Here is something I have noticed: the interior decoration of homes we visit—friends, and family—are vastly superior to our home. In several of the homes we visit, the living rooms and kitchens and dens could model for magazines. To apply the term “interior decoration” to our home would be an example of using an alternative fact.

A favorite recent distraction of mine is reading through issues of Down East magazine, to which I have a subscription. I love Maine, and the magazine allows me to have a little bit of Maine each month. The photos of wonderful, and many of the photos show stylish homes with interior design that seems, for lack of a better term, “grown up.”

While the homes we visit might not reach the levels that appear in Down East magazine, they are certainly grown-up compared to our home. Until recently, we didn’t even own a formal dining room table. We acquired one just in time for Thanksgiving. It is a large table that easily seats six, and takes up much of our small dining room. It looked great in the furniture store, and somewhat out-of-place in our house.

Perhaps one problem is that there is no uniform design philosophy for our decorating. Maybe our friends and family simply have a vision of what they want their home to look like, and have the good sense (and money) to execute that vision. If there is any vision in our interior design, it can be best described as “clutter.” It can be even better described as “chaos.”

We have pictures on the walls. We have a relatively new sofa in the living room. We did remodel our kitchen a few years ago. But despite all of that, our home still does not have that same mature, grown-up look as that of friends, family, and even neighbor’s homes we’ve visited.

I cannot account for this. Often, after visiting a friend’s house, and taking the careful design—each item looking as thought it belonged exactly where it was—I wonder if I missed some class along the way that everyone else has taken. Was Interior Decorating 101 a requirement in high school, and I somehow missed it and fell under the radar?

The more likely answer is that I just have no knack for it. After all, I wear jeans, tennis shoes, and t-shirts to work (in the winter, I’ll wear long-sleeve shirts) and think nothing of it. Style is not my forte.

I don’t know if the design styles we see in friends and family’s homes have names—classical, New England, California casual—but if I had to apply a name to the “style” of our interior decoration, such that it is, I’d call it the LEGO style. One can find LEGOs in every room of the house, including the bathrooms. It is the unifying design theme that keeps our home from the brink of dullness.

Though I’ve never asked anyone, I do sometimes wonder if visitors to our home look around at our interior decoration and say to themselves, “Wow! How is it that everyone’s house besides my own is so well decorated? I mean, look at this place!” They are transfixed by my bookshelves, or the antique typewriter in the corner.

Then they sit on the relatively new couch, shriek, and jump up, looking back at the couch to see what bit them.

It was LEGO. Of course it was.

I am not a phone person. Maybe I was at one point, no longer. I will go to great lengths to avoid talking on the phone. I talk on the phone a lot at work, but that is because most of the people I work with are on the west coast, and I am on the east coast. There, at least, I am being paid to talk on the phone.

My grandfather was not much of a phone-talker. I always liked talking to him on the phone, but whenever I called him, I felt like he couldn’t get off the phone soon enough. I suspect it was because I was paying for the long-distance call and he wanted to minimize my phone bill. This was in the days before unlimited long-distance plans made such concerns obsolete.

There are some people who get me on the phone and never let go.

Then there are all the calls I don’t care to take. The American Red Cross has called me dozens of times asking me to donate blood. I was a regular blood donor for years, and then had a bad experience and decided to give it up for a while. They don’t take no for an answer, so I ignore the calls.

The truth is, I get far more phone calls that I ignore than I answer. These days, if I don’t recognize a phone number I don’t answer the phone. I also don’t listen to voicemail, which I gave up years ago. It is an outdated technology.

Part of the problem is that I rarely have anything to say to people on the phone. I’ve had phone conversations on numerous occasions that have gone much like this:

“So what else is new?” the person on the phone says.

“Well, I’ve retired my voicemail,” I say.

“I know, I read about it on your blog.”

Substitute “read about it on your blog” with “saw it on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.” Social media allows me to keep up with friends and family more efficiently than a phone call.

