I’m a huge fan of design features that anticipate and compensate for human error. I often enter numbers I want to remember into my phone while I’m speaking to another party. (As in, “Go ahead and read me your number, Bill; I’ll put it in my phone right now.”) When I finish a call, I instinctively close the flip, and with most phones, the number I had entered would disappear. My phone, however, remembers it, knowing that it’s likely I just forgot I had taken down a number. When I open it back up to make another call, that number is smiling back at me, ready to be saved in the phone book. It’s a minor feature, but it matters.

Along the same vein is the feature that allows me to close or open my car windows even after I take the keys out, before I open the doors. It definitely saves me from having to re-start the car if I just need to crack the windows in the heat, or close them to prepare for rain.

This has been Tuesday’s Random Praise of Technology.

Regarding the whole runaway bride thing, why must the news media squander what little faith we may have had in them before? And why would they waste it on such a ridiculous non-story? At least Dan Rather’s misstep last year played out during an intensely heated election cycle, where he was poised to make some kind of difference in the polls. This story is nothing.

It’s so transparent that the news-vultures were just waiting for this to become another Scott Peterson or Mark Hacking case.

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly: “Woman goes out for a jog and boom, she’s gone. Do you think there’s an epidemic going on here?” And: “This young woman — it’s almost like Laci Peterson. She just disappears from a place that’s Mainstream, USA.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity: “I agree with the father-in-law-to-be.”

Geraldo Rivera: “That there’s foul play.”

Hannity: “Yes.”

Rivera: “So do I.”

Nancy Grace of Headline News, interviewing Wilbanks’s dad: “Mr. Wilbanks, this sounds completely unlike Jennifer to just disappear. I just don’t believe it`s a case of cold feet.”

Yes, journalists speculate all the time, and yes, they have every right to be as irresponsibly sensationalist as they want. But I can’t really decide if they’re even eroding the public’s trust in them at this point or not. I mean, do people even trust the media anymore? Is it as obvious to everyone else how ridiculous the industry is?

*sniff* A 21st Century Miracle…

So, I plopped down on the sofa this afternoon to make absolutely sure the Tivo was picking up Family Guy’s triumphant return to TV tonight after 3 long years of cancellation. When I hit the To Do list, I was amazed to see–what’s this?– Tivo was already set to record the show! You see, in my sadness over its cancellation, I could never bring myself to delete the Season Pass on the Tivo. The scheduled recording lingered in desperate futility for over 3 years until Fox finally picked the show back up and ordered 33 more episodes, the first of which was automatically recorded 90 minutes ago.

What does this mean? Well, I kept hope alive through modern technology when there was none, so there’s probably a message there. That message? Tivo is smarter than network executives.