I bought fuel at Safeway yesterday, using my Safeway Club Card at the pump, and didn't see the usual 3¢ per gallon discount.  When I went into the office to ask about it, I was told Safeway stopped giving Club Card discounts on motor fuels on August 31, 2012.  The attendant said they weren't giving any more "free discounts"; one must "earn" them by buying groceries.  So, we're expected to buy Safeway's overpriced merchandise to accumulate $200 worth of purchases so that we can save a buck or two on a fill-up once or twice a year?  We can buy the same groceries at Trader Joe's, Walmart and the local Farmer's Market for less every day and save the difference.  At first inspection, it doesn't add up.

Although Safeway tends to offer lower fuel prices than brands like Shell, Chevron and Arco, they're not necessarily the lowest in town.  At the moment, they're no longer competitive with the two independent stations down the street, who beat Safeway by 2¢ to 3¢. The price Safeway shows on their electronic signs at the curb is now the price they charge at the pump.  Although the pump still reads the Club Card, I'm not sure if gasoline purchases even count toward an eventual discount; it may merely be used to drop the price if one has enough "reward points" accumulated from grocery purchases.

This may have something to do with Safeway getting into bed with Chevron on a new "customer loyalty" program.  It's hard to be loyal when their prices are higher than the competition's for the same goods.

"Safeway's Club Card currently grants one reward point for each dollar spent on groceries. At Safeway gas stations, every 100 points earns participants 10 cents off per gallon in a single fillup, with 20 cents off per gallon with 200 points, 50 cents off per gallon with 500 points and $1 off per gallon with 1,000 points. Participants can use points in increments of 100, with a limited-time use up to 1,000 points for a single fillup, according to the company website."

It will be interesting to see if their scheme works.  I also noticed that business at the Safeway filling station was much lighter than usual — I had my choice of four or five pumps where I usually had to wait in line.

Computer monitors

Mitsubishi 900u Diamond Pro

I'm a fan of cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors, even though they're considered old technology and one can often get them for free from FreeCycle and Craigslist and on street curbs,.  People are happy that someone just takes them off their hands and they don't need to lug them to an electronics recycler.  My current favorite display is a Mitsubishi 900u Diamond Pro monitor with a flat-face 19-inch aperture grille picture tube.  Being an analog device, with a good 24-bit color video channel capable, it is capable of a color gamut of over 16.7 million colors, good enough that brightness steps in a blue sky from the zenith to the horizon are imperceptible.  A properly gamma-adjusted CRT display also reproduces images that look most natural to the human eye.  There are drawbacks, however:

• The CRT needs to warm up for 5 to 10 minutes after being started up from standby before the brightness and colors stabilize.
• There is a certain amount of distortion in the image that is tricky to adjust out with the monitor's controls — pincushion, barrel, skew, keystone, position, size, etc.
• It is susceptible to color and geometry distortion from nearby magnetic fields, including the Earth's magnetic field, and needs to be degaussed from time to time, or if the monitor gets rotated or moved to another location.

ViewSonic VG150

Due to circumstances, I've recently been forced to switch to a backup computer system while my main system is down for repair, so I'm working with a ViewSonic VG150 color liquid crystal display (LCD) screen for a while.  I'm not fond of LCD displays, and I've long shied away from them due to perceived shortcomings:

• I can usually tell when someone has processed digital camera images on an LCD display when I view them on a Web page using a CRT display:  Photographic images look harsh, overly contrasty, with many details lost in deep shadows.  The images probably looked "just fine" to those who posted them to the Web, using their laptop LCD displays.
• Their viewing angle is relatively narrow, and one must keep them perpendicular to one's line of sight if there's to be any chance whatsoever of seeing the truest colors they can display.
• The color gamut on consumer grade LCD displays may be as small as 32,000 colors, 0.2% that of an analog CRT, even though they're advertised as being compatible with 24-bit color.  One may need to go to a professional-grade display costing several thousand dollars to rival the 16.7-million-color rendering capability of even a mediocre analog CRT.
• The cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlight needs to warm up 5 to 10 minutes before one can do even half-serious photo work on them.

