Recently I've had occasion to catch a few episodes of "House, M.D." At first I enjoyed the show as being analogous to the Sherlock Holmes stories: a central character with plenty of eccentricities, but with abilities that tower over all those around him, and we get to watch his deductive thought process. But after seeing a couple of episodes to completion, I was puzzled at the formula's conclusion. In Sherlock Holmes, the moment that we are made aware of the solution, the reader is instantly transported back to the clues and odd happenings that are so cleanly explained by it, the importance of the clues having been masterfully hidden from the reader's attention when they were introduced. We therefore experience our own incredibly satisfying 'aha' moment.

In a typical episode of House, the doctors go through a series of brainstorming sessions about what malady might be affecting the patient, interrupted by tests and procedures that confirm or deny hypotheses and provide another data point. Usually the picture seems to grow cloudier with each test, and the doctors knit their brows a little more in trying to come up with a new explanation that fits all the data. Finally they have some epiphany and the problem is solved. But for me, without any medical knowledge, there is no analog to the Sherlock Holmes moment--I have no idea why the solution is correct, or why they couldn't have thought of it before.

Can it be that the primary audience of this show is doctors, who might have a chance to experience the show the way I experience Holmes? Doubtful--doctors with the appropriate knowledge of infectious diseases would make a tiny audience in TV terms, and it seems unlikely that House is the first medical drama ever to be rigorously correct in its portrayal of medicine. It mystifies me that a show that is both popular and respected would have what I perceive to be such a central flaw in its premise. I suppose the explanation is that for most people, the characters on the show and their human drama are the main draw.

I recently posed my quandary to my old friend Al, now a fourth-year medical student. He was able, with his knowledge, to put the problem in a different light. Everything on the show is done backwards, he said. The doctors order thousand-dollar scans only to find out the problem is something that in reality they should have found during the basic physical exam as soon as the patient was brought in. Al said the only medical show he finds bearable is "Scrubs."

I know it's hardly the first house show in Brooklyn, but it was the one I've enjoyed the most. When I was in college I felt privileged to be part of the incredible music scene in Ann Arbor, where the local bands made music that was not only enjoyable but innovative. Even though New York ought to be Ann Arbor x 100 or so, this show was one of the few times since graduating that I've felt that same spirit.

This past Saturday Shayna was kind enough to host the show. Maya and I opened, Huggabroomstik followed, then Shayna's new band 12 Hour Shift, and finally Communication Corporation. I don't know how I missed seeing Huggabroomstik before now, because I've heard their name a lot and seen members playing in other bands, but I was thoroughly surprised and delighted. Pictured above, they had approximately a million things going on at any one time. One guitarist played a guitar with two strings, a drum stick stuck between the strings and the neck, and one pickup pushed partly into the body at an odd angle, and he used a beer bottle as a slide. That would be enough, but he actually played melodies this way! Then there was the girl playing the musical saw, the guy playing some kind of Elmo toy while holding up a triangle for the drummer throughout the entire set, and much more. The music consisted of heavy, psychedelic anthems with a masterfully managed amount of dissonance and chaos. The obligatory "cross-between" assessment would include Built to Spill, Pavement and the Polyphonic Spree. These guys are a revelation.

12 Hour Shift put an excellent bluesy feel on an old rock and roll style. The 4-piece's sound is a mixture of blues, rock, hip hop, folk and soul. It does justice to all of these categories but still manages to have its own original flair. The songs started out with a rough quality but throughout the set they matured into something truly moving. By the end of their set I was definitely a fan. Shayna's vocals were powerful and emotional. Her gritty soulful style set the tone for some of the band's most powerful songs. The bass player is very skilled and has immense speed and versatility. The guitarist has an incredible presence and seems to truly understand his instrument. The drummer is very powerful and his energy is infectious. As this band continues to perform I have no doubt they will develop into something very special. [this last paragraph contributed by Maya, thanks!]

We only heard a tiny bit of Communication Corporation before heading home, but any band featuring a Keytar has to be pretty damn good.

Overall the sound was good, the changes were smooth, and the people danced. A good time was had by all. All we need now is a name for this venue. Any ideas?

As many engineers do, I sometimes help out computer novices of varying degree with questions or problems. The last couple of times I did this I noticed a point of confusion that is rarely discussed. I saw the people I was helping repeatedly click the wrong number of times on a GUI element. Sometimes the desired effect was still achieved, and the person didn't seem to know that they were doing anything wrong. Other times it did cause a problem, but it wasn't necessarily clear to the person that the number of clicks was the cause. Sometimes the person did ask me afterward about how many times they need to click, and I would answer. Whenever a question like that comes up I try to provide an overarching answer in the spirit of teaching someone to fish rather than giving them a fish. But after thinking for a few seconds I couldn't quickly come up with a consistent rule about when to click and when to double-click, to say nothing of more obscure maneuvers. It also suddenly struck me how little attention this question gets as compared to, say, the debate over the number of buttons that should be on a mouse.

