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Insights, ideas, musings, observations, publications, and thoughts on the world and design
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| Elena's first month |
| Monday March 1, 2010, 10:35 AM EST |
Babies really are helpless, as carefully observing Elena's first month in the world reiterated to me palpably and with clarity. In her first week she functioned largely without schedule, hungry most of the time and sleeping the rest. Perhaps once a day for a short period she would be awake and active, eyes open and looking around, before returning to the perpetual cycle of eating, sleeping and expelling. As we got into the second week she began to spend more time awake and alert - still not much - and hadn't quite found the groove of a schedule. By the third week her schedule started to become set:
- Wake up around 4am, very awake, alert and happy until 8am or so
- Sleep off-and-on over the next few hours
- Long, deep nap from about noon until 2 or 3
- Sleep off-and-on over the next few hours
- Awake, grumpy and irritable from 6-8pm or so
- Sleep soundly from around 8pm until midnight or so
- Awake for a bit, then sleep until 4am
- Repeat, repeat, repeat!
More recently she makes a lot of ugly faces, whereas before her face was pretty neutral or smiling unknowingly as she left another hot package in her diaper. Now, while perhaps her face is reflecting her mood or thoughts, she seems to be trying out all of the muscles in her face and contorting in some pretty silly ways in the process. We'll need to teach her more happy faces. :-)
It is a great delight to have her on a schedule of sorts, albeit one that keeps Sigrid exhausted much of the time. Being able to count on some alert, awake and bonding times every day is a really nice thing. In her first weeks, since Sigrid is breast feeeding and not pumping, Elena was only awake and happy if it was time to eat. That meant I got to spend virtually no time bonding and getting closer with her. When I had her she really didn't want her daddy: she wanted to sleep or eat from a breast that I was unable to offer! It is quite a delight now to spend time with her every day getting to see and know each other better.
Parenthood is a lovely thing, with the return much more than making up for the effort. To quote Ferris Bueller, it is so choice. I highly recommend it.
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| Love and regret |
| Saturday February 27, 2010, 23:33 PM EST |
Last year my son Brandon visited and we had what was for me the best trip we've ever had: we went and saw Moby in concert and spent a lot of good time together. My favourite moment was when he was helping me to cut and prepare a prototype for a game I am designing; more on that in future posts. During our work together, at a table with big piles of paper and scissors and making a bit of a mess, we were listening to each other's music. He would play a song he liked; I would play a song I liked. As we listened to what each other liked and shared that bit of ourselves, I felt closer to him than I ever have before, with the exception of when he used to look up at me when I was feeding him as a baby.
It was an experience that completely re-framed the relationship I could have with my children. I realized that spending time like that with Brandon made me happier than I otherwise am. It filled me with energy, connection and a depth and quality of satisfaction that is hard to describe or quantify. More than my son, Brandon was someone I wanted to be friends with. This was a remarkable revelation: in that and certainly other experiences it became clear that this is a person who I want in my life not out of obligation or genetics or the normal rhythm of family but because he makes my life better. I desperately hope he feels the same way.
Coming off that visit I found myself looking to the future: when would we be able to live in close proximity and spend time together? When and how could we be appropriately integrated into each others' lives? This was something I no longer simply wanted as a father who loves his son, but as a person who cares genuinely for another. It was truly exhilarating and drove me to dream about moving back to Toledo, or his keeping his promise of moving to live by me for college
In the subsequent months I began nascently planning to move back to Ohio, to forge such a relationship with he and his brother. Over the last few months as I started driving toward this it became ever-clearer that it probably would not happen. Toledo is right in the heart of the rust belt, reliant on an auto industry in decline, and is among the poorest cities in the country. It would be impossible in a certain way to carve out a life that would enable and justify such a move.
What would I do there? Would I want this decaying region to be a platform for my new children and family to come? It ultimately seemed impossible, and in the process of ruling this move out the journey I began some six years ago when I first moved from Toledo to Boston (for the first time) was painfully complete: barring one of them deciding to leave their friends and what is familiar behind to join me I will essentially miss the day-to-day growth of my first two sons.
The loss I feel in the absence of my sons is the only truly profound, deep, ripping pain and regret in my life. There are not words to properly convey it. Closing this final opportunity to participate more fully in that simply shredded the existing scars open again.
But ultimately it is more than that. Ever since Brandon told me he would move to live with or by me in college some years ago I have clung to that with hope and desperation. Sometimes he says things that put it into doubt: that he wants to go to college with his friend Mike in Reno (!) being a recent example. And while I realized that particular comment was just a dream from a young man it punctuated the tenuousness of the promise being fulfilled. It even made me question it: should I even aspire to guide him toward me? Is that degree of determinism over the choices my son makes "correct"? I think I have an obscene amount of wisdom, insight and life experience to share with him that is being missed by our separation. We are both worse for the lack. What is the balance between striving to illuminate your son, self and family, and encouraging independence and self-determinism? These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they have the potential to be.
Every day, as I think about these things - and it is, quite literally, every day - and as his radiant visit moves another day farther into the past, the poignancy and potential of the moment fade away a little bit more. If for the rest of my life my sons are but periodic visitors, what does that mean for them, and for me, and for us? When I imagine this future it leaves me questioning a literal cascade of decisions I made from the mid-1990's until my move now years ago.
Right before I left Toledo Brandon and I were at my parents' house, sitting on the couch and talking. I remember it with absolute clarity. I asked him if he wanted to talk about my move and if he had any questions or feelings he wanted to share. He looked at me and said, "Why do you have to go to Boston?", in the process shifting from holding his normal little face and countenance to bawling uncontrollably. I held him and re-assured him and had virtually no doubt my move was the correct thing despite his sadness. How little did I know.
To both of my sons, I am profoundly sorry for leaving. At the time it seemed like the only possible choice, for my career and for my attempt to find a life partner. In no way regretting my life and family today, which I deeply love and appreciate and would not give up, if I could have that decision over again I would certainly not have left.
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| Finding a fit |
| Tuesday February 23, 2010, 10:46 AM EST |
It is hard to believe that more than 36 years have passed since I burst into the world as a crying, needy, newly-minted baby beginning to explore my way through the world. Some may suggest I am still a crying, needy baby but my own ongoing deficiencies are not the purpose for this particular writing!
Like most people in modern western civilization I grew up being conditioned to believe in "the myth of endless love." That is both an academic term, which was met by this reader with violent disagreement and abject horror over 13 years ago in graduate school, and an objective reality as experienced by that same reader in the undulating and heartbreaking years that punctuated points in my adult life. That is, the romantic cultural notion of two people being destined to meet and fall into a life of love and bliss is indeed clearly a myth, one being perpetuated as fact across popular media. Even though we practically realize it is myth - most people get divorced, virtually none of us end up spending our life with the first person we fell in love with - we continue to strive for it as some necessary component of "happiness" and/or "completeness" and/or "fulfillment" (keep adding your own shinyhappy states of bliss to the list). It is a disservice to ourselves; it is a disservice to our children who are formulating their ideas about the world. It is because of and for my son that I am writing this.
I had a conversation with my eldest son the last time he was in town, at age 15, that clearly communicated he holds many of the same idealistic, romantic notions and aspirations for love and life that I did as a 15 year old: I would fall in love with my One Perfect Partner at a very young age, be Romantic and Good and True, get Married, have a Big Family, and have as my greatest aspiration someday enjoying a 50th Wedding Anniversary. Yes, that is really how I saw the world as a 15 year-old. And while perhaps unusual for a boy of that age it was certainly aligned with the cultural biases and pressures being communicated to us from every possible direction. Pursuing that life led me into many years of personal struggle and unhappiness. Hearing the same aspirations come out of the lips of my son, at the same stage in his life, made me feel a brand of panic and anxiety that really only comes when you can see farther into the horizon of your child's life than they are willing or able to see, and truly know better than they do. Thus began a still-ongoing debate in my mind of how best to attempt to guide or communicate with or even manipulate him in a way that he can bypass some of the lessons that scarred me in ways both distant and familiar.
To be clear, I actually think I've lived a fairly fortunate romantic adult life: with the exception of my profoundly misfit and unhappy first marriage from ages 18 to 25 - that did provide me two spectacular sons - I have enjoyed long-term relationships with truly good, admirable, dynamic, lovely, interesting women - each some blend of those adjectives - all of whom I am still close with and love dearly. In each case, we were unfortunately "misfits". The relationships themselves were punctuated with some blend of drama, stress, anxiety and friction that ultimately resulted in our parting ways. From a life experience perspective I suppose I can say I feel blessed to have seen that from every perspective: as the one leaving, as the one being left, and our leaving mutually. That they remain in my life in various ways with warm and good feelings felt by all is really a splendid and fortunate thing.
Still, as I went through these relationships there was an increasing sense of loss, fatigue and...inauthenticity. I can remember looking in the mirror at a very unhappy point in one of these relationships, openly crying and imploring to myself, "How many women can I tell 'I love you and will be with you forever' before it has lost all meaning and purpose?" For someone who once considered himself a deeply devoted romantic, this is a betrayal of self and renunciation of essence that is nearly without equal.
During these years in my life I was growing, becoming more mature and seeing the world in different ways. I was able to identify that "endless love" is truly a myth and that we as near-primitive animals simply go through life - all facets of our life - doing the best we can and living within the bounds of what we are able for who and what we are at that time. While I was forced to euthanize and bury a certain soft, thoughtful, romantic part of a once-feckless young man, that sad expiration did provide me with some degree of freedom: realization that my goodness and the quality of me as a person is not ultimately measured by promising to and then doggedly attempting at all costs to truly be with someone forever. It made the imperfections of myself, my past and the world instantly manageable and reconcilable. It divorced my love relationships from serving as a constant test of my being a "good boy", or not.
Then came Sigrid. To be clear, we've been together for less than two years. You could say we are in the honeymoon stage, and only time will tell how this latest journey is going to end. Point taken. However, for the first time in my life I feel like I am with someone who simply fits. The best relationship I previously had - now a decade ago, my God how is my life passing so quickly? - was wonderful and loving and good in a very special way. But there was still the drama, the arguments, the mis-alignment. With that woman, it really came down to one thing: she was a wonderfully social extravert who wanted to be out in the world and I was a home-bound introvert who wanted to simply be close and intimate. The "pulling in opposite directions" of that essential bit created conflict and made us both unhappy. It was exacerbated with my being, and this may not clinically have been true but is the only word I can think of to give an idea, co-dependent. Maybe with the maturity I have at 36 instead of 26 it would have been different, but what we were missing at that time and place was fit.