The third point in the list came as a bit of a surprise to me, but it's true:  When the monitor is turned on cold or resumes operation after being on standby for an extended time, it is quite dim, even though my eyes are already adapted to the room lighting level.  As the monitor operates, the screen gradually gets brighter, much like fluorescent tubes and compact fluorescent "curly lights" used for general illumination.  In a cold room in the middle of winter, the CCFL backlight may never achieve full brightness.

Many laptop displays and some computer displays have switched to white LED backlighting in recent years.  It's a step in the right direction, as LEDs can now be brighter than cold cathode fluorescents, have longer life, and don't have any warm-up issues.  However, the LCD displays still suffer from the old color gamut problems.

In fairness, the gamma of LCD monitors can be adjusted to improve the rendering of images having a wide range of brightness levels, making it possible to do fairly decent editing work with photographs.  This is usually done in software by the operating system.  It's a built-in feature of Linux, but is not available in Microsoft Windows at all, unless it is done through a proprietary video driver.  Since most of the world's computer users are running Windows, it isn't surprising that there's a lot of bad imagery being posted to the Web; most users aren't even aware of the possibilities.

I've been holding out for organic LED (OLED) technology to become mainstream before shelling out money for a new monitor.  It is gradually getting better, although vendors have had problems with the lifetime of the blue emitters.  They're also not readily available in large screen sizes, although a few companies have put small ones to use on cameras and hand-held devices.  From what I've been reading, OLED displays can be built with a color gamut rivaling analog CRT displays.  They don't suffer from lag, making them better for displaying motion pictures.  They also don't suffer from distortion problems, since the pixel locations are fixed, and they don't need a warm-up time, as do CRTs and cold-cathode backlights.  OLED television and computer display prototypes have been shown at trade shows for over five years, whetting the public's appetite, but they haven't been on the market in significant numbers.  This year may be the turning point, however, if big vendors like LG, Samsung and Sony come out with 32-inch HD television receivers using OLED displays.

Jaunty Jackalope is DOA

I just had an unhappy experience trying out Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope") on a Fry's Electronics RX-7335 laptop (2.4 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive) over a 54 Mbps 802.11g wireless Internet connection. I first booted from the LiveCD, and the Firefox 3.0.8 browser was going very slowly, taking about a minute to bring up Google, and more than ten minutes to bring up Weather Undergound. I thought it might be a memory swap problem running off the CD, so I foolishly installed 9.04 on the hard drive yesterday, wiping out the Ubuntu 8.10 installation. It was just as slow. Acquiring a network connection through the Netgear WG511T PCI card, talking to a Netgear WGR614 router, took on the order of 5 minutes, with several manual restarts when it failed to connect on the first and second attempts. By way of comparison, that same laptop, running with Ubuntu 8.10, connects to the Internet in 10-40 seconds, without help, on most days, and brings up Google in less than one second and Weather Underground in a shade under eight seconds. It ain't the fault of the hardware.

Since the release of Jaunty Jackalope last week, there are reports on the Ubuntu forums of users having problems getting Samba to work at all with 9.04 and USB devices that worked fine in earlier releases barely working or having stopped working. It may work with a hardwired connection to the LAN, but why bother? Jaunty Jackalope is not usable, in my opinion. I'll wait for release 9.10 this October before I try again and will stick with 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" until then.

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Digital cell phones

They can make a phone connection sound as if the caller is gargling with ball bearings. They drop out at the most inopportune moments.

Other than mobility, there are few reasons to use a cell phone, in my opinion. I'm not one of the people stampeding to drop my plain old land line service.

Loss of a cell phone often means that the stored list of contacts and telephone numbers is lost. I often hear from friends and acquaintances that haven't been able to contact me or someone else because their cell phone failed and had to be replaced, they dropped it into the toilet, or whatever. If the typical user has 50-100 contacts, unless they were fastidious about copying the information down somewhere or backing it up on their computer, they're faced with the task of collecting it all over again through their social network, a process that can take months. Did you wonder why your good friend so-and-so hasn't called you in over half a year? He may not be angry with you; perhaps he just lost his cell phone. Sure, there are cellular services that offer telephones with computer interface cables, allowing one to back up and restore the contact list, even load new ringtones and features, but how many users have sufficient technical skill to figure out how to install the software and hardware, and then make it work? What's more, the software, if available at all, may only work on Windows XP or Windows Vista. (Too bad, Windows 98, Apple Mac and Linux users!) Since it is well-known that most people never back up their computer disks, what makes you think they'd back up the memory in their cell phone? On the nasty side, there are services that offer crippled cell phones that can't be connected to a computer. Virgin Mobile USA is one that comes to mind, with their pay-as-you go plans. They won't allow you to buy a fully functional phone elsewhere and register it with their service, so if you go that route, you're reduced to laboriously copying the information out using the phone's minuscule keypad and display, and if needed, re-entering in the same, tedious fashion. It can take many hours.