As an exercise, then, I'll now try to mentally go through all the types of clicking I do on a daily basis, and write out which types require a double-click, since one would think that should be the less common action.

• In Finder or Windows Explorer, or on the Desktop, double-click an icon to open the file, folder or application.
• In a browser's location bar, and in Microsoft Word, double-click to select a word, triple-click to select the whole line.
• In email applications, click a message once to display it in a panel, double-click it to open it in its own separate window.

Those are the first few that come to mind--clearly it gets more complicated as you get further into the land of third-party software and its interfaces. The explanations above also rely on some concepts that many people don't understand. I'm realizing that there are probably a lot of people out there who use computers daily for email, web browsing and other tasks, and who don't know what Windows Explorer is, or how to find a file on the hard drive. A lot of the clicking errors I've seen were double-clicking on links in web pages or on "OK" buttons when one click would suffice. Sometimes this causes problems when the user ends up clicking once on a GUI element that was displayed or revealed after the first click. This practice probably develops in the user after frustrating experiences with clicking and seeing nothing happen.

From a designer's perspective, it makes sense to use double-clicking only when we need two different response behaviors that are both based on clicking on something. When we do so, it's good to think about how the user will know, other than by trial and error, which number of clicks will produce which response. We can usually learn keyboard shortcuts by exploring an application's menus, where the key combination is displayed next to the description. But there's no analogous visual indication of what mouse clicks will do¹, and instead we (as users now) must employ the unconscious knowledge that some, but not all of us have about the 'rules' of computing and graphical interfaces.

[1]: In this way, right-click menus are better, and allow for any number of actions to be associated with clicking. They do require more effort than a single or double click, but the double-click action could be listed in the context menu along with the right-click actions.

I find this story very gratifying. The condo board for a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is suing the Subway franchise on the ground floor for the "fresh bread" odors that permeate the apartments above. For years I've been nauseated every time I walk by a Subway by the smell that I could only assume was their "fresh" "bread", and wondered how they could ever think it would attract customers. I feel bad for the tenants in this building; the thought of my clothes smelling like that is pretty scary.

Pieces of a monologue by a fellow passenger on the Bx15 bus this morning, crossing 125th Street in Manhattan.

"I'm seventy-four years old. People look at me and they don't believe that, but I was born in '34. Now my legs just gave up."

"Back then they had el trains, here on 2nd Avenue, on 8th Avenue. People don't believe that! Horse-drawn carriages in the street!"

"Buildings were heated with coal. They were just bringing gas over. You had to put a quarter in the meter to cook! People don't know that now."

"There was no such thing as ball point pens then. They weren't invented for another 20 years! And now they leak everywhere."

"And there was no such thing as buses. ... ...Oh yes there was, yes there was."

"You don't even know how old you are... do you. Think about that!" [silence from man being addressed, who is sitting behind me] "You know what someone else told you. And you take their word for it. Because they treat you well."

"...Now even homeless people have phones! Everyone's got a phone. And they're not good for you either. Do you know how they work? No you don't. They have rays that go through your body. You know, like gamma rays, or x-rays?"

"There weren't no vegetable stores back then. Vegetables were sold off the land. And you could steal the vegetables!"

"Everything's changed now, in schools. Arithmetic became mathematics. Everything's changed!"

"And you know how the kids dress in school today, with their whole ass hanging out, and tattoos on their behinds. There's no reason, no respect."

"Aw man."

The slightly infamous Mr. Crack van in the South Bronx. The van appears to have lost an apparatus from its roof and the American flags on the sides since it was photographed parked in Harlem last July. I had the same thought on seeing it as one blog commenter: that this would be the perfect vehicle for a drug dealer or smuggler.

Some of the slogans that may be hard to read in the picture:

"Kids tell your parents, no drugs today"

"You use any drug, you support terrorists"

"You smoke crack you will be homeless"

"To our leaders of tomorrow... Every person in America should read this book"

"Kids, please don't use drugs, or you will become a slave"

When I took this picture the van had just pulled away from a McDonalds. Visit the official site linked above for some more 'raw truth' or to buy the book.

