16th Annual Arts & Crafts Show, San Francisco

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If, like me, you are a fan of the Arts & Crafts Movement, then join Arlene and me at the 16th annual Arts & Crafts show, August 14 and 15 at the Concourse Exhibition Hall, 8th & Brannan, San Francisco. Furniture, pottery, graphic art, both period & modern, also lectures, exhibits and book signings.

Also: on August 14 from 5-9pm, there will be an open house at the beautiful William Thorsen house in Berkeley. Enjoy wine and hors d’oeurvres and network with fellow Arts & Crafts enthusiasts in this historic setting. The house is famous as one of Greene & Greene’s “Ultimate Bungalows“ and is rarely open to the public. Don’t miss this opportunity!

It’s not about the bars or the antenna—but it is about PR.

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Apple is certainly taking its lumps about the iPhone 4 antenna, and Apple’s competitors are no doubt loving the whole episode. But as Spencer Webb of AntennaSys so elegantly pointed out on This Week in Tech (two weeks before Consumer Reports dissed the iPhone), all you have to do is put a rubber case on the iPhone and the dropped calls will stop. You were going to put a case on your iPhone anyway, right?

Apple’s previous problem was having to admit that the iPhone iOS showed more signal-strength bars than it should have: but as Spencer Webb also pointed out on TWiT, that’s a complete red herring. There’s no such thing as two bars, or four bars. It’s digital, not analog. Back when phones were analog the bars mattered, but on digital phones bars are meaningless. You either have enough signal strength for a connection, or you don’t. Instead of bars, the signal indicator should be a big dot that’s either red or green. The only reason that phone companies continue to show the bars is because the public thinks bars still have meaning and demand that they be there.

We have created these reception problems ourselves. All tiny phones have congenital antenna problems, because the best antennas are big and long. Mobile phones used to have pull-out antennas, and reception would be far better if those still existed. But the public hated them, so they no longer exist. Yet we demand “five bars”.

All of which is to say that Apple has completely screwed up the public relations on AntennaGate. They could have said “bars are meaningless on digital phones,” but instead they apologized for the bug in iOS. They could have said “Human hands cause call drops on all smart phones,” but instead they pretended the problem didn’t exist. Now they’re providing free cases for all iPhone owners. This whole kerfuffle is one part technology and three parts PR.

The only time I don’t have to spell my name

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Whenever I give someone my name—say, when I’m making a restaurant reservation—the other person invariably asks me to spell it. This has happened my whole life, and my father’s whole life before me. And my name is not difficult to spell! I have known people named Szczepanski, Schweikhardt and Schuldheisz: you think maybe they have had problems making reservations?

Thankfully, there is one exception to this rule, one place where I have never had to spell my name—my ancestral homeland of Italy. Making a reservation there is like a breath of fresh air:

“E il nome?” (And the name?)
“Mostardi.”
“Mostardi, perfetto. Arrivederci!”

You have no idea how liberating this is. Better yet, this extends also to Italian restaurants in America run by native speakers. Just today I reserved a table at Ideale, our favorite dinner spot in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. We spoke in Italian, and he didn’t ask how to spell my name. Ahhhh. It’s a beautiful thing.