WombatNation

I never thought I would write “fast” and “DMV” in the same sentence (other than, perhaps, “I conducted an involuntary fast while waiting all day at the DMV”), but I was actually in and out of there in 10 minutes today while renewing my Driver’s License. In fact, the whole DMV experience was pretty damn good.

First, I made an appointment online at the Oakland Coliseum DMV office. The online form for making appointments was really easy to use. You could see the current wait times at some of the nearby offices, view maps for the offices, find out the earliest available time slot, and more. On a Tuesday afternoon, I was able to get a 9am Thursday slot.

I highly recommend the morning weekday slots at the Oakland Coliseum DMV office. The parking lot was almost deserted. I arrived a few minutes early, waited in line for about thirty seconds, waited on a bench for about 2 minutes, went through the vision test and payment process in just over five minutes (would have been even faster if the guy helping me didn’t have to stop twice to help other colleagues), spent another minute or two getting my thumbprint and photo digitally taken, and then I was walking out the door. Another good thing about this office is you can pay with an ATM or debit card.

The winter of 2004-2005 brought a deluge of rain to the Bay area. Heavy rains will cause underground mice tunnels to flood and collapse. While I was away on vacation for about 9 days during the heavy rains that winter, some of the neighborhood mice decided to take up residence in the engine compartment of my car. Read the story, stay for the 35+ comments.

Well, the rains have returned with a vengeance, and so, it appears have the mice.

Yesterday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper when my dear cat Nicholas walked up about two feet from my two feet. I looked down and noticed he was carrying one of his felt mice in his mouth. Nick sometimes does this, so I didn’t initially suspect anything was awry. But, I next noticed that the tail seemed entirely too realistic. When I stood up quickly, Nick lost his concentration and the mouse leapt wildly from his mouth and scurried past my toes on his way to the relative safety of the floor beneath the couch.

Nicholas immediately began to patrol the perimeter of the couch, and Alexi quickly joined in on the stalking. The instinct is strong in these two. My wife was not amused, and she quickly edged away from the excitement. The instinct is strong in her, too. I chased the mouse away from the couch and cornered him behind a fake fireplace log. Alexi and Nick were at the other end of the couch and didn’t notice the escape, leaving me to finish the hunt.

Then, my trapping instinct kicked in. I set up a plastic grocery store bag with its large opening at one end of the log. I then slowly pulled the log away from the wall and started moving toward Mickey Mouse with another bag. He turned and ran straight into the gaping maw of my plastic bag trap. I quickly snatched up that bag, dropped it in the other, and then tied off the top.

My first inclination was to blame him for last year’s car engine wire, hose, and insulation gluttony. I won’t share the brutal visions of retribution that flashed before me. But, then I realized that mice have short lives and he was unlikely to be the cretin responsible for my automotive nightmare. So, I tossed the bag in the car (our other car, just in case the scent of tasty wire harnesses might lead him to attempt an escape from the bag), drove to some nearby woods, and released him well away from other houses. He darted from the bag and scampered into some tall grass. With any luck, he made a tasty snack for a bird later in the day.

Handy Reference: Difference Between Rats and Mice

Microsoft recently announced that Speech Server 2007 will provide support for speech applications written in VoiceXML. In order to penetrate the enterprise market for speech applications, Microsoft really had no choice. SALT-based applications remain as rare as hen’s teeth in the enterprise. Ok, maybe not that rare, but certainly the number pales in comparison to the number of VoiceXML-based applications. The press release says “More than 40,000 telephony ports of capacity have been licensed, and Speech Server customers are successfully answering more than 10 million calls per month on the platform”. I know of individual companies that by themselves handle more than that many calls per month with VoiceXML applications.
Also, it’s become pretty clear that VoiceXML is winning the mindshare of the standards committees. Of course, VoiceXML had a big advantage by preceding SALT by several years. Even in the multimodal space, SALT is very unlikely to become the anointed standard. Some of SALT will likely live on in VoiceXML 3.0 and beyond. That’s a very good thing for all of us, though, as I believe VoiceXML 3.0 and XHTML+V are going to be much better standards due to some of the good ideas that originated from the work on SALT.
I’m curious if part of the reason for Microsoft picking up some of the technology assets and a few people from failed start-up Unveil was to gain some additional VoiceXML experience in advance of this plan. After all, the headline of the press release I linked to above was “Microsoft Unveils Road Map for Speech Server 2007″. Then again, maybe not.

The “Trapped in the Closet” episode of South Park that parodies Scientology, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and R. Kelly is available from Xenu.tv.