Even more disturbing is the use of cellular communication devices being used more and more as personal digital assistants (PDAs). My phone requires entry of a security code after it is turned on, but if I should lose it somewhere, whoever picks it up would be able to see all my contacts, so long as the unit still has battery power and doesn't get turned off. I keep it that way for my convenience, but it also means I need to severely restrict what kind of information I store in the unit. However, what about our friends? Perhaps they keep all sorts of personal information in their phones, such as street addresses, passwords, account numbers, enough for an identity thief to have a field day. Let's hope that the information they have in there is their information, not yours. Having contact information available to others may not be all bad, however. You can program one or more entries called "ICE" (In Case of Emergency), so that if you were incapacitated and couldn't speak or act on your own behalf, emergency personnel could use that information to contact a friend or family member.

As emergency communications devices, cell phones are only marginally more reliable than smoke signals, and in much of the mountainous areas of the western United States, they're nearly useless, due to their line-of-sight connection characteristics. On a good day in flat country, they'll reach maybe 10 miles, even though the radio horizon may be 20-25 miles away. They just don't pack enough transmitting power to go much beyond that. In urban areas, repeaters are spaced very close together, giving continuous coverage, but that's not true when you get more than 20 miles out of town, unless you stay within a few miles of major highways. You can go over a hill and lose contact with a repeater that is just a few miles away; one might as well be on the dark side of the Moon. If you like off-road motor sports or hiking in the back country, you can leave the cell phone behind, because it would be just so much dead weight to lug around. Forget about the UHF band GMRS walkie talkies that seem to be so popular now, as they also are line-of-sight devices with a range of about five miles in open country. A pricey satellite phone, a cheap, old-style Citizens' Band radio or an emergency signal mirror would be better choices.

Most digital cell phones can't be used for FAX services. The same characteristics that make your voice sound choppy and garbled totally ruin the audio signal that facsimile machines use to talk to one another. They also don't have a way to connect a computer modem for a dial-up Internet connection; even if they did, they'd fail for the same reason that FAX doesn't work, or you'd be limited to painfully slow connections. Alright, perhaps you don't have much use for FAX or dial-up Internet these days, with text messaging, e-mail over high-speed Internet and all, but I thought you might like to know.

In a disaster, such as earthquakes, wildfires, floods, and so on, cell phone systems seem to become unusable much faster than land lines. Sure, if enough people try to make calls on land line phones at the same time, it will overload the central office, but individual cells can get overloaded much more quickly. You'd think that the distributed nature of cellular communications would make them less vulnerable, but my experience seems to show that the opposite is true.

Unlike a squelched two-way radio, the phones use a fair amount of power just staying in touch with the nearest repeater. Moreover, their batteries are tiny, and the smaller the telephones get, the smaller the batteries, leaving them with very little reserve capacity. Cell phone lithium-ion batteries wear out after two to three years of service and seem to run down just when you need them most. My relatively old Kyocera "candy bar" phone is supposed to have enough battery capacity to operate on standby for five to seven days, but I've seen it get nearly drained in just four or five hours on occasions when I've taken it along in mountainous areas and forgot to switch it off. You'll often get the same effect by being inside a concrete-and-steel building in the middle of a city.

The now-obsolete analog cell phone service was fairly tolerant of weak signals as one got farther away from the repeater. Most, if not all, providers in the U.S. shut off their analog service several years ago, so the only types of cell phones now operating are digital. Just like counting in base 2, they either work, or they don't. If you find yourself in a weak coverage area, moving a few feet in any direction can mean the difference between having a telephone conversation or having nothing. It may make all the difference in the world to you if your conversation happens to be with your local 911 emergency services at the moment. Weak coverage may not even mean being 10 miles out of town on a country road — it may be in your own house in town, so that every time you make or receive a call, you need to stand on the southeast corner of the front porch and stay within a radius of two feet of that magic spot to maintain the signal. For heaven's sake, don't bend over or turn around to pick something up, because you'll lose the signal! That's one of the reasons radio show hosts often refuse cell phone callers: It's no fun for the audience to listen to conversations that get cut off in mid-syllable.