I actually prefer video chats. I do these frequently with coworkers, and when I call family, I prefer video chats to phone calls. I prefer texting to phone calls. When Kelly and I were dating, we texted for more than a month before we finally resorted to an actual phone call.

We have one of those phone plans with rollover minutes. I use so few minutes that I have, as of this writing (I just verified this) 5,222 minutes including my rollover minutes. That’s 87 hours or more than 3-1/2 consecutive days worth of call time. Combined, Kelly and I used 43 minutes of call time on our last bill—most of which was Kelly. At that rate, it would take us 10 years to consume the 5,222 minutes—and that’s not counting the new minutes we add each month.

If you are looking to reach me, your best bet is not to contact me by phone.

While on vacation, I watched the kids walk to the edge of an ocean. It wasn’t their first time to the ocean. They’d been to Sand Beach in Acadia National Park, which looks out into the Atlantic. But on this beach, the Atlantic spread across the horizon from one side to the other.

It took a photo of the ocean as it looked that day.

Watching the kids stand there, I imagined a young John Adams looking out at the ocean from the hills overlooking Boston. It must have looked formidable. Eventually he crossed the ocean, taking the 40-day long voyage to Europe. Did Adams ever wonder if faster travel across the Atlantic was possible someday? I wanted to explain to the kids that the ocean is so big that it once took people 40 days to cross to the other side. Today, it can be done in six hours or less.

Instead, I kept silent. They kicked their toes in the sand, got their feet wet, and returned to where I was standing so that we could get some lunch.

When I read last week that Gene Cernan had died, I thought of my kids staring out at the ocean. Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon, and I get the sense that he felt it was a dubious title. He didn’t want to be the last man to walk on the moon.

Did Cernan, as a child, ever stand at the ocean and marvel at how big it was? Did he look up at the moon and think, no one will ever get there! I have read a great deal about the Apollo program over the years. I feel like I know many of the astronauts in the program from the numerous biographies, and histories I’ve devoured. I have also read about the early attempts to cross the Atlantic ocean, attempts made before Christopher Columbus. As a pure technical challenge, it is probably harder to go to the moon than it was to make that first Atlantic ocean crossing.

Still, it should have gotten easier. It takes practice. How many ships (and lives) have been lost crossing the Atlantic ocean? Too many to count, probably, but it is easier now than ever before, due largely to the fact that we kept trying. We learned from our setbacks and we pushed forward.

I was an infant when Gene Cernan stepped onto the moon, something that was a non-event compared to when Neil Armstrong did it three years earlier. History tells me that people had lost interest. We’d done it, now let’s go do something else. Let’s fix other problem. I understand this and empathize. Or I do until I stand at the edge of an ocean, marvel at its size, its power to shape the weather, and very world itself.

It took a long time for us to conquer the ocean. Leif Erikson made his way from Europe to North America, and it would be another 500 years before Christopher Columbus did it. The moon is harder and it will take more time, but I am still optimistic that one day, traveling to the moon will be as routine as traveling across the ocean.

I’m equally optimistic that someone other than Cernan will bear the title of “last person on the moon” when my kids stand at the edge of an ocean, watching their kids walk timidly toward the shore.

Last week, I went to start our older car and the battery was dead. This is about the 4^th time this has happened in the last year, and it is entirely my fault. I left the lights on again.

I left the lights on because I tend to turn on the headlights whenever I am driving, day or night. Our new car, of course, has automatic headlights and I don’t have to think about it. The older car buzzes a warning if you shut down the car and the headlights are still on. Only, that warning buzzer is no longer working. It died about a year ago.

So, if my routine is slightly disrupted when I arrive home, as it was last week, then I forget to turn off the lights, and the next morning: dead battery. This, by the way, is why pilots—even experienced ones—always use checklists.

We called AAA and they came out and jumped the car and all is well. Except: it will happen again.

