Hal O'Brien

So said a mechanic to my mom when our Renault 10 -- which we'd liked quite a bit -- ran into transmission problems.

I just used the brand name "Kelvinator" as a joke in a comment elsewhere. This led to Google, who led to Wikipedia, which led to the succession: Kelvinator / Nash-Kelvinator / AMC / Renault. Which only reminded me of our Renault and it's allegedly fiendish transmission.

Here's what's in Wikipedia. It does indeed sound odd:

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From 1965 onwards the 8 and 10 were available with an automatic transmission of unique design. This transmission was developed and produced by Jaeger. The clutch was replaced by a powder ferromagnetic coupler. The transmission was a three-speed mechanical unit similar to that of the Dauphine, but with synchromesh on all gears.

The system used these input devices:

* a push button control panel by means of which the driver could select forward or reverse drive
* a governor which sensed vehicle speed and throttle position

A "relay case" containing electromagnetic switches interpreted signals from these devices and commanded operation of:

* the coupler
* a decelerator to close the throttle during gear changes
* an actuator consisting of a solenoid to select operation of the reverse-first or second-third shift rail, and a reversible electric motor to engage the gears

The system was thus entirely electromechanical: no hydraulics, pneumatics or electronics were used.

Benefits of the system included no loss of fuel economy as compared to the manual transmission version, and easy adaptability to the car.

Deficiencies included loss of performance due to there being only three available gears, and somewhat jerky operation during gear changes.

This transmission was also used in the Dauphine and the Caravelle.

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Another "deficiency" was that no one would work on the thing because they were scared to death of it!

I heard an interview with Jeffrey Rosen, who has an article in today's New York Times. The article is called "Silicon Valley's Spy Game", and it's all about how many Valley companies are rearranging their products to be sold as national security and anti-terrorism items.

Prominent among these companies is Oracle. Oracle tends to pitch their databases as great predictive tools -- Amazon can guess which books you'll buy because they track you in an Oracle database, your airline can predict your travel patterns, etc. Now they're trying to sell the idea that they can predict who terrorists are, just by integrating various governmental databases, both at the Federal and local level.

But...

In an anecdote not in the Times article, Rosen told interviewer Terry Gross, on the radio program Fresh Air, how he visited Oracle's headquarters campus one day. Apparently, it's notoriously difficult to find parking there, and the space he finally found was far enough away from the door that he had to walk something like 15 minutes to get to the building.

Here's the big question: If Oracle can't even reliably predict how many people will park at their own building -- which is presumably why they haven't built adequate facilities, and not because, say, Larry Ellison is a cheap bastard who doesn't care about his employees much -- how reliable do you think they'll be at predicting terrorists?

Just a thought.

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A related in-the-Valley parking anecdote.

Apple also has parking problems, it seems.

Steve Jobs is a guy well known for running late.

Apple, at the time, didn't have assigned parking.

So... One time, the Interim President for Life got into the lot, and everything was full.

He decided, in that ever-so-considerate Jobsian way of his, to park in a handicapped space.

When he returned to his car at the end of the day, he allegedly found a note stuck into his wiper blades:

"Park Different"