I’ve been reflecting on dashboards this week, because of the critical importance of the modern digital dashboard pictured below.
This picture is all about how information travels. This “dashboard” tells us that our bulk email messages have the best shot of getting to your email inbox. This is great news, and thanks to a lot of hard work here by our computer ace Kilian, more of you should be able to receive your weekly Bugeye Bugle email.
We have heard from some of you that the newsletter stopped appearing in your inboxes. I always thought it was spam filters on each local computer, and that you could find all your missing messages by opening up your personal spam box. But I have learned that Internet service providers block tons of messages before they even go down the pipe to your door. If you are suspected of being an evil troll, your mail is blocked before it even makes it out of the post office. Scrutiny is at all time high, in spite of the fact that our emails only go to people who signed-up to receive them.
If we want to communicate with you, we need to know how to send out Data. Information management requires constant fiddling, and like teenagers with Unisyn tools in our pockets, we now need laptops at the ready to synchronize our words so that they can flow.
This week, I also spent some time staring at a dashboard of a different sort. This is Richard’s 1956 Austin Healey 100 (BN2) (above). Simple. Clean. Elemental. Pure 1956. We were tasked with fixing his sloppy shift lever and leaking rear pinion seal.
When this dashboard was contemporary, the driver would be perhaps thinking about their current realities just as we now think about data. At that time, the cost of an average cost of new house $12,220.00, average monthly rent was $90.00, a gallon of gas was 24 cents and The Slinky was a very popular toy. On the horizon in 1957… the Soviet Union would launch the first space satellite, Sputnik 1.