I don't claim my relationship with Sigrid is perfect. We disagree here, have an argument there. I'm not who she would precisely request "to order" from God, nor is she for I. But, for example, when I get irritated and stubborn and am an idiot, rather than challenging and fighting me she gives me space. And when I calm down I am grateful for that space and genuinely apologetic and sorry. How many times in the past with a different person, that same situation would have instead become a hugely escalating argument that ruined a weekend?! This is just one example of a very consistent theme, where the ways in which I am broken and deficient have a comfortable place in which to exist. I cannot adequately describe the feeling of comfort, liberation, even joy in that experience of sharing a life with another person in that way. It is certainly unique in my experience, and based on the people I've coupled with and how "compatible" in various other ways I would still consider myself to be with them I have to think this is an incredibly rare, fortuitous, blessed thing. Or maybe it's just that I'm tough to live with, but let's leave that mis-shapen little piece of baggage where it is for the moment.
Might our sense of equilibrium change? Sure. I can't see the future. But what makes me optimistic is I've never had this before. Maybe in the first weeks of a new relationship. Maybe for a month or two. Maybe.
The strange thing about finding my fit is that it makes me believe in love again. In a different way, perhaps, but a real way. A meaningful way. I don't know that Romantic Dirk will ever be resurrected in the giving-martyr incarnation he once was, but perhaps that person and that mode of behaviour was simply a relic of a mis-guided and immature time and should not remain a gossamer aspiration.
The life lesson I have taken from all of this, and the thing I wish I could transfer into the mind, heart and soul of my son to help him avoid some of the tortured heartbreak and desperate love that I lived through would be to slowly find your fit. Loving and coupling with a person should not intrinsically intertwine with some notion of duty and honour, serving as a crucible for you or others judging your goodness, authenticity and commitment. Each of us need to find the person we fit with, and we probably aren't going to do that right away. It is to that compatible person, the one who allows you to be the person you are and aspire to be in a comfortable and relaxed way, that you should endeavour to be with.
The parental paradox, of course, is: how do you impart this wisdom unto your child without their needing instead to learn the same things through painful life experience? Is it even possible? (This is a real not rhetorical question, would greatly appreciate guidance and mentorship on this!)
As for me, I'm blessed to have found and be with Sigrid. Maybe I've found my elusive forever. And even if I haven't, there is an internal quiet and sense of proportionality that leaves me calmly assured I will be loved and cared for by marvelous friends and family, regardless.
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| Why this website is here |
| Sunday February 21, 2010, 14:35 PM EST |
I launched this website in 2004, a formalization and extension of a previous blog I was maintaining on Blogger. At the time I was right around my peak point in a personal branding campaign that began as part of trying to use celebrity branding to help my previous employer gain market credibility, then extended into my own entrepreneurial endeavours. Little did I know that the realities of running a small business would all but kill my capacity to write and network in the necessary way to maintain a celebrity brand in my industry. In the intervening years I have settled comfortably into obscurity relative to my past prominence, and I really have no complaints. Indeed, celebrity branding doesn't really interest me anymore and I would only do it out of a sense of necessity, not desire or ambition.
Thus, in the 5+ years of this website's existence it has shifted, perhaps even in its earliest days, to be something that is more personal than public, its continued publication on this most-public Internet notwithstanding. Most of my writing, and certainly all of my writing that has mattered to me, deals with issues of meaning and the human condition. Increasingly my hope is to do just two things: in the immediate, to publish content that helps people get better in touch with themselves and the people they care about by sharing my own observations, thoughts, feelings and insights on the world as filtered through my very sensitive and specific lens. Secondly, and perhaps more enduringly, I intend to preserve the contents of my writings in a permanent and available media for my ancestors to come. While I will be an irrelevant and obscure person to the vast preponderance of the world to come I must imagine that the future generations of my progeny - the children of my children, and their children on downward - may find incredible value, insight and meaning from a deeply examined and expressed life from their direct ancestor. Goodness knows if such a thing existed from my past generations I would have spent significant time looking for lessons and insight about myself and the world within those words.
So it was that I was moved today when an old friend wrote me about my post discussing the birth of my daughter and said, "Reading your thoughts truly makes me feel better being human." In that moment, it struck me that there is perhaps no higher compliment someone could pay to what I am doing here. It is exactly that degree of feeling, depth and meaning that I strive to stir in the people kind enough to read me. And it reminded me why I am doing this, and why I hope to continue doing it until my death or inability to communicate finally calls it to an end.
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| Crying thrice |
| Friday February 12, 2010, 23:33 PM EST |
When our daughter Elena Marie was born almost two weeks ago on Sunday January 31 I cried not once, but thrice. This won't surprise anyone who knows me well, as I certainly cry more than a big, strong, card-carrying member of the male gender is supposed to. It was particularly deep and poignant on this day, however, and each moment had particular and specific meaning:
First, when it was clear that her birth was imminent on this date, Sigrid reminded me that my grandfather was born on January 31st. This was a marvelous coincedence. Growing up, home life was a battleground. As a child and adolescent I felt little connection, love and support from my parents. The one person who was always supportive and loving, my "biggest fan", was my grandfather. Through the first 20-something years of my life, no one in my family meant more to me. He died when I was 21 and was the first close relative to die during my life. I often wish and wonder what it would have been like to know him as an adult: what would it have been like to learn from him? Learn about the world, how to live, how to be a man...everything. I sorely lacked for male role models and he would have been the best of all. We just did not share the same time in the right way to enable that sort of man-to-man relationship. Oh, what I wouldn't give for it!
Regardless, when I realized my daughter would share his birthday, I cried out of feelings of deep and abiding joy.
Second, shortly after Elena was born and I went with her through her initial weighing, bath, testing and assessments, it made me think and wonder about my mother's birth. Over 60 years before my mother had been born anew and was taken through some similar process of first being brought into the world. As an adult I have forged a close relatoinship with my mother and love her dearly. In seeing my little daughter in her first moments of life I was led to imagine that my mother was once an infant just like this. Thinking about her in this context made me cry, out of some combination of love, missing and sadness, to imagine how much life she has lived and that my daughter will likely live and grow in a similar way in the many decades ahead.
The final time I cried was when I called my sons, to tell them that their sister was born. As is usually the case I simply got the voicemail, and in the process of leaving a message telling them about it I completely lost it. I miss my sons every day and their absence from my day-to-day life is a source of great sadness. Overwhelmed by their not being with me, and my love for them, and my want for us to be a closer family. This was not just crying, it was bawling. I really miss them.
I'm so thrilled to have a wonderful new daughter, and was blessed that her coming into the world brought me very acutely closer to many of hte people I love most.
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| The world will never be the same |
| Saturday January 23, 2010, 20:28 PM EST |
One week from now I will be tending to a freshly-minted, exceptionally needy little baby who has just burst into the world, the product of Sigrid and I. To say the realities of new parenthood will mark a dramatic change to my lifestyle is a bemusing understatement.
Parenthood for me began over 15 years ago with the birth of my eldest son. From the start I enjoyed being a parent, but raising newborns was difficult for me as a very young 20-something. I loved my children and tried my best but found parenting a baby to be frustrating, exhausting, and a perpetual exercise in feelings of personal failure. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't find the patience to parent as I might imagine an exemplar to be. The older my children have gotten, the better a parent I have become. Whether that is my increasing maturity or just being more cut out to parent older children and adults - actually it is probably both - I've been keenly aware of my being more effective as a parent over time. Indeed, it has almost been a generation since I was raising a baby. This will change in the next few days. More ...
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| Farewell to 2009 |
| Thursday January 7, 2010, 1:51 AM EST |
Hardest year of my adult life. No question about it. Getting caught in the eye of the 2009 recession took a terrible toll on me mentally, physically and spiritually. Not to mention financially. We had just reached the point of taking the next step forward with Involution, having turned the key on our expansion plans and putting a great long-term plan into place, before 2009 broke it all into pieces and sent Andrei looking for higher ground in the process.
Of course, not everything was bad about 2009: my relationship with Sigrid blossomed. In fact, 2009 was probably my best year personally which gives you some idea of how bad the "bad" was to still make the year, on balance, brutal. More happiness from 2009 included getting close with my oldest son Brandon, developing a great working relationship with my new business partner Juhan, beginning to work closely with Daniel, and perhaps most surprisingly having a new baby girl queued up, due to arrive at the end of January. Only four weeks away! Oh my.
Reviewing the list of good things, it is clear that the people who make up the core of my life are the strong point now. That speaks to building a solid and reliable foundation, and I suspect that will serve me well in the years ahead and be part of why I hopefully have some very lovely years just ahead of me.
It has been my intent to use my "year end" post to look back on the year that was and document the specific highlights and lowlights at some level, to aide my sieve-like mind in remembering the nuance of my life in the future. But I just don't have the will for it. I'm ready to turn the page. Perhaps I will circle back later and do that kind of codification but for now it is onward and upward, hopeful and optimistic for a better year.
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| The cautionary tale of Russell Hantz |
| Monday December 21, 2009, 15:40 PM EST |
One of my guilty pleasures is the television program Survivor. This was a fascinating season, as easily the strongest player in the history of that game - Russell Hantz - employed his unique brand of ruthless manipulation, pragmatic dogmatism and unchecked ego for the entire 39 days of the show's duration. Last night he concluded his tenure being chosen as the runner-up to winner Natalie White, a largely passive player whose victory was due as much to riding in the wake created by Hantz than anything else.
The results of this Survivor season and the aftermath of White's victory provided a lot of grist for considering the human condition. I think trying to summarize the many specifics of the show in a meaningful way will prove too much for this communication forma More ...
