The exactly right tool
The maple trees surrounding the house are starting to shed their leaves. Unless the gutters get cleaned each year they quickly get clogged. The house is a Dutch colonial so the roof comes down to the first floor even though the house has three stories.
Cleaning the gutters with a purported gutter cleaning wand for the hose the last two years took me the best part of a day which is to say the actual work took me three hours and investigating the multiple design failures in the gutter attachment took the same again. Whoever designed the thing did not consider the fact that forcing water into a narrow jet creates a huge amount of pressure. Each year the same pattern: multiple minor failures followed by the wand breaking completely because the glue holding the parts of the shaft together are simply not strong enough. Eventually I have to climb up on a ladder and empty the gutters by hand.
This year I tried something different, an attachment to the shop-vac blower port. I saw one demonstrated on This Old House a few years back but had never seen one in a store. Reviews on the Web were uniformly positive. After some effort I found a shop that had a kit in stock.
To make a long story short $19.95 plus tax is rather a lot for four pieces of plastic tube but a small price to pay for cleaning out the whole gutter in less than five minutes. Using a jet of water to clear a clogged drain is a loosing proposition in every way imaginable even before the wand breaks. The failure of water to clear the clog is the reason the gutters need cleaning in the first place. Using a jet of air just works, as soon as the blower is turned on the debris is blasted out of and far away from the gutter.
Technology often works this way. A technology that is 95% right is nowhere near as effective as one that is 100% right. The idea of blasting the leaves out of the gutter with a jet of fluid is right, the 5% change that makes the critical difference is that the fluid must be gas (i.e. air) rather than a liquid (water).
Today the architecture of the Internet Security infrastructure is 95% right: it delivers a very high degree of security for the people who understand how to use it, the problem is that the Internet user of 2005 is not the same as the Internet user of 1995 when the systems were being developed.
Fixing the problem does not mean that we should tear everything down and start from scratch, doing so would merely create another 95% successful solution. Instead we need to focus on the reasons people are not using the security systems that exist and redesign those systems so that they deliver security in ways that are useful to the typical Internet user of 2006 and beyond.