I thought about ways to prevent this. I could stick a Post-It on the steering wheel to remind me to SHUT THE LIGHTS. But, I might not look at the Post-It if I was dealing with getting the kids out of the car, along with backpacks, and everything else. What would be great is if that buzzer was still working. I wondered if there was some other way.

Then it occurred to me!

I was an early adopter of the Automatic Link. This is a device that plugs into the data port on your car and acts as a kind of Fitbit for your vehicle. I have one in each of the cars and the data it provides can be fascinating and useful. I only drive the older car to-and-from work (the car probably gets less than 1,500 miles/year), and I often forget that the Automatic Link is in the car. But I had brilliant idea.

One of the features of the Automatic Link is that it integrates with the IFTTT (If This Then That) service. One of the triggers is “when the ignition is turned off.” So, I setup an IFTTT applet that does the follows:

IF my Automatic Link detects the ignition is turned off, THEN sent me an SMS telling me to make sure the lights are turned off.

And guess what? It worked! There  is sometimes a delay of 10 or 15 minutes, but ever since I enabled that little piece of workflow, within aa few minutes of shutting down the car, I get a text message that reads “Honda CR-V’s ignition turned off. CHECK LIGHTS!”

Usually, I shut the lights off, but now, if I forget, I’ll have a reminder within few minutes to check. Hopefully this will forestall future dead batteries.

This, by the way, is an example of what I like to call practical auto-mation.

When I was 13 years old, in 1985, I discovered Ultima IV. This was a top-down role-playing computer game. It was unlike any other game I’d ever played. For one thing, the world was richly detailed and interactive. For another, even more important, the game was not about killing monsters. It was about 8 virtues that you, as the character, had to preserve. If you stole gold from someone, that affected your honesty. If you ran away from a fight, that affected your courage. If you bragged to a villager, it affected your humility. It was a paradigm-shifting experience for me. I loved playing the game. And I loved the sequels that followed.

The game was created by Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British. Last week, I read Garriott’s new book, Explore/Create: My Life In Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark. The book is a delightful journey through the life of someone who has done more than just create virtual worlds, but someone who has seen more of our world than most people alive today ever will.

Garriott’s book, as the title suggests, alternates between two big parts of his life: exploration, and creation. Garriott has been to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, and toured the Titanic. He was also a space tourist, flying on a Russian Soyuz rocket for a 2-week stay on the International Space Station. (Garriott’s father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut, spending 60 days on Skylab, and flying the Space Shuttle.)

But Garriott also had a creative vision, and was the brains behind some of the best computers games ever created, including the Ultima series of games.

The book is packed with anecdotes from Garriott’s experiences, from performing magic tricks for moonwalkers like Ed Mitchell, to the evolution of the 8 virtues in the Ultima games. While I enjoyed the exploration parts of the book, I loved the “create” sections. I loved learning how the Ultima games came to be, loved learning how features were added, and how the games grew and evolved over time.

Explore/Create is a fun read, especially for anyone with the explorer bug, or anyone who loves computer role-playing games.

A few years ago, I learned that Garriott was Kickstarting a new game, Shroud of the Avatar, which would be a 21^st century descendant of the Ultima games. I became an early backer, and watching the game evolve over time as it gets closer and closer to release has been a joy. As a backer, I have access to early releases, and have played the game with the Little Man, who also seems to get as much joy out of it as I do.

If you are interested in exploration, creation, a polymath, and old-school RPGs, I recommend Garriott’s book. It’s a treat.

I have been thinking about ditching LinkedIn. I have enough trouble keeping up with Twitter and Facebook. I tried keeping up with Instagram for a time, but it was too much for me. I find Twitter useful, and I’ve got something of an audience there. Facebook is good for keeping up with friends and family. But LinkedIn…?