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| "Dad would have liked this." |
| Monday November 30, 2009, 23:01 PM EST |
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Watching a new show, "Pawn Stars", for the first time tonight, I found myself chuckling and saying, "Dad would have liked this." I wish we had a longer adult relationship, where making that observation would lead me to pick up the phone and tell him about it, as opposed to being left to wince at the fact he no longer exists.
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| Nomadic fatigue |
| Tuesday November 24, 2009, 22:06 PM EST |
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I consider myself a homebody, so when Daniel pointed out that I've been living the life of a nomad - for a really long time now - it had an impact. Going back to 1999 I've lived in...10 different places. 10 years, 10 homes. That's just silly. Some moves were for love, some moves were for money and some moves were for convenience. As I sit in yet another new domicile - sadly, for money - here's hoping my next move actually involves planting some roots.
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| P.S. - About the end of the affair... |
| Friday November 20, 2009, 15:36 PM EST |
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I've gotten a bunch of direct messages over the last 24 hours. To be clear, I may have left California but Involution Studios is still very much in business. I'm in Boston with Juhan, our great business partner and creative guru out here, and other key team members. We've got a smaller team with people still in California. We're beaten and battered but we still have the chops to do the great work our reputation is built upon. So don't write our professional post-mortem; the next chapter could be better than the last.
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| The End of the Affair |
| Wednesday November 18, 2009, 23:02 PM EST |
About two weeks ago I ended a 5+ year affair with the San Francisco Bay Area.
I will never forget the first time I flew out there, in the spring of 2004 for my first planning meetings to create what was to become Involution Studios. The plane was landing at night and, as I looked out the window at the water below, I thought I was looking at the Pacific Ocean. It was actually the San Francisco Bay. It was the first of many things I was to learn in the years ahead.
More than anything, I learned that I love California. Madly, passionately, deeply. Unlike most young-ish people in my industry who despise Silicon Valley and strive to live in the City (and despite there being three large cities in close proximity, the City always means San Francisco) I adore the valley. It is warm and sunny during the day and delightfully cool at night. There are many more brown people than white people, and something about being a racial and ethnic minority really wore well on me. People are smart there! People are geeks there! Finally, I was surrounded by people who I thought were "like" me. Most of the major technology companies in the world were in this amazingly compact little radius, so driving from one place to another was like a trip through the software A-list. The bay and ocean are close; mountains, hills and forests are as well. There is low humidity. You can find really good ethnic food all over the place. The airports are large with direct flights to every corner of the world. The politics are liberal and people are open. The valley has none of the icky grittiness of the city. If I were independently wealthy yet still had to work I would certainly buy a nice, large home in Woodside, or Los Gatos.
But California is not perfect; if it were, the affair would continue. The deal breaker is that it's prohibitively expensive. Prohibitively. I was brought up in a large suburban home and I grew up accustomed to the conveniences and lifestyle related to a lot of rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms with a nice yard and plenty of living space. Unless you're a millionaire, you won't find that in a sane commuting distance in the San Francisco Bay Area. Right when I first moved to California in the summer of 2005, I was nowhere near able to afford a home. When I left in the fall of 2008, with my company very successful, I was still nowhere near able to afford a home. When I left I knew I probably wouldn't be back. The other blemish is that it is incredibly crowded. The Eastern Seaboard has got nuthin' on the San Francisco Bay Area. It's people on top of people on top of people. But all of the pros more than outweighed that particular con.
The affair was able to continue because, despite my exodus, my company continued forward. The plan was always to administer a multi-location entity, of which California was the headquarters. We even had a small corporate apartment to enable the travel of myself and other mobile employees. California thus became a dalliance as opposed to a spouse.
Ah, the best laid plans. Little more than a year later, the calamity of the 2009 economy led to the demolition of most of our company and my California business partner's heading for higher ground while there was still higher ground to head for. I attempted to zig back to California and revive the location when he left but the damage from a year of ruin was too severe. The end came with a whimper not a bang, as one employee too many left and the relationship between the foundation and potential of the studio combined with the questionable revenue potential signaled a sensible and obvious end. It was little more than two weeks from deciding to kill it and flying out of California for the last time, at least as a nominal resident. Those were a weird, harried, sad two weeks. At the end of it, the affair was over.
California will always hold sway over my heart. I liked to say I felt like a native Californian; it just fit me so well. However, I no longer have the ambition to make the kind of money that living there in the sort of lifestyle I consider comfortable would really require. I might get lucky, something might change, but more likely I won't be living in the warm embrace of California again. Losing her was difficult, and of course is wrapped up in so much more: the dismantling of my company, a brutal professional year, dramatic overall life change. Strangely, 2009 was probably the best year ever in my personal life. It's ironic and, perhaps, cruel how that works. On balance I'm not complaining, just trying to acclimate to a drastically different life.
Adieu, California. I will always miss you.
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| When you demand satisfaction, escalate |
| Tuesday October 20, 2009, 12:01 PM EST |
Due to my weird living-out-of-a-suitcase-while-living-away-from-home-85%-of-the-time-the-last-few-months existence, small things that I used to be very thorough about are slipping through the cracks. The latest is the cellphone bill that I get for the phone I provide for my mom. She uses that phone less than 30 minutes a month yet I pay over $40 for the service. I think its money well spent as these things go - her having the phone is important - but it is certainly free and easy money for the provider, AT&T. Thus when they hit me with a $36.60 fee for missing the payment I decided to call and request a reversal.
To make a long story short, the operator said "no" again and again, using very odd and indirect verbiage. I explained I would start giving someone else $40 a month for virtually no service if she didn't fix it. She again talked around the issue, saying no without saying no. We went around like this for a few times more before I finally forced a boil down and got us to a conclusion:
Me: "We're going to discuss this in English. Either you waive the so-called 'valid fee' and you keep my business, or I'm going to take my business and send a $40-something check for no service to a different provider every month."
Her: "I'm sorry sir, that is a valid fee."
Me: "Are you telling me that you will not reverse it?"
Her: "Its a valid fee."
Me: "Do you understand I'm going to take my business to another provider?"
Her: "Its a valid fee."
Me: "Are you going to waive it or not?"
Her: "It is not possible to waive that valid fee."
Me: "Let me speak to your supervisor."
After being on hold for three minutes I explained the situation to her supervisor in about 20 seconds. Her immediate response? "Of course we will waive that fee. Please hold while I take care of that for you."
Always, always, always escalate when you're dealing with customer service insanity. Anything else is just, well, insane! And large faceless corporations like AT&T out there, for goodness sakes empower your front line service people to make those logical decisions on their own. Despite the fee being waived, in total, I have an even worse opinion of AT&T after the call than I did before it. Hire competent people, or empower the people you have. Pick one, but don't subject me to the vagaries of poor service and intentionally difficult operators.
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| Moby at the Boston House of Blues |
| Friday September 25, 2009, 17:03 PM EST |
My single favourite thing in the world to do is see bands that I really enjoy, live. If I was set to be executed, or euthanized, or otherwise destroyed, I would choose to spend my last day on Earth at a concert. Probably even a Moby concert (I've seen him...six times at this point). Suffice it to say that going last night with my son Brandon to see Moby at the Boston House of Blues was a memorable and amazing experience.
Perhaps the thing that makes Moby so special to me is that he is all about feeling really alive and "emotionally erect" (to quote Steve Martin) in a gentle and thoughtful way. Even as he belts out harder and faster songs, it is built on a very humanistic and loving base. It is really quite special. There is a beauty in so much of what Moby does, and its reflected in so many ways: the fact that, despite being one of the best musicians of his generation he gives MORE solo time to the other people performing with him than to himself; the seamless way he shifts from vocals, to guitar, to bongo drums, to keyboards; the way that he encourages the audience to get involved and excited while imploring us to "FEEL" it. Great stuff. More ...
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| Wishing for better "news" and "reporting" |
| Monday September 21, 2009, 20:12 PM EST |
Today I stumbled upon an exceptional three-part series analyzing the safety of trendy new sweeteners Truvia and PureVia. Both are derived from "natural ingredients" and I was thus intrigued by their safety or risks, which led me to these articles. In reading all three of them in breathless succession I was struck by how they reflect the very best things about journalism, to me: objective, thorough, thoughtful, focused on the essentials of the matter at hand. It was precisely what I was looking for, although I was expecting infinitely less. Even more, it optimized the web as a medium with copious links out to primary sources and a seemingly never-ending string of juicy additional readings and research, if I so choose. It gets my strongest recommendation. Here is the article.
My excitement over reading this series really underscored what a wasteland I consider news and reporting to be. I have largely tuned out of media news as a reliable source for information. The reason? I don't trust it. Headlines intended to shock and thus increase readership. Angles that are clearly motivated by political or moral agendas. A tacit knowledge that what I am reading is far from "truth" in any understandable sense and rather is a careful positioning the motivations for and assumptions behind which I do not understand nor necessarily am motivated to untangle. The flip side is, the "serious" journalism that does go deeper and with rigour is often snooze city. It moves too slow, it is too hard to get the essential nuggets out. It shouldn't be; it doesn't have to be. More ...
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| Stratford 2009 |
| Saturday September 12, 2009, 23:48 PM EST |
Sigrid and I went to Stratford last weekend with my mom and aunt Ruth Ann. As usual it was a lovely weekend with comfortable amenities, good food and excellent theatre. I am going to begin reviewing and rating the different plays and restaurants each year for posterity, so there is some solid record to compare year-over-year:
THE PLAYS
Julius Caesar (Friday night, Avon Theater)
Ever since I first saw this play at Stratford in 1990 with Brian Bedford as Brutus, Colm Feore as Cassius, Scott Wentworth as Mark Antony and Nicholas Pennell as Julius Caesar, this has been my very favourite Shakespeare play. The magic of that night is what made me fall in love with Stratford and made Julius Caesar a "must-see" play. Sadly, if my first experience with Julius Caesar had been this 2009 rendition, I would say that Julius Caesar is one of my least favourite Shakespearean plays. This was not a good performance. More ...
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| Niagara Falls |
| Wednesday September 2, 2009, 22:42 PM EST |
Sigrid and I are spending the night in Niagara Falls en route to Stratford for the annual pilgrimage. This is my first time here, and I must say it is a great bargain. The "best" hotel room I could find on the Canadian (better Falls view) side is $200 a night, and for that privilege I am able to get a spectacular view of both the Canadian and American falls from my bed on the 29th floor, while typing this blog entry. Pretty. Frakking. Spectacular.
