December 2003 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

December 27, 2003

The city of Melbourne has a problem, which is marketing its airport as a destination to European tourists who, when they think of Melbourne, think of the city in Australia.

As reported recently in the Press Journal, the city plans to deal with this by marketing its airport in Europe as Orlando-Melbourne International Airport. The initial marketing effort for the flights will feature Orlando's tourist attractions, the city's marketing director, Larry Wuensch, says, but after a few months the airport will market Brevard County attractions, such as Cape Canaveral and the cruise boats out of the port.

That is, if tourists who land in Melbourne and find themselves 60-some miles from where they thought they were going don't tell their friends to beware of the "Melbourne Shuffle," and no one else comes.

What's going to happen when foreign tourists land in Melbourne after a seven- or eight-hour flight across the "pond" and then learn they have another hour or more of travel, by toll road, to go to their hotel rooms or to see Mickey? How will they get there, by bus? By rental car? Since there's no train service, as in Europe, they might feel "taken."

Also, how much will it cost them in both money and time to not only travel the distance from Melbourne to Orlando, but also to travel back to catch their flight home?

Fudging an airport's location is a risky business, and the only conclusion European tourists might derive after a few planeloads are conned into coming over is that Americans are not as bad as everyone thought 葉hey're worse.

The idea that all that separates Orlando and Melbourne is a hyphen implies that the two cities are close together, and they're not.

It's almost as if city officials in Vero Beach decided to rename the airport West Palm Beach-Vero Beach International Airport and started luring Europeans with pictures of Palm Beach and CityPlace.

I suppose that once they've arrived and asked where all the attractions were, we could have greeters point them down U.S. 1, wish them good luck and send them on their way with a hearty, "If you see a sign that says 'Welcome to Miami, now duck!'"

Wuensch said in the article that Europeans don't know what the Space Coast is. Well, after they've gotten a load of Melbourne's version of geographic proximity, they'll know a heck of a lot more, and might tell their friends to beware of travel companies pitching trips to places that aren't quite what they're built up to be.

Baiting and switching "rubes" may have been a Florida tradition, but it's not the way to build good feelings. Melbourne could have made itself more attractive to European tourists in countless other ways, and ended a lot of the confusion, by something that's not very popular nowadays, but always leaves a good feeling in the heart: honesty.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

December 20, 2003

It's hard to imagine that there was a time when the Internet was not a household name.

I played a tiny role in helping some people get connected to the online world back in the mid-1990s, when I took my first job after quitting the Postal Service.

The position was with an Internet access provider as a tech-support person and order taker, and it was quite an experience. It also convinced me that while I might have some marketable skills somewhere — despite what the postal bosses had told me — sitting and listening to verbal abuse was not one of them.

True, there were people who were gracious and happy to get our help, but some let their frustrations boil over. I remember the good folks, though, most of all.

Back then, before call-monitoring and punching 30 numbers to get through arcane menus just to talk to a real live human being, and before they thought of sending the whole operation overseas, you dialed the number, got the human and usually got accurate help.

There was no training; I had to "wing it," and soon could talk anyone through the process of installing the rudimentary software to get online.

We had some wild times. One customer, a florist, had a Web site, which was a rarity back then, and insisted on using regular words as passwords. Security was a concern and the password was just about the only line of defense to protect a site from being hacked. The "dictionary attack" could open a site up to all sorts of mayhem.

Well, this person called one day in a rage because her Web site had been hacked yet again after she changed the password to a word. Someone had changed the word "flower" everywhere on the site to another word that began with "f."

My favorite event was one fine afternoon when, suddenly, we got no calls at all. We thought initially that we had done such a fantastic job helping people that everyone was satisfied, but we soon found that trying to access the Internet or make outbound phone calls was impossible.

We left work puzzled, and learned the next day what had happened. A crew working under contract to the water department had dug a hole somewhere and struck a fiber-optic line, cutting it in two. The workers then duct-taped it back together, threw it back in the hole and made themselves scarce.

The phone company had to come out and find the hole, then fix the cable.

I left the Internet provider soon after for my first journalism job, and kept an account with the company for several years afterward until high-speed DSL service became available.

In a way, those early days in the online world were the most exciting. Today, the Web is just another appliance. But for a time, it was a joy to ride the bleeding edge of technology.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

December 13, 2003

The holiday lights are making an appearance in my neighborhood, and all I can do is rejoice.