I’m not sure what the value of LinkedIn is. For one thing, it has among the worst UI/UX’s I’ve encountered. The only time I ever go to LinkedIn is to accept a request to connect with someone. Each time I go there, I feel like I’ve been transported back to the late 1990s when websites were in their experimental stage, and attempted to use every feature available in HTML, even when those features were horribly annoying. (Remember <blink>!)

More than that, however, LinkedIn just skeeves¹ me out. Whenever I roll my eyes at the short bios people put in their Twitter descriptions², I remind myself that things are a lot worse on LinkedIn.

I’ve kept LinkedIn this far because I’ve used it for professional connections. I’ve got more than 500 connections there, and I think I know about 50 of those people. I never go to LinkedIn to browse the feed there because it is the most unbrowsable feed I’ve ever encountered.

That said, for the purposes of this post, I risked sanity and opened up my LinkedIn feed. Here are some of the things that my professional network feed contains:

• A viral video on how to welcome a new person to your organization.
• Lots of photos of people’s office desks.
• Lots of sponsored ads by places like Booz Allen.
• Posts offering secrets to become a [courageous | innovative | productive | affable | etc.] [CIO | CFO | CTO | COO, etc.]
• Tons of posts telling me about people’s new roles, new jobs, new skills, or work anniversaries.
• Ironically, a post on “The End of User-Friendly Design.”

I imagine there are people who find a lot of value in LinkedIn, but I am hard-pressed to see what that value is. I am harder pressed to understand how they find that value in all of the noise.

What I really don’t like about LinkedIn is how it tells you who has been looking at your profile—and by contrast, if you look at someone’s profile, they know you’ve been looking at it. On rare instances when I want to look at someone’s profile, I’ve taken to opening up a private browsing window and browsing LinkedIn anonymously.

I have tried to keep my LinkedIn profile more or less up-to-date, but I am not sure why. I don’t use the service, and I know so few people on the service, that there seems no point in continuing with it. It is not a hard decision. I use Twitter and Facebook daily, but I actively avoid LinkedIn. It’s probably time to give it up.

Maybe.

On Sunday the Little Miss was watching television in our bedroom while I was rocking the baby in the rocking chair. The Little Miss left the room for a few minutes. The TV remained on. I wasn’t watching it, and I have a pet peeve about a television playing when no one is watching it. She returned to the room a few minutes later with paper, and markers, and set down in front of the television to draw and color.

“Are you watching the TV,” I asked, “or are you coloring?”

The Little Miss stood, gave me a stern look, and said, “Daddy, I’m multitasking.”

She is her mother’s daughter.

I know this because I have no knack for multitasking. I used to. Back in 1999 and 2000 when I got my pilot’s license, I was at the pinnacle of my multitasking proficiency. I doubt anyone can safely fly an aircraft in Los Angeles airspace without having the ability to multitask: flying the aircraft, talking to air traffic control, looking for traffic, and studying a chart or checklist, all at the same time.

As I have grown older, this talent, such as it was, has all but withered, and can’t be relied upon. This, perhaps, has served as my singular motivation for seeking out ways to automate repetitive tasks over the last few years. Rather than trying to do multiple things at the same time myself, why not have a computer, tablet, or smart phone do one or more of them for me?

Kelly is a multitasking master. She makes it look effortless. Like a baseball player who has a swing so natural they don’t even think about it, I’ve seen Kelly do four or five things at the same time without breaking a sweat. Not so, me.

If the television is on and Kelly is talking to me, I usually have to ask her to mute the volume or turn the TV off. I can’t focus on both at the same time. Although I often want to listen to music while I work, I often find it too distracting. If I listen to the music I slow down on my work. Or, I don’t hear the music.

I’ve found that the Little Man has taken after me in this regard. If he is getting dressed in the morning, he can’t do it with the TV on. He’ll stand in front of the TV with one arm in a sleeve, and the other poised to go into a sleeve, but staring distractedly at the television. I empathize with him.