The sound quality of digital cell phones is horrible. They limit the bandwidth of the sound coming from your mouth, cut the continuous waveform into little chunks, then convert it to a stream of numbers. What comes out the other end sounds choppy, raspy and hard to understand, even from the best of digital telephones. It seems to get worse when the local repeater is heavily loaded. There are technical reasons for this. The move from analog to digital service was made to allow more users to have conversations simultaneously, but in the physical world governed by natural laws, this didn't come for free. More users means sharing limited bandwidth with an attendant drop in signal quality for everyone. If you don't like the sound of solid-state digital telephone answering machines (the kind that work without a tape cassette), you probably don't like the sound of digital cell phones, either. Radio show hosts often don't like them for the same reason.

Land lines work when the power is out. The telephone company maintains large banks of storage batteries, or smaller batteries combined with an emergency generator powered by a Diesel engine. They can keep their central office and all the phones in town powered up during a natural disaster for days. Can you keep your cell phone battery charged for days when there's no juice at the wall socket? Even if you can find a way to charge the batteries, with solar cells or a hand-crank generator, there's no assurance that the individual cell repeaters will have backup power for several days, or even several hours.

Your local 911 emergency services know exactly where you are when you call for help from the land line in your house, but it is not necessarily true of cellular communications. Although there are now means of triangulating your cell phone's position, it's only accurate to a few hundred feet at best, and a few miles at worst. That's not a good thing when you're waiting for police, medical or search-and-rescue assistance, as the family of the late CNET editor James Kim tragically learned in December 2006.

A legitimate purpose for cell phones is their portability and ability to provide improved accessibility when one is away from the home or office. If one subscribes to call forwarding for the land line, whenever one leaves home, one can have all incoming calls forwarded to a cell phone. It's a boon for adult children monitoring aging parents, or for parents staying in touch with young children. In a panic, instead of having to remember multiple telephone numbers and trying to guess which one to use at the moment, friends and family members just need one land line number and enjoy a high probability of being able to get a live person quickly, instead of a voice mail system or an answering machine. Until we all have Star Trek communicators, that's the best technology has to offer.

Update, April 28, 2009: On April 9 this area lost all cell phone connectivity for about a day as a result of sabotage to some fiber optic cables. Those who relied on only cell phones and VoIP phones had nothing at all — no way to call for police, fire or medical assistance. Since the fiber optic cable also carried Internet signals, email, instant messaging and Twitter were no longer available, either. Even E911 emergency services weren't available, because they relied 100% on those same cables. Bummer! However, folks with copper cable land line phones could, for the most part, still call friends and neighbors within the local telephone exchange, and thanks to help from local amateur radio operators, the fire and police services muddled through until the damage was repaired.

Annoying Technologies

Here are a few contemporary technologies that should go the way of the dodo bird as soon as practicable:

• Nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries. I've never had a set that got anywhere close to the advertised 800-1000 recharge cycles before they failed, usually due to dendrite growth, causing the cells to short out.
• Digital cell phones. They can make a local phone call sound as if the speaker is gargling with ball bearings. They drop out at the most inopportune moments. Some radio talk show hosts refuse to take calls from listeners using cell phones for these reasons.
• Laptop computers. Their Li-ion batteries cost a bloody fortune and seem to die every three years, or so, no matter how much I take care to keep them charged. (I'm typing this on a laptop computer whose battery croaked two years ago; I'm not going to spend $130 to replace it, when the whole machine only cost $499 originally.)
• Cordless telephones. Most of them are made in China these days and they sound tinny. The batteries in many of them barely last an hour, or so, between 14-hour charges. Talk show hosts frequently refuse calls from listeners using cordless telephones, for the same reasons they refuse cell phone calls.
• FAX machines. In high resolution mode they can produce copies comparable to poor-to-average Xerox copies, but most folks don't understand how to use the higher resolution modes, so why bother with the technology at all? It's better to scan documents and send them by email. Compared to FAX spam, it's easier to filter out email spam, and even though both cost me time, at least email spam doesn't cost me printing supplies as well. When someone I barely know asks for my FAX number, I usually lie and tell them I can only receive e-mail messages.
  
