can all point to managers for whom it is true.

But she later hits on a very telling point, I think:

Possibly the most seductive reason of all: Serial lifecycles provide a (false) prediction. And, boy oh boy, is that prediction comforting to your senior managers. “When will the project be done?” might be their most-asked question. [italics in original]

Serial lifecycles have a few aspects — perceived benefits — that I believe drive their appeal:

1. As Rothman notes, they provide the appearance of prediction and control.
2. She also notes that they can succeed on short projects… though pretty much anything can succeed given a short enough or simple enough project.
3. They provide the easy metrics and even red-yellow-green dashboard reporting that less effective execs love.
4. They provide ways for bad managers to blame others for problems and offer “support” for that blamestorming.
5. They work in some industries, especially construction and manufacturing, where the percentage of unknowns and unknowables on a project, along with the variances in estimates, are very small.
6. They’re the easiest methodology against which to apply project management science. Unfortunately, it’s extremely easy to misapply the science to them.

I knew you had more than a passing interest in outsourcing. Maybe you can come up with a solution for the problem outsourcing companies in India are facing. You may know that majority of the income for outsourcing companies comes from engineering of end [...]]]> A former colleague of mine wrote me the other day:

I knew you had more than a passing interest in outsourcing. Maybe you can come up with a solution for the problem outsourcing companies in India are facing. You may know that majority of the income for outsourcing companies comes from engineering of end of life products (products that are deployed and are in sustenance mode). While overall income from these products has grown, margins have been rapidly going down even before the recession. Outsourcing companies are also scared that if and when we come out of recession SaaS [software as a service, or hosted solutions] and cloud computing will have a huge impact on the topline of outsourcing companies in the wrong direction. Your thoughts…

First, I think margins will continue to decrease for multiple reasons:

• Water seeks its own level, so to speak. As the US transfers money to India, for example, by paying for offshore work there, the basic laws of economics dictate that the value of work there will go up relative to here. Workers will get paid more, the Indian economy will do better (the rupee rising against the dollar), and so on. So it will be more expensive to do work in India next year than it was last year.
• As India gets more expensive, and as other countries do a “”hey, we can do what they’re doing,”" India will have more competition, at least in some areas. There are lots of English speakers in the Philippines, for example; I used to outsource work there a decade ago, and they still have a price advantage. India for now has a skills advantage, but given sufficient price differential, and that will vanish. There’s also a “”nexus”" advantage in that groups of workers congregate and are easy to reach, and they share skills. Both can be overcome with money.
• China is entering the market. There are enough people who read English well enough in China to do outstanding technical work from American documents. There’s still a price advantage in China.

There are other difficulties and issues:

• China also has a time-zone advantage. India is half a clock cycle away (actually, 12.5 hours) from the West Coast. It’s super-hard to get a team meeting to happen, because if it’s 9AM here, it’s near-bedtime there, and vice versa. You can get individuals to connect, but it’s hard to get two full teams on line at the same time. China is 8 hours away from here, which gives a lot more overlap. (It’s 11 hours from the East Coast, though.)
• It slows up work when there is an overnight cycle. You can do only one communications cycle a day with India, and it’s pretty much the same with China. We send something at the end of our day, they work on it while we’re with families and asleep, and we get it back as they go to bed. That’s slow.
• Brazil and Argentina are entering the game. Same time zone, give or take, which is an advantage for collaboration.
• The overhead is significant when dealing with India. There are flights, and time lost to travel. There’s the overnight/full-day-cycle issue. There are general communication difficulties; it’s hard enough for two Americans to communicate and transfer full meaning; it’s a lot harder when there are fewer cultural referents. (That said, India is culturally closer to the US than China or Brazil because of the long history of the British in India.)

I had mixed luck with sending work to India. One project went well, but it had an effective leader (the colleague who wrote me the note above). Two others went poorly, with lots of rework; they ended up costing more — and taking longer — than it would have had I sent them to Bozeman or Bangor rather than Bengaloora (Bangalore). The upshot is that if I looked at costs all up, including transactional friction and opportunity costs, I’m n0t sure I’d find India economical for technical work at this time. That can only get worse with SaaS and the cloud, where much of the work will need to be in the same sort of timezone as the customers. Should the US emerge from the recession before India does, there’ll still be some price arbitrage… but I’d bet the recession will end in Manhattan, NY before it does in Manhattan, Kansas, and so there’ll be price arbitrage opportunities to “”offshore”" to the US and Canada. Bozeman and Manhattan (Kansas) are also offshore. They’re not within 200 miles of an ocean.

Also, the perceived — and possibly quite real — need to do rapid turns (revisions) on cloud-based work argues against an India or China solution. There’ll still be work going there, but it may not continue to grow — and it may well be lower-margin work.

There is, however, another area where the price differential remain enormous — the legal world. Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) will utilize India and other nations for some time to come… but again for low-margin work.

=========================

There is one critical assumption implicit in all this. I’ve avoided it until now.

That assumption is that the US will continue to be the center of both technological advancement and the source of work such as LPO. Given our litigious society, the latter seems reasonable. But I’m not confident the US will remain the unchallenged “”big dog”" of technological innovation.

China is a scary (from a US-centric viewpoint) rival. India is too. Will the next Microsoft or Google emerge from an “”emerging”" nation? Maybe, if you’re talking about a business. However, will the innovations that drive this mythical company come from outside the US? That’s much more likely than it was ten years ago.

Ten years ago, that was unthinkable. Now, it’s very thinkable.

And therein lies the key to the question raised at the start. India will grow stronger to the extent that it become the technology innovator. Same goes for China.

Think I’m smoking something? Consider: There are a handful of very cool phones at the moment. The iPhone is a US idea, but both the Touch and the Google Nexus come from China. (HTC created both.)

Innovation is the high-margin business. Insight, courage, education, a bit of capital. Used to be, the West was a sole-source supplier of the last two. Today, not so much… and with education, seriously not so much. The opportunity is out there….

Sometimes technology can save our lives. Sometimes it puts them at risk.

As I [...]]]> Robert Scoble writes about Ford and Toyota options that add radar-based collision avoidance to your car. It’s very worth reading, especially the part about setting up the brakes to fully engage the moment you touch them when the car senses a potential collision.

Sometimes technology can save our lives. Sometimes it puts them at risk.

As I get older, I appreciate more how fragile our lives can be. Coming back from our island cabin the other day, we almost got wiped out at 60 MPH by some doofus who was texting while driving. I was behind the wheel in the carpool (left) lane with my family. There was a Jersey barrier right up against the left edge of our lane, no shoulder. This turkey was in the left regular lane. Suddenly he swerved into our lane, with half his vehicle across the lane divider (which is a normal-width lane divider, not the wide separators used in places such as California). Luckily, his rear bumper was a few feet ahead of my front bumper, and I was able to brake judiciously. Five feet further forward, and I’d have been clamped at 60 MPH between this idiot in a serious-sized panel van and the unforgiving Jersey barrier. I’d prefer not to test my airbags in this manner.

I misspoke above, intentionally. Technology, of course, didn’t put me and my family at risk; stupidity did.

At some point our cars will drive for us, at least on main highways. The Toyota and Ford radar systems are a start. But that someday isn’t here yet.

Until then, please don’t be like that selfish, self-centered driver. Don’t text and drive.