I often listen to audiobooks while doing other things, but it can be precarious. Most frequently, I listen to books while I walk. This works well for the most part, but if my mind wanders even the slightest—hey, when did they start building that building?—I have to rewind because I won’t have heard the last ten or twenty seconds of the book.

Problem-solving is part of my job. Last week, I had a particularly complicated math problem I was working out in some code I’d written. I was at the kids’ school, in the carpool line to pick them up, and standing around with the usual crowd. Someone was trying to talk to me but I had a hard time replying because I was trying to work through the math problem in my head.

Automation has mitigated this for me. I’ve written a lot over the years about how I’ve automated different parts of my daily life. This takes some of the burden of multitasking off my brain and transfers it to a computer. Still, I am always impressed by someone like Kelly who makes multitasking look easy. She can make the kids’ lunches, while holding the baby, and talking on the phone.

I can do all of those things, too. Just not at the same time.

On Monday, I  was glancing at the list of books I’ve read, and thought it would be interesting to list the book that I was reading on that day—January 16—for each of the last 21 years.

• 1996: Science, Numbers, and I by Isaac Asimov
• 1997: Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan
• 1998: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• 1999: Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
• 2000: The Life of Greece by Will Durant
• 2001: My War by Andy Rooney
• 2002: Terraforming Earth by Jack Williamson
• 2003: Forever: A Novel by Pete Hamill
• 2004: The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
• 2005: My Manhattan by Pete Hamill
• 2006: Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear
• 2007: The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
• 2008: (Not reading anything on this day)
• 2009: Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters by Richard Winters
• 2010: C. M. Kornbluth by Mark Rich
• 2011: Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939
• 2012: Astounding Science Fiction, January 1942
• 2013: Impulse by Steven Gould
• 2014: Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman
• 2015: (Not reading anything on this day)
• 2016: My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall
• 2017: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

I ended up including what I was reading on Monday, which actually makes the last 22 January 16th. Twice in that time, once is 2008, and again in 2015, I wasn’t reading anything on January 16. This happens occasionally, when I am between books, and can’t decide what to read next.

Facebook and Google like to remind us about what we were doing on a particular day. In many respects, I prefer looking back to what I was reading on a particular day. For some reason, I can look at what I was reading, and remember quite clearly where I was, and what I was doing while reading that particular book.

The other day the doorbell rang and we found ourselves facing an unfamiliar Girl Scout and her father. She was going around the neighborhood selling Girl Scout cookies. I guess it is that time of year again.

I know very little about the Girl Scouts as an organization. In fact, everything I know about the Girl Scouts centers around the selling of cookies. That’s can’t be a good thing.

I am sure that the Girl Scouts do a lot more than sell cookies. I imagine that their activities are similar to what I’ve seen in the Cubs Scouts. They learn things, they make friends, they volunteer their time, they socialize. But if the only thing I really know about the Girl Scouts is that they sell cookies, then a PR problem exists. The Girl Scouts should be about a lot more than selling cookies.

The Little Miss recently joined the ranks of the Daisy Scouts, and so far, there has been no talk of hocking baked goods. Frankly, I am not looking forward to the time when selling cookies becomes a significant activity. I don’t like the idea of kids hocking things as a way to raise money. It is emotionally manipulative, for one thing. Who can say no to a cute 6-year old? For another, selling isn’t for everyone. Some people are uncomfortable pushing things on family, friends, and especially strangers.

When the Little Man’s scout pack recently raised money for a new Pine Wood Derby track, they attempted to do so by sending the kids home before the holidays with a catalog of junk to pawn on family and friends. The pack would earn a percentage of whatever was sold.

I took the packet home and immediately tossed it. I told the Little Man that he didn’t have bother selling junk to his family and friends. Instead, we would just make a donation to the pack, specifically for the Pine Wood Derby track.