• Coal-fired power plants. They spew tons of mercury, uranium and thorium into the environment, along with a host of other noxious substances, and they waste coal, which would be better-used as a feedstock for our chemical industries and for making steel. Sulfur dioxide gas emitted from the stacks forms acid rain that lays forests to waste. Acid tailings from coal mining leaves areas looking like lunar landscapes. Ash and slag from coal burning requires huge areas for disposal. (Thank you, Al Gore, Sierra Club, and the rest of you enviro-whackos, for forcing us down this path.)
  
• Natural gas-fired power plants. They waste natural gas, which would be better used to heat our homes, propel vehicles, and as chemical feedstock. All natural gas and coal power plants in the U.S. should be replaced with clean, safe standard nuclear plants, like the French have done, using our very own U.S.-developed nuclear plant technology and spent fuel rod reprocessing technology.
  
• Recordable Compact Discs (CD-R). No one knows how long they'll last. Some guesses are as little as ten years. That's quite poor archival storage compared to the glass plate photographs taken by Mathew Brady in the mid-1800s. My lifetime success rate with burning CD-R discs with music and digital photo images is quite low, perhaps 50%. That's a lot of wasted time and wasted money on blank discs. Also, like yesteryear's floppy disks, will there be any equipment ten years from now that will be able to read an 800 MB Compact Disc? (I learned only recently that a Japanese company, Taiyo Yuden, is the place where the CD-R disc was invented, and the only company whose discs are reliable as an archival storage medium. Some brand-name discs are made by Taiyo Yuden, but many are cheap knock-offs made in China, using forged codes on them to make the CD writing software think it's burning a Taiyo Yuden disc. If I'd only known this ten years ago ...)
  
• Liquid crystal displays. Even though the technology is mature and there are places where it is an excellent choice, such as in wristwatches, it really sucks wind in automotive and aircraft display systems, as well as other places where the devices are subjected to temperature extremes, high shock and vibration, or the need to be readable in marginal lighting. Marginal lighting may include full sunlight: I practically need to use a photographer's changing bag to read the display on my Kyocera cell phone. Another misuse of the technology is in computer displays. The images have too much color saturation and brightness; when an image that has been prepared on an LCD screen is viewed on a properly adjusted cathode ray tube, it usually looks awful.
• Inkjet printers. The print cartridges cost waaaay too much and have waaaay too little ink in them, plus, the print heads are too susceptible to clogging and drooling. I'd buy into them if the manufacturers would switch to separate print heads and large, easily refillable ink bottles, with small tubes feeding the ink to the print head. They should also have a locally-selectable monochrome printing mode, with a button or switch on the printer control panel, for those times when one doesn't need color and/or the printer driver doesn't have support for black-and-white printing. Until that happens, I'll stick to black-and-white laser printing; if I need a color image, I'll send it to my local Walgreens, Longs Drugs or Costco photo department for printing.
• Microsoft software. Overpriced, bloated and buggy, with some serious bugs never fixed, even to the day that the software became obsolete and technical support ended. (I'm happily writing this blog in SeaMonkey running under Ubuntu Linux; I've never, ever had a more reliable browser/operating system combination.) I've never understood how Microsoft management has allowed their programmers to get away with including "easter eggs" in Microsoft Office, such as mazes and first-person shooter games, adding to the bloat and potentially reducing the reliability of the product.
  
• Adobe Acrobat. Instead of a way of archiving documents in a system-independent fashion, it's become a moving target, a memory hole. Yesterday's Acrobat Reader can't read today's PDF files, and chances are that within ten years there won't be any software available to ready any PDF file, from the day the first one was created to the present (2008). Useless. That's what we get for trusting yet another private, proprietary implementation. I think OpenDocument Format has a brighter future.
  
• Internal combustion engine cars. Dirty, noisy, leaky, messy. Gimme an electric car with decent power and torque, and a range of 1000 km (600 miles) between recharges and I'll dump my oil burner in a heartbeat. 'nuff said.