In a lot of ways, the results shouldn’t surprise anyone, given what we know about the operation of human memory: if you give users a task that’s nearly impossible, they won’t do it.

The fuel tank of my truck holds 25 gallons. One cent per gallon would save me 25 cents. How far can I drive on 25 cents of gas? At $4/gallon, 25 cents buys one sixteenth of a gallon. If my vehicle got 16 miles per gallon, I could drive 1 mile on 25 cents. My truck actually gets about 18 miles per gallon and gas is not quite $4/gallon right now, but I’m just approximating.

So, if I drive 1 mile to save 1 penny per gallon I wasted my time (not to mention the wear on tires and such). My son’s car only requires about half as much gas to fill up but he can go twice as far on a gallon of gas so the result is the same. 1 mile, 1 penny.

The bottom line is you can’t drive very far out of your way to save on gas…

I’m trying out subversion. I’ll make some notes here to help me remember.

To create a new project myproject in my repository I need to:

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir myproject
cd myproject
mkdir trunk tags branches
cp -r path_to_myproject_files/* trunk/
clean up any junk files
svn import ~/Desktop/myproject svn+ssh://gb@cvs.cs.unc.edu/cvs/user/gb/svn/myproject -m "initial import"
cd place_to_work
mv path_to_myproject_files out of the way if necessary
svn checkout svn+ssh://gb@cvs.cs.unc.edu/cvs/user/gb/svn/myproject/trunk myproject

Then in that working directory the commands to know are: svn add, svn update, and svn commit.

So I hacked on CamKeys to add a GUI for configuring all sorts of events. I’ll include a few screen shots below. Now the teachers are recording their own speech and music sounds and hooking them to events on the DDR pad or camera.

The CamKeys roots of this project were funded by the Mozilla foundation.

The source is in CVS at sourceforge uncassist.

I made my donation on 14 November expecting the laptop by Christmas.

I got a thank you note from Nicholas on 16 November.

I got an email on 22 December promising delivery by 15 January.

I got email on 19 January saying their shipment system could not ship to my address. We get shipments here on campus every day from every shipper. I responded that their shipment system is broken and they should drop it in US Mail. Their email included a 24 hour dedicated 800 number for speaking to an agent.

I got email on 21 January apologizing for the email of the 19th, saying ignore the request for updated shipping information.

I got email on 25 January saying it had been sent to the warehouse for shipping.

I got email on 6 February telling my how grateful they were for the overwhelming response.

On 14 February I called the 800 number. The lady who answered the phone “hello?” didn’t appear to know anything about the OLPC. I figured I had the wrong number so I apologized, hung up, and dialed again. Same lady, except this time after much silence she gave me another 800 number to call.

I called it, got a menu, chose to speak to a person, and was informed that my XO would ship “at the end of March”.

Yow. These guys are going to change the world? My confidence is waning.