Of Phonewords and Carpet Jingles: Its funny how the brain works

I was talking to a colleague about how my android phone's dialer doesn't have some basic features - like the ability to paste a number directly into it (LG Optimus 500, 2.2 - ymmv).

...which led to..

Me remembering how Blackberries had the ability to dial phonewords directly by pressing Alt.

...which led me to two things:

1. Googling if android does the same. It doesn't looks like it does. Funnily, all searches led to blackberry forums where the Alt trick is described. Isn't progress wonderful?
2. Googling 800-588-2300 - the one number (and jingle) I cannot forget.

... which led me to..

The metafilter discussion about Empire and the empire man.

... which led me to...

1. Wonder how I remember seeing the commercial in NJ when the post doesn't list it as one of states in which Empire operates? Maybe I remember it from my time in Florida? Man, that would make it memorable for a decade! That's some recall power for a product that I've not ever bought.
2. Now run around the whole day in Bangalore singing both the Empire AND Luna jingles!

PS: Best quotes from the metafilter page:

The man has gone, but the goddamn jingle will never die. I hope Hauldren's heaven is plush and stain resistant, with no monthly payments til July

and:

"we're been getting some ads in the same form for Luna carpet, but I haven't the foggiest idea what their phone number is."
877-241-LUNA. I'm ashamed of myself for knowing that.
What? No. 773-202-(boop beep boop beep) LUNAAAAA. 

Fluent in the real world: Light Table

Today's HN story on Light Table only tells me that I won't have to build Fluent myself - someone else will, soon enough!

In the discussion that ensued, there was however, this interesting comment:

Yes, but our code was entirely in these utterly unusable changeset files that couldn't work nicely with the version control that everyone else in the entire world was using; his version still uses files under the hood. There's a team that's trying to back Monticello with Git, I believe by saving each method into its own file in part of a Git source tree; that looks promising as a compromise.

That's a good lesson to learn from, methinks. Just as "text as code and not just its serialization format" has stood the test of time, so has version control using textual diffs. Anything else will face the migration gap.

I can't be bothered to find the link, but a while ago there was a post by somebody big in the blogosphere (Spolsky or Cringely) that spoke about a bill pay start-up that solved the migration problem by allowing users to forward their paper bills directly to them to have the bills digitized and paid. The idea was that once the bills were digitized they could be paid electronically thence, but it was the first time setup that was the hump that users didn't want to go over. Take that pain away, and you got yourself converts by the droves.

Tripit does something similar with Trip Management by parsing booking confirmation emails from travel websites.

I'm not so sure such an approach will apply to developers and their tools for a couple of reasons:

• Text is actually not a format that you want to get away from (unless you're in the structured camp)
• Providing the gateway solution involves fixing all the tools to work with the non-text format you come up with. And you must fix ALL of them - the IDE, the debugger, the built tool, you name it.
• Alternatively, you could change the environment to something where text input is actually less efficient. Like the Tablet. Then you have a chance.

Its a long, tough road ahead :)