Overall Niagara Falls isn't "my" kind of vacation: it reminds me of Orlando with countless Applebee's-type restaurants and densely filled with tourist attractions geared toward a less sophisticated traveler. But the falls themselves are truly spectacular and worth seeing. We will end up being here a total of about 18 hours and, while perhaps one more day would have been nice, this will be enough to get the best parts.
The highlight was standing by the guardrail at the edge of the falls. The water going over the rocks was not 20 feet away (!) and when the wind changed we were all getting sprayed by the giant clouds of water pounding up from the falls far below. Really spectacular, and something worth doing at least once for everyone! Strong recommendation.
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| A day to remember |
| Monday August 31, 2009, 14:48 PM EST |
This morning Sigrid and I learned that, in roughly five months and assuming nothing unusual happens, we will be welcoming a new daughter into the world! Seeing the ultrasound pictures and getting the information from the technician, I was so happy I cried.
The preponderance of the best and happiest moments of my life have to do with my children, and this is the latest among them. When I was younger I wanted boys, and I had boys. This time I quietly hoped for a girl. Certainly a son would have been equally welcome, but the joy in my heart at learning we can expect a girl was vast and powerful.
Without even considering the many miracles that will be the life and times of this fair lass, for me as a person experiencing the world it will open the pathways that much wider. It will make me think of women differently. It will provide an entirely new aspect and nuance to parenting. It will continue to enrich my worldview in ways I cannot even begin to comprehend.
She will have big brothers - REALLY big brothers - to help guide her through the world. Her presence, her very life, will change all of our worlds: she is a grand-daughter, a niece, a sister, and a little girl. From there...only the Fates can see what lies ahead.
A little girl! The product of my own body! What a wonderful life I am blessed to lead.
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| On men, maturity and societal expectations |
| Wednesday August 26, 2009, 21:35 PM EST |
Each year, I get better. Certainly not physically; I peaked in my physical capacity and appearance about seven years ago. As a man, as a person, as someone who increasingly gets closer to the person I aspire to be, I am getting better. Its really a lovely thing, and something that fulfills me even while keeping me optimistic about the quality and tenor of the years still ahead of me.
Ted Kennedy died today, and I was floored by the outpouring of seemingly unanimous positive and laudatory tributes to his life. Certainly his time as a public servant appears to deserve respect and acclaim, acknowledging the potential for corruption and graft of which I might not be aware. But what I am struck by was the lack of mention or attention placed on the incident which marred much of his earlier public life, the Chappaquiddick incident.
For those who are too young to remember or be exposed to it, when Kennedy was 37 he was driving in his car on Chappaquiddick Island in Martha's Vineyard in a drunken stupor with a 28 year-old female "friend" (he himself was married with three children at the time) and drove the car off a bridge and into Poucha Pond. Kennedy himself swam to safety but was unwilling or unable to save his companion who drown to death. Rather than report the incident to the police immediately as dictated by law, he waited 10 hours.
This is only the most public and tragic of Kennedy's various indiscretions as a well-known womanizer and hard-drinking good-time boy. He was no choir boy, and even directly contributed to the death of another human being. Not surprisingly given his family and status he got away with a slap on the wrist. And today, upon his death, he is "The Lion of the Senate," a man being treated with great reverence internationally. More ...
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| Product differentiation at 30,000 feet |
| Monday August 10, 2009, 23:07 PM EST |
I used to say JetBlue was my favourite airline. The planes were more comfortable; every seat has a TV. Ultimately though, the difference between JetBlue and its competitors were not enough to have me seek out JetBlue. If it was the cheapest, I was happy. If it was $10, $20 more per flight, I might pick it over the tired old long-haul carriers. There was not really any loyalty, though. JetBlue remained a commodity.
Recently I took my first flight on Virgin America, and this time a new, upstart airline has stood out as a premium product and hooked me as a loyal consumer. How? The smart application of technology. There is no one thing they are doing; it is ALL of the things together. Here's my reasons-why: More ...
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| I love California |
| Thursday July 23, 2009, 20:51 PM EST |
When I'm here, I'm happier. I just enjoy the culture, the people, the diversity, the sunny skies, the lack of humidity, the amazing food, the brilliant minds, the gorgeous and varied nature. When I first moved here in 2005, it didn't take me long to start saying that, for the first time in my life, a place felt like "home". Being in Boston again and only periodically returning here, there is a lightness in my step and a smile on my face.
The down side is that it is prohibitively expensive, so choosing to live here would mean other trade-offs. So if I end up here or not is a completely open question. But if I had all the money in the world, and I still had to work and contribute (as opposed to go to Hawaii and enjoy perpetual pleasure), I would be one happy Californian!
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| Money brings out the worst; a quick exploration of identity |
| Thursday July 23, 2009, 17:28 PM EST |
During the last nine months of economic recession, I've learned a lot of lessons. Some were new, some were simply affirming truisms I had absorbed but not experienced, and some were things I knew but were now getting them in a different way or flavour. As is the case for many other people, it has not been an easy year.
Examining all of the battle scars, though, most garish is the stark understanding that money truly does bring out the worst in people. The latest example was just recently, from a person and in a context that I never would have expected. But it is only the most recent example in a trail that stretches back months. Money makes people act differently. And strangely. Especially when they are afraid. People I like/(d) and know/know weren't/aren't the same anymore.
At the superficial level, this will lead me to be more formal in agreements, and just generally assume and plan for the abnormal case as opposed to the typical - even with those I really click positively with. On a deeper level, it raises questions of being and identity: who are we, really? The person we are during our best moments? Or during the daily routine? Or who we are at moments of stress and anxiety? Or who we are during our worst moments? At some existential level the answer is "all of them". But that runs very contrary to how we are perceived by others. Some people see most of us. Others see very little. So each of us is simultaneously thoughtful, rude, smart, absent-minded, hard-working, lazy...often polar opposites.
The differences lie in our behaviour as contexts and situations change, as well as in the perception of the various receivers. How we act in the same moment could be perceived as funny by one person and obnoxious by another. Consequently, those people have an entirely different picture of who we are - despite our being almost literally identical in both cases from an objective and sanitized standpoint.
So who is the essential me, or the essential you? Even if we stipulate that everyone's perception of us is unique and necessarily different from one another in ways small and large, somewhere underneath it all there remains the self. Within which, we are something - either general or specific. Some of us might think we are one consistent thing, while others view themselves as complicated and diverse (an old friend of mine would refer to herself as acting depending on "the decisions of the committee in (her) head," which would ostensibly prove variable and inconsistent over time, depending on which "committee member" was holding sway).
Are we ultimately a continuum, not any one thing but many different things? At a simple observational and analytical level that is sensible, but it doesn't speak to the extremes. It does not seem adequate to say a serial killer, for example, is just like the rest of us but happens to have "this side" to them. I think its more than that.
No answers here yet; I haven't really thought about it to be honest, this is more a hemorrhaging as I scratch my head in amazement at how people act when it comes to money. But these are important concepts that, while seemingly ethereal, if answerable could give us a far better understanding of humanity, behaviour, and how we as individuals and a society should shift to accommodate the reality - simple or complex - of human identity.
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| Time marches on |
| Sunday July 19, 2009, 15:44 PM EST |
Late in his life I would visit my grandfather periodically, perhaps once a month. He sat in his study in a recliner every day, slowed by various maladies. I would sit with him for a few hours and he would talk about his life. During these visits, the focus was on my grandfather, with whom I was very close.
At the same time, my grandmother was always there as well, sitting in the kitchen right next door. She was ostensibly cooking something most of the time, and kept a small television set in there to watch during the day. Perhaps her favourite thing to watch was golf. When I would arrive and leave, it would involve going through the kitchen, talking with her a bit, and watching the golf with her. Her favourite golfer was Tom Watson, whom she saw as a more likable protagonist than the great Jack Nicklaus. Grandma was an exceptional athlete and had a whole collection of loving cups from her own golf tournament victories.
This week, her Tom Watson made an improbable run at a British Open championship. All week, every time there was a story about it, it made me think of her. She passed away almost 14 years ago, yet Tom Watson's success this week brought her right back into my life, every day, in a familiar and happy way. As Tom fell agonizingly short of victory and then collapsed on during the playoff to lose the championship, it made me think that this might have been one of the last things that happen in the world which take me back to my grandmother, as if she were still in the kitchen, watching her golf as she always did. She was a lovely person, and Tom Watson helped me remember how much I miss her.
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| The names must change |
| Monday July 13, 2009, 18:25 PM EST |
Thanks to the Internet, it is an inevitability that we will drastically change the way we name our children. Why? Try Googling even a semi-common name. There are hundreds, nay, thousands of results. Each of us wants to be relatively unique and special. We want our children to be relatively unique and special. In the analog world, we could name our child "Patrick Mahoney" (the name of an old friend of mine) and he likely would not meet another Patrick Mahoney in his lifetime. Now, not only is he confronted with many, many Patrick Mahoney's, but old friends and people who care about or want to connect with him will not be able to find him, precisely because there is a global glut of "Patrick Mahoney's" coming up on any search of the Interwebs.
Its not a question of if; its only a question of when. My guess is that, rather than a future name being "Patrick John Mahoney", it will be "Patrick John Jacob Jingleheimer Mahoney". There is always the chance we go to unique identifiers instead, such as 13io45ght with more user-friendly "nicknames" put on top of them. But I suspect the weight of history will prevent that drastic of a shift. We'll see what happens, and when...
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| Me and the Pope vs. The "Civilized" World |
| Wednesday July 8, 2009, 18:42 PM EST |
Imagine my surprise upon learning today that me and the Pope (yes, the Pope!!!) apparently share an identical stance against one of the parts of our modern world that I most hate: capitalism.
In remarks made today in advance of the latest G-8 summit, the Pope stated,
"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise....Above all, the intention to do good must not be considered incompatible with the effective capacity to produce goods. Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers."
Right on!!!!!!
His overall statement - part of his monolithic Third Encyclical Letter - is based on a specific Christian belief and worldview that I do not share. Regardless, his conclusions - that capitalism in its currently operating form is antithetical to healthy and appropriate human functioning - is 100% right on.