Even if you don't buy into everything having to do with the season, there's something about seeing a house lit up and flashing colors at this time of year. True, we're not bundled into winter coats when we go outside, but you can imagine the crispness of a late fall evening when you walk around and see the creative and interesting designs.

There are those who condemn communities such as the one I live in. The houses are architecturally similar, they say, and they're too close together. But to the individuals who own them, each house is special in its own way, and holiday decorations help homes stand out.

Now, editorial columnists are required to howl in agony at the supposed horrors and excesses of this time of year, the consumerism, the packed shopping malls and all that. Well, I don't feel that way. The mall is a fun place to be this time of year, and it's nice to see the children all excited about visiting Santa and promising to be good so he'll pay a visit and leave them with nice things.

Even someone as cynical as myself can't help but be touched by the season, if only for a little while before plunging back into the workaday world of responsibilities and deadlines.

One of my favorite Christmas Eves has almost faded into memory, but I can recall riding in the back seat of a car, I think it was my father's 1968 Plymouth Satellite, as we drove uptown in Manhattan. Looking out the back window, I saw the Empire State Building and, in the kind of optical illusion only possible in New York, the lit-up World Trade Center seemingly right behind it.

One December, early in the month, the whole family worked to get the outside of our house decorated. It was "sweater-weather," the kind of unseasonably warm late fall day that is almost as much a gift as the ones that are wrapped in pretty paper and put under the tree, to be opened and enjoyed on Christmas morning.

Knowing that it will come to an end is part of what makes the season magical.

I remember going to the Melbourne Square Mall to meet someone right after New Year's and, having arrived early, sitting by the "Santa's Village."

It was closed down, the seat for the jolly man empty, the little railroad cars quiet, the disassembly process not yet begun, but you knew it would all be packed away in a few days.

A little girl wandered over, maybe wanting to stop off and thank Santa and put in some advance requests for next year. But she stopped when she saw that everything was closed.

She looked so sad. "It's over?" the girl asked, incredulous. "It's over?"

"Yes, it's over," her mother said.

They walked away, and I could feel the little girl's sense of loss.

Hang on, I wanted to say to her. It's over now, but in 11 months it'll all begin again.

That's worth waiting for.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).

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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

December 6, 2003

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 25 — Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive.

Reuters

via (www.MSNBC.com)

This, I swear, was a real news item.

If, in your life as a computer user, you've ever run up against a hard drive that was running out of space, you have encountered such terminology. Back when an 80-megabyte hard disk was standard on many PCs, I bought a 200-megabyte hard drive and installed it in my PC.

Part of the installation process involved setting jumpers on the back of the drive so the computer would know which drive was which. As the story mentioned above notes:

"In the computer industry, 'master' and 'slave' are used to refer to primary and secondary hard disk drives. The terms are also used in other industries."

For example, just by owning and driving a car, you are perpetuating this allegedly offensive terminology. You can, of course, avoid doing so by not stepping on the brake pedal.

Yes, there are cylinders in your car's braking system, and they are called the master and slave cylinders. Here's the word, from the Web site (www.autoshop-online.com/auto101/brake.html):

"The brake system is composed of the following basic components: The 'master cylinder,' which is located under the hood, and is directly connected to the brake pedal, converts your foot's mechanical pressure into hydraulic pressure.

"Steel 'brake lines' and flexible 'brake hoses' connect the master cylinder to the 'slave cylinders' located at each wheel. 'Shoes' and 'pads' are pushed by the slave cylinders to contact the 'drums' and 'rotors,' thus causing drag, which (hopefully) slows the car."

Considering our own experience here in Vero Beach with the controversy over the book "A Land Remembered" and the use of a certain very offensive word in that book, I'm surprised a controversy over such terminology hasn't sprung up here.

Or maybe it's about to.

According to the Reuters dispatch, the official Los Angeles request, "which has some suppliers furious and others busy re-labeling components — came after an unidentified worker spotted a videotape machine carrying devices labeled 'master' and 'slave' and filed a discrimination complaint with the county's Office of Affirmative Action Compliance."

I'm sensitive to racial issues and avoid using words that might be offensive, but I wonder if this employee maybe needs to get a job that involves more work or find a life beyond filing complaints.

What next? Calling the front of the airplane something other than the "cockpit" because it conjures up images of fighting chickens?

I say it's time we slammed on the brakes before we hit a wall of political correctness that ends with all language being banned.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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