Twice recently I've been pushed, by unnecessary limitations of the technology I pay for, into the arms of unauthorized copies or downloading of media. In the first case, Maya and I had been watching the Showtime series "Dexter" on demand. We took our time watching it, sometimes watching more than one episode per week and sometimes less. One day I noticed that all the episodes we had watched so far were gone from the selection of available episodes. Chastened, I realized I had not been checking when the episodes would "end", and when I later checked on the rest of episodes, I realized they all ended in a few days, "on 1/23." So we would have to have something of a marathon to watch the rest of it in time, about two episodes each day. The thought did occur to me at the time that "on 1/23" is a bit ambiguous; it could mean either the end of the 23rd or the beginning. But I repressed it, because I thought it would be poor interface design to make it the beginning of the day, and I didn't see how we could watch the episodes any faster anyway.

On the 23rd, sure enough, all the episodes were already gone, and we were thrust into a desperate situation. At that point, having watched four episodes in the last couple of days, we were very involved in the escalating plot, and really wanted to find out what was going to happen. We couldn't possibly wait for the DVD. And there simply wasn't any other way to see these episodes. So I turned to alternative channels, and found downloadable versions that looked almost as good as a DVD. By hooking up my laptop to the TV and the stereo, I was able to recreate the immersive viewing experience that we had become quite accustomed to.

Why did I have to do that? Why did they have to cut off the on-demand availability of the episodes on that particular day, long before a DVD release? Either there is some technical limitation to the amount of on-demand content that Time Warner can host at one time, or they just don't think what I pay for on-demand entitles me to a service quite that good.

Two days ago the Academy Awards aired, and thanks to a party planner lacking foresight, we had to spend most of the evening out. We DVR-ed the program before leaving, but didn't think at that time to program extra recording time because the show usually exceeds the nominal schedule. We got back before the end and started watching. When the scheduled time ended and recording stopped, we were switched from watching the recording to live TV, instantly ruining one award for us by showing the winner giving the speech, but also showing us that we would need to program more recording, which we did before going back to watching the playback. We only made it about halfway through before we had to go to bed.

Yesterday I had the unusual situation of having to try not to find out who won the big awards. My coworkers are not likely to talk about it, so that wasn't a problem, but my Google personalized homepage and all but a couple of the web sites I usually visit daily were off-limits. This was a wake-up call to how 'plugged in' I've become and how much harder it is not to find out the latest news, than to find it out.

When we watched the rest of the recording last night we gradually became aware of impending doom: the show had gone more than 35 minutes over. Again, this possibility had occurred to me the previous night, but I had banished it, remembering that they had been trying to rein in the overruns in recent years. The recording ended during the acceptance speech for Best Actor. I knew it would be impossible to go looking for videos of the last two award presentations without finding out who won, so I sacrificed my own surprise for Maya's. After scouring a few sites the best I could find was on YouTube--a pretty good video for Best Director, and one with Spanish voiceovers for Best Picture. Something of a Pyrrhic victory.

Why couldn't the official Oscars site host videos of the awards being presented? They had lots of videos from the "Thank You Cam" and "Ellen's Video Diary." I'm sure we were not the only ones who encountered this problem as a result of the Academy's inability to schedule adequate time for its show.

As I passed by the bird store "33rd and Bird" after work yesterday, the window displays, which until recently had been occupied by small parakeet-type birds and a toucan, were filled with these pigeons. They were as motionless as I've ever seen pigeons, mostly just looking out at the street, apparently quite befuddled at their sudden captivity. Right away I imagined some kind of pygmalion plot in which they'd be fed nice food and turned into classy birds so they could be sold at high prices. But today they were gone.

33rd and Bird was previously located on 33rd Street in Manhattan, a couple of blocks away from 3rd Avenue. In April 2006 they relocated to Bruckner Blvd. in the South Bronx, which if it had a number instead of that name, would be 133rd Street.

33rd and Bird's website is an unfortunate creature itself. All of the pages display a plaintext "Shopping Basket," which might lead you to believe that you can buy things on the site. But none of the pages show any products with "add to cart" buttons. The closest they come are the pages about hand-fed baby birds and custom-built aviaries, which only hint demurely at the possibility of purchase. Some of the photos on the site appear to have old-fashioned date stamps on the pictures themselves.

Aha, there's a Product Search link at the top of the page. You can search by keyword or by SKU. When I search for "bird", I get a list of all the section pages that are already listed down the left-hand side of every page. Oh well.

Easily the funniest part of all this is that the URL's of the pages on the site look to me like creations of Ruby on Rails. What sort of database could be behind this site I cannot fathom. Also, several times while viewing the site pages randomly failed to load, then showed up fine when I hit 'reload.' It's a shame, because it's a really cool store and a fun place to walk by every day.