When I used to give papers against capitalism back in the early 1990's, shortly after the fall of the USSR, people thought I was a nut. So I stopped. I decided to join the system, make some money, and perhaps help change things from the inside someday. But in the last 15 years, something funny has happened: the cracks in the Machine are showing. The walls are crumbling. And it just might become time to pick up the banner again and expose capitalism for the naked emperor it is. This time, perhaps, the wisdom of those words will be what carries the day, as opposed to ignorant fear regarding the implications of replacing an entrenched but fatally flawed system.
Me and the Pope, in lockstep, against the ignorant G-8. Who woulda' thunk it?!
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| Stupidity 101 |
| Friday June 26, 2009, 11:20 AM EST |
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Why is it that doctor's request you get a blood test after you visit them and not before? I mean, when you get the test after you get a random postcard in the mail with numbers that are meaningless to you, or a phone call from someone other than the doctor giving you the information. Why isn't the test BEFORE the visit so you can, y'know, actually ask the doctor about the results? I'm guessing its an insurance issue, but whatever it is, it is completely idiotic. Why bother seeing the doctor at all?!
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| The quantification of work and technology |
| Thursday June 4, 2009, 1:41 AM EST |
This is a bit of a long and detailed post. If you are turned on by any or all of economics, math, science or philosophy, I think it will be worth your time and encourage you to hang in until the end. If not, feel free to ignore.
We're working on a disruptive technology that has the potential to radically downsize a multi-trillion dollar industry in the U.S. While actually being a catalyst to such an outcome requires a great deal of wishful thinking, the problem space has nonetheless got me thinking about the relationship between human work effort, technology, and the corporate good. After all, if we're going to make the walls come a' tumbling down, there's going to be deeply vested people fighting it. There's going to be countless workers paralyzed with uncertainty. Anything we can do to better understand and communicate the benefits while mitigated the fear and self-interest is to our great benefit.
So it is that I've come up with a conceptual approach to quantifying the labour, and particularly the juxtaposition, of human effort and technology. Here's the example:
It takes a certain amount of effort for a person to dig a small hole in a grassy yard, lets say 12 inches deep and 12 inches in diameter. It would be dirty work, it would be uncomfortable work, but could be completed pretty quickly. If you only need to do it once, it is a perfectly acceptable thing to just dig the hole out as opposed to buy or find a tool to help.
At some point, if the size requirements for the hole get too large, digging it with your hands becomes arduous and, at some point, impossible to do within what would remotely resemble a reasonable timeframe. For that you need a tool; lets say its a shovel. Suddenly, it gets relatively easy again. The shovel accomplishes the work in a small percentage of the time and effort your bare hands would require.
If the requirements for the size of the hole get bigger still, at some point a shovel is as impractical as using bare hands was at a smaller size. At that point you need to upgrade, lets say to a backhoe. Suddenly it gets relatively easy again. The backhoe accomplishes the work in a small percentage of the time and effort your bare hands would require.
If the requirements for the size of the hole get bigger still, at that point, you just get another backhoe. And then another. And then another. And then...
Here's the "a-ha!": all of this is quantifiable. It is absolutely possible to figure out the point at which digging a hole should evolve beyond bare hands to a simple tool, then from a simple tool to a more complex tool, until you finally reach the most advanced tool technology has to offer, in which case you either change your requirements or simply get more of the same tool working on the same problem.
How would one go about determining this? Sticking with my original example, there are objective criteria and subjective criteria. Objectively, it is a question of how much energy it would take to dig the hole with your hands. My business partner Juhan thinks that a calorie might be the atomic unit to measure that. This instinctively seems as good a measure as any. So, it takes a certain amount of calories to dig a hole of a specific size in a specific terroir. How one person gets the hole completed as compared to another has no bearing on this, there is a specific and explicit amount of energy expenditure necessary to dig that hole.
Subjectively, it really depends on the individual person. In digging the hole with your hands, you are going to get dirty to one level or another. Some people are repulsed by this; some don't like it but deal with it; others enjoy it. Similarly, some people enjoy physical labour and would find putting a lot of effort into digging a hole with their hands a pleasant or even enjoyable act; others would be highly perturbed; most of us would be somewhere in the middle. Acknowledging that this ultimately matters and needs to be considered in a more thoughtful way, for the purpose of this example we will assume that all subjective measures related to individual people come out as perfectly average. The point in doing this is to focus on the clearly objective part of this, the calorie.
Another variable that can be quantified in the context of an atomic unit is the technology. In order to create a shovel, there is an expenditure of both human and natural resources. These would include but not be limited to: the wood of the handle, the metal of the shovel itself, the tools that cut down the tree that provided the wood of the handle, the tools that prepared the wood to function as the handle, the tools that extracted the metal or alloys from the earth, the tools that led to forming the shovel head shape, the tools that went into assembling the shovel as a complete unit, and all of the human work required to bend the natural world into a shovel. This is, ultimately, quantifiable. I don't know what the correct atomic unit for this is yet; maybe it can even be bent to be calories for a true apples-to-apples. But, regardless, we now have two fixed and quantifiable data points:
A. Energy required for a person to complete a physical task (calories)
B. Resources (Energy?) required to create an artificial object
Now, using a shovel also requires a person working - which requires calories. So if x = the amount of calories it takes for an average person to dig a hole of a certain size using their bare hands, and y = the amount of calories it takes for an average person to dig a hole of the same size using a shovel, then x-y = the amount of calories saved by using a shovel. It is quantifiable. And since we additionally have a quantifiable metric for what is taken to create a shovel, we can begin to do analysis on the relationship between the amount of human calories saved by using a shovel to help dig the hole, versus the costs of making the shovel in the first place. With most technology, there is also either or both degradation in the object over time and with use, as well as the possibility of a fail which would require repair. There is also the possibility that someone could injure themselves using the shovel. All of these things need to be accounted for. Importantly, all of these things CAN be accounted for! These give us additional, fixed data points to use toward analysis. Adding them to the previous list, we now have:
A. Energy required for a person to complete a physical task (calories)
B. Resources (Energy?) required to create a tool
C. Human energy saved through the use of tools in addition to or instead of expending calories
D. Decay of - and related devaluation of - the tool over time
And again - and importantly - all of this is quantifiable!
Then you have the backhoe. That adds another layer of consideration beyond just the shovel. While a shovel will do modest collateral damage with its use by potentially damaging the ground or what is on/under/around it (which also needs to be accounted for!), a backhoe substantively damages the world around it: the gas and oil it burns, the pressure and stress it puts over the roads it lumbers over, the damage to grass, flowers, plants, trees, animals and whatever combined flora and fauna that get in its way. So lets add THAT to the end of the list:
A. Energy required for a person to complete a physical task (calories)
B. Resources (Energy?) required to create a tool
C. Human energy saved through the use of tools in addition to or instead of expending calories
D. Decay of - and related devaluation of - the tool over time
E. Damage caused by use - or even just ongoing existence - of the tool
There might be other things I've missed. But this idea is just hours old, and for the purpose of making the point I think I'm being superficially thorough (how's that for a happy paradox?!)
But what we now have is quantification of all the variables necessary to measure the footprint of technology: we can analyze the data and actually identify the precise point it makes sense to use a shovel as opposed to bare hands, then the moment when to move from a shovel to a backhoe. Using the list letters above as variables, and then treating variable x as equaling the number of times the tool is actually used, we get:
Cx - (B+Dx+Ex) = Absolute "value" of a shovel
Yes, the amount of data necessary to get from this framework to actually HAVING the numbers in real life is staggering. But I imagine we could get a clumsy WAG figured out taking a day or two of time just culling existing data on a lot of these different subfactors. The beauty of it is that it is all solvable.
I can hear you now..."OK, why does it matter at all if we can figure out when to use a shovel instead of digging a hole with our bare hands. Who digs holes with their bare hands anyway?"
This is not about the example; this is about the methodology. The thinking can be used to evaluate ANYTHING! Historically, we know by instinct and education that an assembly line is dramatically more efficient than the higher touch methods that preceded it. But, what is the real difference? It is determinable. We can identify the precise moment using that assembly line was superior to more manual means. Or, using a steamboat as opposed to a raft to get down the Mississippi. Or, using a train as opposed to a horse to carry a load. We already have horsepower to roughly measure the power and speed, but what about the costs? The decay? What is, in some holistic way, the totality of difference between the two? We can answer that!
This thinking can be used for anything and everything. I would even posit it should be used for anything and everything. We shouldn't use technology and tools just because we can; we should use them because they make sense. I think we can figure out what makes sense and what doesn't, and why.
Now, lets take this up to an entirely different and even more hypothetical level. Let pretend that various technologies become so powerful that people, for the most part, don't need to work. There are machines, robots, computers and whirlygigs (my word for technology we can't even imagine) so that we can all sit on pillows and eat bon-bons all day. I think any medical doctor, psychologist, geriatrician or other professional schooled in healthy human functioning will tell you this is not a good thing. Even if we didn't have to work, it is good for us to spend some minimum amount of our lives working. That is, there is a point where machines replacing humans becomes a point of diminishing returns for us. It is no longer a welcome convenience but a recipe for rigor mortis in the prime of life (to quote the wonderful John Cleese).
Given that, there is a point - a measurable, quantifiable point - after which it is BAD for our species if technology replaces our manual efforts. To be clear, we're not there yet; not even close. There is plenty of work out there to be done. But it is important to consider that there is a FLOOR to how little work we want people to be responsible for, after which point it is diminishing returns.
I propose that our ability to quantifiably understand the actual "value" of every man-made object is absolutely essential information to our successful navigation of the future. This is a deeper way to analyze existing (and minimize future) environmental damage. It is an objective means of comparing one product against another and pretty precisely identifying which is more valuable. And, to the point of the original thought experiment that led me down this little wormhole, it can help us not be afraid of emerging technology while better managing its planning and use.