Setting the emotional manipulation aside, the other problem with Girl Scout cookies is one of scale. It is one thing to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies for four bucks from a neighbor kid. But in the area that we live in, the scale of things is much larger. We don’t get asked to buy Girl Scout cookies by one neighbor kid. We get asked by dozens of people:

• Neighborhood girls.
• Parents of Girl Scouts at work.
• Out-of-state relatives.
• Friends whose kids attend different schools.

If we bought one box of Girl Scout cookies from every person who asked us to buy cookies, we could open up a cookie store.

What gets lost in all of this is what the scouts themselves get out of selling cookies. Sure, there are prizes they can win if they achieve certain sales benchmarks. And some of the money from the cookie sales must go back into the local packs. Here is what the Girl Scouts website says about revenue from the cookie program:

One hundred percent of the net proceeds from Girl Scout Cookie sales are reinvested back into the originating council to fund activities and Girl Scouts’ Take Action projects, which positively impact their communities. Each council determines its own revenue structure depending on its cookie cost, local retail price, and the amount that is shared with participating troops and groups. On average, Girl Scout council net revenue is approximately 65–75 percent of the local retail price; the amount shared with participating Girl Scout troops, referred to as troop proceeds, is approximately 10–20 percent of the local retail price.

I think it says something that Girl Scouts require cookie sales to fund their programs, when the Boy Scouts don’t require a similar stream of cash to fund theirs.

The Girl Scouts should be about more than selling cookies, and probably it is. But the only time I hear about the Girls Scouts is during cookie season, and that, I think, is a problem.

Here is an idea for a modern shopping cart that I offer freely to any and all grocery stores and retailers. The shopping cart hasn’t changed much in the last four decades. With the exception of the annoying mechanism that locks the wheels just before I reach my car (my car being parked far away because that was the only parking spot I could find in the lot) the shopping cart is what is was when I was a kid. Technology has improved, and I think we can see significant improvements toward a modern shopping cart if that technology is applied.

The shopping cart is designed to make it easy to carry your groceries as you make your way through the store. But there is the potential for it to do much more. More and more grocery stores have introduced self-checkout lanes to speed up the process of checking out. But what if the shopping cart itself handled all of this? Here is what I propose:

1. On the handlebar of the cart, a small computer touchscreen is mounted. The screen contains a bar code reader as well as a place to swipe a credit card.
2. When you load an item into your cart, the cart detects what is loaded, displayed the item on the screen, and calculates the price so you can see a running total of what your bill will be.
3. If you remove something from your cart, it is removed from the total.
4. If you add something like produce, where price is based on weight, the cart can detect how much the item weights and calculate the price, adding it to the total.
5. The bar code reader can scan your club card, so that the prices are adjusted based on special club pricing the store offers.
6. The bar code reader can also scan coupons. Since the cart knows what you’ve added to it, it can deduct from the total the value of any coupons you scan.
7. The cart has the ability to be linked with a second cart, so if you are doing a lot of shopping (with your spouse, for instance), the total displayed is the total for both linked carts.
8. At any time, you can get running total of how much the groceries in your cart cost. This is useful if you do weekly grocery shopping and are trying to stay on a budget.
9. When adding an item, the cart can alert you when a less expensive, generic brand is available, and how much that would save you.
10. When you are ready, you can swipe your credit or debit card to pay for the items. Then you can just walk out of the store, avoiding all the lines. There could be a station near the exits just for bagging groceries you’ve paid for. If you want to pay cash, you can line up, but you still know exactly how much you will pay, no one will have to scan the groceries.

I doubt many stores would go for this. Though it would save time, and probably save consumers a lot of money, there isn’t much incentive for a grocery store to implement such a system. The idea is for consumers to spend more money, not less, and knowing exactly how much you have in your cart would upset this model.

Macworld broke their digital magazine app. They had a good thing, and then, for no obvious reason, they changed it and now it is a lot worse. Why do people always have to mess with the user experience?