Technology is inevitable. Since at least the industrial revolution, technology has prominently and even routinely taken jobs previously performed by humans and replaced them with machines. Jethro Tull - who was an agriculturalist before a rock band - invented the seed drill almost 300 years ago. His workers were furious: they thought they would all lose their jobs. Agricultural technology has evolved many times over since then, and the seed drill certainly did not prove to be the end of western civilization as we know it. Most people in the United States, for example, even during this dreadful economic period, remain employed. Technology might change the jobs we work, but it largely does not ultimately make it impossible for us TO work. As such, the important questions and answers around technology have not to do with job loss in the abstract, but the relationship between human effort, technology benefit, and the start-up and ongoing costs of using that technology over time. We can measure carbon footprint. We can codify the value to the planet of a 100 year old tree. It only requires we connect a few more dots to get to the point I'm advocating.
My only question is: if it hasn't already been explored or accomplished, why on Earth not?
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| Group behaviour |
| Thursday March 12, 2009, 16:02 PM EST |
My buddy Lou tweeted into the ether a few minutes ago, trying to get an impromptu little meet-up of people who happen to be on the same flight as he, heading down to the South by Southwest conference. Assuming there is modest response, I can envision half a dozen or so design industry-related souls happily seeing and greeting each other at the gate before the flight. How strange that will seem! Having flown literally hundreds of time in my life, the idea of a group of people meeting in a pre-arranged way, chatting enthusiastically, possibly trying to convince others to change seats with them so they continue to kibbitz - while those same others are tortoise-shelled and stressed, waiting to hear their group number called out and hoping their carry-on bags will have enough overhead space - is a bit surreal.
Social network technology is going to create these weird moments of juxtaposition, where people are suddenly friendly and familiar in public spaces that were previously - and almost universally - uncomfortable, anonymous and inhuman. What is the impact going to be? Annoyance? Appreciation? What will the other people at the JetBlue gate think and feel? How will they react? In five years, will MOST of the people getting onto an airplane have "pre-arranged" to socialize in more comfortable and familiar ways? What will that mean? If its really "open" and too many people get involved for it to be comfortable, will it create a new form of isolation? Could it lead to further class warfare and stratification?
Yes, I've pretty much just put my imagination on autopilot at this point. Those are spewings, not predictions. But what I do predict is that, if these things accelerate and increase over time, it is going to create new and unexpected strangeness, awkwardness and social isolation of a very unpredictable nature. Of course, in the shorter term it will also turn some inhuman group social situations into more microcosmic happy, familiar and comfortable situations for those who productively connect. This is certainly not a condemnation of happy gatherings, it is more a counter-balance, an identification that in the longer now the group dynamics will be changed in ways we can't predict until we get there. We'll see what that means.
In the meantime, hopefully I too can participate in some warm-fuzzy happy familiarity with people I know and perhaps even care about, in what would otherwise be a cold and unpleasant group public context.
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| Credit and reputation |
| Thursday March 12, 2009, 15:14 PM EST |
While my wading into Twitter has largely amounted to just keeping a single toe in the water - opening the client once or twice a day, glancing at it for a few seconds, and closing it again - just a moment ago I saw something that made me think of a bigger issue. I saw a Tweet to a video by one Jesse Newhart, showing how to set up TweetDeck to be more useful. I turned the video on in the background and semi-passively listened while writing emails. At one point on the video, he commented on a feature that allows the user to "re-tweet" what someone else has written, and that you can "re-tweet" a "re-tweet", in essence creating a "chain" where an original person creates content, a second person promotes it, and then a third person promotes it again. In describing this process, Jesse cheerily noted, "And here I'm giving props to two people, instead of just one person."
As a big picture, systems thinker, this immediately made me think of how this mindset could quickly break down, as re-tweet after re-tweet means that "props" are being given to five or six people. At some point, ALL of them become irrelevant and glazed over because there are TOO MANY of them. Suddenly, NONE of them are recognized because ALL of them are recognized. It reminded me of academic papers, where the list of contributors are so voluminous that, ultimately, you barely pay attention to the first person's name only and then skip ahead to the content. More ...
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| Not safe yet |
| Friday February 27, 2009, 12:39 PM EST |
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The scythe that is the recession/depression of 2008-? could still cut me down to equine feed yet. Blame a catastrophically incorrect estimate for my personal 2008 tax burden. GIANT hits to cash flow when your stocks and home are underwater Atlantis-style is decidedly negative EV (Expected Value, for all you non-poker ballers out there).
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| Twitter: early returns |
| Friday February 27, 2009, 12:36 PM EST |
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I'm not a big fan, at least yet. There's certainly potential: some of the people I'm following post interesting, thoughtful things. Some post the right amount of relevance and interest about their daily lives that I like it and don't think its Spammy. Other people use it as this weird business/marketing megaphone - in a nice way, certainly, but in a way that ultimately is inauthentic and makes me think less of them. Others post FAR too many mundane and trivial details about their daily routine and life that simply clutters up the entire feed. More ...
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| Being moved |
| Wednesday February 25, 2009, 22:24 PM EST |
Tonight, I cried twice.
Today is my son's birthday. As I talked to him tonight, thinking back on the day of his birth, appreciating him, missing him, loving him, in the course of that conversation I was moved to tears. My love for him is so deep, and makes the distance that much more heartbreaking. But my tears were not sad tears, they were happy - with twinges of sadness and remorse. Above it all, though, was my love for my son.
Later I spoke with my mom. Our conversation was winding, but eventually made it around to my father. As we talked about his death and trying to coordinate a posthumous service as requested by his sister, I found myself crying again. This time out of sorrow and longing and loss. And, certainly, love.
So tonight I cried twice. And it really felt good in a deep and meaningful way. It had to do with celebrating my beautiful son, and feeling love for the people who matter most in my life. Ultimately, those relationships are the things that matter. Palpably feeling that is ostensibly a wonderful thing.
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| To Tweet or not to Tweet? |
| Wednesday February 18, 2009, 19:12 PM EST |
I've been aware of Twitter pretty much since it began. I signed up for an account (being in software, it is my Sworn Duty to sign up and check out Hot New Services to stay current), and watched it become a geek mainstay with some level of bemusement. At its most ridiculous level, I did not appreciate the benefit of knowing every time the people I care about are choosing to get a cup of coffee. I let the party rage on without me.
Today, I sit in a studio next to someone who has TweetDeck open in the background pretty much 24/7. Its a pretty interesting little app, and I've seen the social power that his sharing some of the things we are up to has had in a very practical sense. A friend has termed it as "Facebook is where you connect with old friends again; Twitter is where you get closer to the people you want to have as friends in the future." That's a pretty provocative statement, and one that is certainly near to my heart. More ...
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| Logic 101 |
| Wednesday February 18, 2009, 12:49 PM EST |
IF the U.S. Government bails out industries, companies and people who - either through ignorance, bad judgement, incompetence or corruption - have gotten themselves in an intractable fiscal position, then they must also create socialistic safeguards and paternalism that govern the so-called "free market system". Otherwise, people like me - those who educate themselves, pay all their bills on time, gainfully employ a variety of people, wait to buy a home until the mortgage is reasonable, safe and fiscally intelligent - are just going to leave or quit. I live my life sensibly, often to my own discomfort, as others live irresponsibly or beyond their means. In total, the tax dollars collected by the government is ALL OF OUR money. If my contributions are being given to others who "live in the moment" more than me, or otherwise sacrifice the future for the present, that is directly and specifically to my detriment. While I will tolerate the current round of bailouts as a valid attempt to "save" our economy on some macro level, my tolerance for watching those who made bad decisions benefit on MY back is, indeed, quite thin. The people who are doing things RIGHT should be benefitted, not penalized. When the economy started coming tumbling down, I committed a tremendous amount of MY money to protect our employees, at great personal financial risk. Where's MY bailout? Where's MY reward? Why is ignorance rewarded and responsibility, implicitly in the shake-out of all of this money moving, penalized?
At the very least, I want a promise this isn't going to happen again. Get the system stabilized. Save us. Then CHANGE THE BLOODY SYSTEM. Make sure ignorance, bad judgement, incompetence or corruption from companies and individuals can't drag down those of us who work hard and intentionally behave in a way that is intended to not just improve our own comfort and happiness, but benefit others and the collective well-being as well. Law requires Justice, and Justice requires Fairness. Absent that, why bother trying to do the right thing? It makes infinitely more sense to go somewhere else and operate within a system that supports and rewards your efforts. That is, truly, Logic 101.
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| Sympathy: A Redemption Story |
| Monday February 16, 2009, 22:35 PM EST |
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Once Upon a Time in modern popular culture, there were clear Heroes and Villains. My earliest memories of such things were seen in the old U.S. propaganda movies of World War 2 (Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini = Evil; The Allies = Pure as the White-Driven Snow), re-runs of the 1960's era Batman TV show (Batman and Robin = Heroes; Virtually Everyone Else in a Goofy Costume = Villains). Then, moving forward, from The A-Team to Miami Vice to Hulk Hogan saying his prayers and eating his vitamins in juxtaposition to evil vermin like Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik, there was no doubt about who we should cheer for, identify with and hope would prove victorious. (Full disclosure: I personally rooted for Rowdy Roddy Piper to groin shot Hulk Hogan when Piper was still a Despicable Bad Guy, but that doesn't change the general cultural positioning) It was literally as clear as black-and-white and consistent across most every mainstream cultural artifact being produced. More ...
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| "Who is Johnny Carson" |
| Saturday February 14, 2009, 2:42 AM EST |
Today, someone who works for me didn't know who Johnny Carson is, because she is too young to have any cultural awareness of him.
(ahem)
Today, someone who IS A FULLY GROWN ADULT and works for me is so young that she was JUST BEGINNING GRADE SCHOOL when Johnny Carson went off the air, AND HAS ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO HE IS (!!!)
This little morsel of shocking self-realization came about when I hummed the first notes from his old Tonight Show theme song and my partner Juhan queried, "Is that the Johnny Carson song?!" So, at least I'm not yet the ONLY person in the room so old that no one gets my dated cultural references.
Oy vey. It only gets worse from here, doesn't it?!
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| My goals for 2009 |
| Wednesday December 31, 2008, 21:08 PM EST |
(using the pseudo-democratic Alpha ordering system)
Be a better person. I'm already a good person, but I want to be a better person and citizen. More patient, empathetic and considerate. Less judgmental, morose and disdainful of public inconveniences like long lines and slow drivers.