Prior to this change, reading Macworld on the iPad was a pleasure. They followed a model that many magazines use, a model which works very well for the medium: swipe left/right to move between articles, swipe up/down to scroll through a single article. In its latest incarnation, the app behaves much more like a traditional magazine. You swipe left/right to turn the page. There is no up/down swiping.

This doesn’t sound that bad, but I’d gotten used to the old model, it worked well for me, and there was no obvious reason to change it. Also, it seemed to me that the font sizes were larger, making a page easier to read for my aging eyes. I suspect the new experience is designed to make the magazine feel more like a print magazine… but why? The font is smaller and harder to read, and there is no obvious way of enlarging it, other than zooming in on the page, which is an annoying extra step.

The Scientific American app works the way Macworld used to work. You swipe left/right to move between articles, and up/down to scroll through the article. In that app, you can set the size of the font, so that scrolling through the article is easier to read. This is also the way the New York Times app works.

I’ve noticed that electronic version of magazines divide their user experience into one of two categories:

1. Swipe-and-scroll, like Scientific American and New York Times.
2. Magazine emulation, where the app is essentially a PDF of the print magazine. Down East magazine, and Smithsonian magazine behave like this. And now, so does Macworld.

There are UI/UX advantages that the iPad, iPhone, and other tablets present over traditional magazine formats. If I wanted to read the print version of the magazine, I’d subscribe to the print version. Macworld doesn’t have a print version, and for some reason, they’ve gone from the good experience of the swipe-and-scroll model, to the weaker, awkward experience of magazine emulation.

If I had to guess, I’d say that it was a move to save money. Good user experience comes at a cost, and it is probably easier to produce a PDF-like experience than it is the swipe-and-scroll model. I imagine the size of the issue is smaller in the new-and-improved format. Still, Macworld is produced by IDG, which also produces PC World. And PC World uses the better format that Macworld used to use.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The new format is a big step backward in user experience. The cover story of the January 2017 issue of Macworld is a review of the MacBook Pro. The tag line for the cover is: “The touch bar makes the Mac fun again.” The opposite could be said of the new Macworld format. It was fun, but the change back to traditional magazine format has sapped that fun.

Does anyone make just a regular Caesar salad anymore? Lately, when we go out to eat, I’ve been ordering Caesar salads. For some reason no one seems to make just a plain Caesar salad anymore. Everyone has to distinguish their Caesar salad in some way in order to make it stand out. Here is what I look for in a Caesar salad:

• Romaine lettuce
• Shredded parmesan cheese
• Anchovies
• Crutons
• Caesar dressing

Romaine lettuce is a given most of the time. The other day, however, the romaine lettuce was mixed with kale. Kale is apparently a trendy new leafy green. It reminds me of my college days working in the dorm cafeteria. We would decorate the salad bar with kale. It makes it difficult to eat in a salad. Kale does not belong in a Caesar salad. Keep it on the salad bar.

The thing I like about Caesar salads is that they are simple. There are five ingredients. If a restaurant adds something to the list, it is no longer simple, and no longer a Caesar salad in my mind. There was broccoli in my “Caesar” salad the other day. I like broccoli, but not in a Caesar salad. One establishment added tomatoes to my Caesar salad.

Kelly always orders here salad dressing Sally-style¹. I, on the other hand, take what they give me. One day, I got a Caesar salad with oil and vinegar instead of Caesar dressing. Another day, I ordered a Chicken Caesar salad, and was given a plate full of Caesar salad dressing with some Romaine lettuce to go along with it.

It is almost impossible to find a place that offers a Caesar salad with anchovies. So many people have refused anchovies in their Caesar salads that restaurants have stopped offering them. They have ruined Caesar salads for the rest of us. I’ve been to a few places that offer Caesar salads with anchovy Caesar dressing. The dressing probably contains something like “anchovy paste.”

Caesar salads are light, simple, relative inexpensive dishes. Can’t we just keep them that way? There is no need for embellishment.