Build Invo Boston into an important regional player. We're already rocking out Silicon Valley. Now I need to do my part to make Boston a shining success.
Establish a regular exercise routine. I was SO good about this in California, but have completely lost my pace thanks to a much different logistical situation here in Boston. Must. Be. Healthy.
Grow and deepen my relationships with the people I love. Family and friends alike; pay attention to those I love and do more than my fair share to make these relationships blossom.
Improve my leadership and management skills. I've got excellent natural skills and good learned wisdom, but often allow the diversity and complexity of my global responsibilities to derail my practical application. Accepting this state of affairs is not acceptable.
Live a more ordered life. With the big move this year, and exacerbated by being physically separated from my spectacular assistant, I have become completely disorganized, discombobulated and just feeling out-of-control of the minutiae of my life. I need to get this untangled.
Read and write more. "Reading" in any real sense has been largely out of my life since I started spending 12+ hour days on the internet some 12 or so years ago. Now, I'm reading again and I love it. Writing - what I once spent most of my time doing - has ebbed with the flow of my entrepreneurial responsibilities. I need to find it again.
Stabilize and strengthen my companies. Lots of transition in 2008, punctuated by the economic debacle of the last three months. We did such a great job creating a strong base and stable foundation before this mess, I need to make sure we get it back.
Its a long list, but one that is eminently "do-able". Give me 12 months and I'll tell you how I did.
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| Farewell to 2008 |
| Wednesday December 31, 2008, 20:33 PM EST |
This year was the most tumultuous in my life for some time, with a lot of change and turbulence throughout:
For the Good, I...
* Started a new relationship that is very loving, nurturing and fulfilling
* Gained an outstanding new business partner who is going to be a key component to my next level of professional success
* Helped my company achieve record revenues and added Apple, Microsoft and McAfee to our client portfolio
* Spearheaded the creation of new companies that will provide a platform outside of our existing software services to grow, diversify and explore
* Bought a house, the first home I've owned since moving out of the modestly priced Toledo real estate market More ...
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| A new day |
| Wednesday November 5, 2008, 13:55 PM EST |
During this phase of my life I have largely treated my personal politics a private thing. I try not to talk about my preferences or get into the religious-like discussions about one issue or another, or one candidate or another. In part, this is because my beliefs are not mainstream: in my life I've voted for more third party Presidential candidates than mainstream party candidates. And I have even voted for a Republican! So, despite being generally liberal, I am far from a "straight-ticket Democrat". In general, I think both mainstream political parties in the U.S. are ideologically off track. I think capitalism is inherently and definitionally self-destructive, that our manifestation of democracy runs counter to the intention or raison d'etre of the founding fathers, and the only way humanity will start to evolve as opposed to continually DEvolve is through fairly substantial changes to our shared worldview that go well beyond any ideology of the powers-that-be in our country and world.
Needless to say, I'm not exactly a mainstream political thinker. More ...
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| "I'm Great!" |
| Friday August 1, 2008, 15:23 PM EST |
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For this first time that I can recently remember - and we could be talking weeks, or months, or perhaps even years - my response today to the casual query of "How are you doing today?" was an enthusiastic and honest "I'm great!" Typically, it is some variant of "I'm OK" or "I'm busy" or some other slice of mediocrity that has become de rigueur in my daily routine and rhythm. Don't get me wrong: I've had plenty of moments of happiness or joy or feeling good in between. But now, hopefully in a consistent and lasting way, I'm feeling as though my day-to-day rhythm is becoming overwhelmingly positive. What a happy thing!
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| Being seen |
| Wednesday July 2, 2008, 20:17 PM EST |
I indulge in the conceit of writing on this website for absolute public consumption; that is, there is no password protection or attempt to hide what I write. It is out there for anyone to be pointed to or find. In addition, what I write is largely unedited and reflects a raw and transparent view of what I am thinking or feeling. Granted, there are things that are particularly personal or things that I might think would not be professionally prudent to share given the likelihood of people I engage with professionally eventually encountering the site. Still, those topical omissions notwithstanding, I certainly use this channel to share a variety of traditionally private parts of myself in a complete and public way.
Recently, I had my first concern about this approach. After writing the posts about Brandon's football camp experience, someone - very well-meaningly - encouraged both of my children to read these posts, given their very powerful nature and content. While I know my children have previously seen and are aware of my website, I take it for granted that they don't regularly read it. Or, that if at times they did read it, it was not in a real-time way, but in a way where it more represents an artifact of the past as opposed to the present. This might have been naive or foolish, but was how I thought of it. More ...
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| Coming home from football camp |
| Thursday June 19, 2008, 18:06 PM EST |
This morning I went to Brandon's football camp to watch his final scrimmage and then bring him home. He again played well, and it was again a tremendous thrill to watch him out there on the field. On defense, even though he recorded seven tackles over the 35 snaps he player (which is an outstanding number for any position, let alone a defensive end; and yes I am a geek for counting!) I noticed that the other team ran almost all of their running plays to the other side of the field, away from Brandon. I assumed this was just coincidence. Well, during the awards ceremony afterwards Brandon won both the best defensive lineman award and the award for being the best defensive player overall. And the head coach again called out how he played every single snap of every practice and scrimmage - all week, no less! - but also commented that Brandon was such a force that the opposing offense ran their plays the opposite way from him as much as they could. I thought something was going on during the scrimmage today!
Brandon was very proud of and focused on the fact that he won two trophies ("One more than Justin!" he beamed, referring to his friend who won the award for best offensive lineman) but what made me the most happy was how hard he worked and hustled. His level of effort and intensity was truly exceptional, and again I was struck by a variant on the "son surpassing the father" theme. I had so much fun watching him that's its almost enough to get me to move back to Toledo so I don't miss out on more of the same for the next five years. If only I could manipulate the space-time continuum. Gosh, do I ever love my children!
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| A moment of perfect clarity |
| Wednesday June 18, 2008, 21:07 PM EST |
As a divorced parent who lives across the country from his sons, I typically spend 6-8 weeks with them each year. While "not bad" given the geographic distance, it remains a relatively disconnected way to "watch" your children grow and live their lives.
So it was that today I took part of my afternoon to visit my eldest son at a football camp he is at this week here in California, while visiting me. He is a very athletic and physical 13 year old, and I expected he would be a solid contributor among the participants. Little did I anticipate that watching him on this sweltering June afternoon would turn out to be 90 minutes that I will never forget. More ...
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| "That's a good point." |
| Thursday May 29, 2008, 20:09 PM EST |
Recently, I was on a conference call where one of my colleagues spoke up with a contradiction to the direction being suggested by the client. The client listened, thought for a moment, and then responded by saying, "That's a good point."
Earlier in my career, I worked to be told I had made a good point. I mean, I worked hard for a lot of reasons, but when it came time to interact with or present to my colleagues and clients, I very much looked for positive validation of that sort. I didn't go into meetings literally trying to evoke such a response, but I was energetic, ambitious, and eager-to-please. That sort of an approach to work and ethic ostensibly results in positive reinforcement. So, when I would get a comment like that it would light me up inside.
As the recent client told my colleague, "That's a good point," I remembered the rush I used to get when receiving such comments, and wondered if he had felt a similar happy spike when the client said this to him, and in front of his boss (me) no less! Even more, it made me realize that such things no longer - or, at least, very very rarely - have any impact for me. I'm sure people still tell me I make good points from time to time. But I already know this. My quality and effectiveness are proven, and I am comfortable with them. I know I make good points. I also know I make bad points! But on balance, I understand and believe in myself, and someone else telling me I make a good point or am correct or insightful or whatever, now has become something that does not elicit any noticeable reaction in me, and certainly nothing like in the days when I was a young man and hearing such things could literally make my day.
I suppose I'm a little wistful that these sort of little reinforcements are no longer the source of a small piece of joy to me, but I appreciate the fact I can still identify such things, and remember the time not so long ago that this sort of a compliment would give me a smile, a tingle, and an extra bit of pep in my step.
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| "It is what it is": the "stuff" of a new generation |
| Friday May 16, 2008, 14:22 PM EST |
When I was a boy, the word "stuff" really bothered me. It was used frequently, and it didn't really "say" anything. A typical exchange would be something like:
A: "Hi B, what have you been doing today?"
B: "Oh, you know, work and stuff."
Or...
A: "So B, what sort of things are you interested in?"
B: "I like Transformers and G.I. Joe and stuff."
Or...
A: "Hey B, what did you guys do at the carnival?"
B: "All sorts of stuff!"
A: "Such as...???"
"Stuff" was a catch-all. As an overly precise little guy it drove me nuts that so many people said "stuff" in so many different contexts, in the process seeming to say nothing at all.
Fast-forward to the early 21st century. On the "reunion show" episode for last season's Top Chef (a guilty pleasure) they did a short spot making fun of how everyone on the show would say "It is what it is" and that it was a total cliche. And as they showed many, many clips of the various judges and participants saying "It is what it is" it did seem quite ridiculous. Either on that show or in some other context, I "learned" that the expression started in New York City. It may or may not have, but that is not the point. Soon I realized that I was using "It is what it is". Perhaps not a lot, but certainly more than I would like to. And if you are familiar with this phrase or you have heard it yourself, you likely know that it operates very similarly to "stuff". It rarely adds anything to an interpersonal communication. It is, superficially at least, a passive acknowledgement that whatever is being referred to is existential; that is, quite literally, what can be seen and perceived from whatever is being referred to is exactly what it is, without subtext. Unless it is used ironically, in which case the subtext is understood.
Clear as mud, right? Stick with me, I'm getting somewhere that is potentially interesting, if not important.
Recently I used "It is what it is" again and, frustrated for my linguistic laziness, spent a few minutes really trying to figure out why I use it. And, like a thunderbolt, it hit me: there is an enormous gap between what I intuitively see and understand about things, and what I am able to competently communicate to someone else in a socially convenient way. In the example that started me off on this whole process of deconstruction, I was witness to a low-level conflict that was ultimately not very important but which was dripping with context just below the surface. I had a lot of insights on very interwoven and even independently complex things such as:
* The motivators of one of the people involved
* The ego conflict of another of the people involved
* Divergent understandings of what was at stake
* Incompatible conflict resolution styles that made it harder to work toward an optimal-for-all resolution
* Past history (read: baggage) that further complicated the entire process
And the situation resolved itself in a very ugly and illogical way. I knew the reasons why, very clearly, but they dealt with psychological and sociological things that people typically don't understand unless far too much time is taken to provide excess context. Later I was asked about the conflict and I very succinctly shared the irrational final outcome, shrugged, and said "It is what it is." I just didn't want to take the time to throw out on the table all of the deeper inter-personal things I knew were going on with it.
Bingo! Now I understand! At least for me, "It is what it is" is my way of not trying to unpack all of the layers that I can see and understand but which can be difficult to explain, and even which many people are skeptical toward. It is walling off a certain block of content from being shared, either for reasons of time or ease or just sanity. It enables me to give a condensed report of things and tie off that which is not always easy to explain, or that I simply don't want to explain.
Now, go back 25+ years to "stuff". I believe the word and common use of "stuff" was a reaction to a consumer culture. In a world where the consideration set of things you can do or think about is increased exponentially from just a generation or two before, it is not necessarily easy to remember everything you did, or to take the time to examine and talk about everything. By saying "stuff", you are walling off the conversation, including just what is important to you, or easy to remember, or what you are comfortable saying. Rather than being the default generic response from a disinterested child to a trying-to-connect adult, it is a mechanism to enable people not to have to deconstruct the physical particulars around them in an increasingly complex and new world. Rather than the tool of a flabby mind that little eight year-old Dirk saw it as, "stuff" was the "It is what it is" of an earlier generation: a shorthand way to say, "I'm either unwilling or unable to go into any more detail than this." And it is almost certainly the product of a late-capitalist, consumer culture that was rapidly accumulating far, far, far more "stuff" than ever needed to be considered or dealt with in the year before it.
Doesn't make sense to you? Hey, I'm not making this stuff up. You want me to explain it in more detail? It is what it is!
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| Hypocrisy and hyperbole |
| Tuesday May 13, 2008, 19:25 PM EST |
I'm subscribed to the Wall Street Journal's News Alerts. I woke up this morning to one sent at 4:18 AM PT with the following lead-in:
"A monstrous scale of devastation is emerging from the Chinese region worst hit by yesterday's earthquake, and the government's ability to respond to the disaster may help define the kind of superpower China is in 2008."
The Wall Street Journal is published in the United States, these same United States that treated New Orleans and the myriad victims of Katrina as something less than what I would hope the lowest common denominator for "taking care of our own" would require. Yet, somehow, still amidst the rubble and ruin of that tragedy, the Journal dares to suggest that China should be judged or framed by their response to this event? How, precisely, would the Journal "define the kind of superpower" the U.S. is in that light?
At least, if Katrina is the benchmark, China does not have a very high standard to meet to define itself as an elite and appropriate superpower.
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| Found time |
| Tuesday May 13, 2008, 19:19 PM EST |
My favourite thing in the world just might be found time. What is found time, you ask? It is when you unexpectedly have a block of time that you thought you would be spending in a way you didn't particularly want but, surprisingly, suddenly becomes free for you to do what you may. An example would be when, earlier in my career, I went to a client's located about an hour-and-a-half away for a scheduled six hour meeting that turned out to be just two hours. While technically I should have gone back to the office, instead I (shhh - don't tell!) went home and worked on a personal project. And that represented some of the sweetest, most enjoyable hours I put into the entire project.
So it was that, last Friday, I was planning to go and see Iron Man with the rest of my company as a birthday celebration for those with April-ish birthdays. I'm not an action/special effects movie kind of guy, so I was only planning to go out of respect for the birthdays, the proverbial "taking one for the team". As it turned out, one of my clients needed some work that had to be done quickly that afternoon. It was enough to do so that there was just no way I would be able to make the movie, even though I was done with the work about two hours before everyone would return from the theatre. Instead, I took that opportunity to go to the gym, where I did my "usual" semi-daily run on the elliptical machine.
I have to say, a sweeter workout I never have had. I was relaxed, smiling, not a care in the world. The only difference that I can cite compared to my usual workout is that, instead of rushing to squeeze it in before my workday starts, or trying to carve out an hour sometime in the day to make it happen, or doing it on my way home and cutting into my cherished "home time" (and in all three of those examples rushing and watching the clock), it was found time. It was footloose, fancy-free, not-beholden-to-anyone time that was completely mine, without guilt, stress or constraint around it. Even better, it was in stark contrast to what I expected to be doing that afternoon, sitting in a dark movie theatre watching something I wasn't interested in.
I categorically, absolutely adore found time. I wish there were easy ways to "find" more of it!
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| Why I don't use Google to "Google" anymore |
| Thursday April 10, 2008, 16:55 PM EST |
Today it hit me that I rarely use search engines to find information anymore. The specific example is a little embarrassing: I was looking over the days' headlines and read, "No 'Secret': CBS cans show after one episode" next to a picture of former Star Trek actor George Takei. This jogged my memory about a commercial I had seen for a painful-looking and forgettable new TV show about low-level celebrities "showcasing" their hidden, unexpected skills in an American Idol-type setting. I had zero interest in watching the show but the fact it was canceled immediately pulled my "morbid curiosity" string and caused me to click in and read the article. There wasn't much to it, just spelling out the planned format with some granularity, reiterate that it was canceled, and briefly lamenting that Danny Bonaduce would not get to display his secret skills since he was scheduled to be on the second episode. Immediately I asked myself, "I wonder who won the only episode of this train wreck?" The article didn't tell me. Once upon a time, I would have then Googled the name of the show. But as time goes by I've learned that going to Google for such things will not necessarily answer my very explicit question. So, I went to Wikipedia and searched the name of the show instead.
Why Wikipedia? I've learned from past researching of TV-related things that they have pages for every show I've tried to research and tremendously granular information about them. They additionally are assiduous in listing the weekly and overall winners in reality shows, and generally provide a nice overview of what is going on. I knew that their page for this show would answer my question, and I was right. Indeed, not only did it outline why there wasn't a winner and why (it is a multi-week competition and voting had not concluded) but it had a lot of other information and was even updated with the show's cancellation status, updated approximately as quickly as the news site that started my journey in the first place.
And as I thought about it, that I went to Wikipedia as opposed to Google, it struck me that Google is quickly being displaced in my life. Here are some other examples from just the last few days, but which speak to a trend that reflects usage behaviours that cannot, long-term, be good for Google: More ...
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| Forgotten by history |
| Friday April 4, 2008, 18:09 PM EST |
When I was younger, I wanted to be famous. Not so much famous-for-famous-sake, but more because I intuitively understood that through fame I could stretch my essence beyond the bounds of my physical life, in some clumsy way thus living beyond my actual lifespan. This greatly eased my fear of death and gave me something to strive for.
At some point during my grad school experience of taking philosophy classes, the futility of this goal settled in. Even if the most famous among us extend themselves in some way beyond the time of their actual life, at some point in the future they will completely cease to exist. Even if there remains a sign of that person the signifier will be no more. Over the long now, memory dies away.
This was an initially difficult pill to swallow, but ultimately a liberating one. After all, if even Julius Caesar will someday cease to exist or have meaning, what is the point in chasing this sort of hollow "immortality"?
Fast-forward to today. As computers and the Internet begin capturing and codifying so many artifacts/moments/facts/etc. of humanity, the collective memory of what was and is here on Earth is getting longer. It is still ultimately terminal, but the infants of today can expect an almost shocking amount of "institutional memory" about them, ranging from written words to pictures to videos.
What is interesting to me is, by contrast, the way and degree to which older things are being left behind and have missed this particular boat. Here are some examples that I've been thinking about recently:
1. My grandfathers. They were both, during their time, world-famous men. My maternal grandfather, Morton Neipp, ran the democratic party in the state of Ohio, helped prosecute the mob out of my hometown of Toledo, and was personal friends with the top politicos of his day, including LBJ, RFK and Hubert Humphrey. In Toledo he was particularly well-known, and I became accustomed to multiple people coming up and shaking his hand when he would take me out to lunch. To this day I own an eclectic collection of trinkets from those relationships of his, such as whiskey glasses bearing the U.S. presidential seal, cuff links bearing the U.S. vice presidential seal, and countless newspaper clippings and stories about his exploits. Yet, according to Google, a search for "Morton Neipp" returns a scant 28 records. 28!
By contrast is my paternal grandfather, Siegfried Knemeyer. Even more internationally famous in his day, Siegfried invented the first-ever handheld flight computer and was known as the "Stargazer" in the German Luftwaffe due to his visionary and creative solutions to aeronautical challenges. By the end of World War 2 he ran the entire RLM (Reich Air Ministry) and was overseeing the work of Wernher Von Braun, who went on to architect the U.S. space program. After the war he was brought over to the United States where he helped pioneer next-generation airplane cockpit design, following his philosophy of designing for the ease and usability of the pilot. He was legitimately the finest mind in his field, a field that was arguably the most technologically and advanced transportation industry of the 20th century. He knew Charles Lindbergh and many of the other aviation luminaries of his day. Today, there exist 85 records for "Siegfried Knemeyer" on Google. 85!
These are only two examples, the examples that I am most personally familiar with and cognizant of. They made their names between the 1930s and 1960s. And today they are almost forgotten. Unless I or someone else who cares enough (read: family member) gets around to memorialize either of these men on Wikipedia or some other digital source(s) that would extend their essence, they are already close to being forgotten. If they had lived just one generation later, they would be remembered in many thousands of instances. They simply missed the digital cliff.
2. I'm something of an information junkie, and a bit of a historian. So with the things I'm inteterested in, I tend to poke around and look under the hood and try to get as much information as I can. Two examples of this are with movies and music. For example, when I'm watching a movie, I will simultaneously research the actors, director, and all of the various leads that spring from them on resources like imdb.com and Wikipedia. And the juxtaposition between the contemporary versus the past is significant. Jon-Erik Hexum, an actor who died in an on-set accident in 1984, does not even have a picture on IMDB despite being one of the hottest actors around at the time of his premature death. Meanwhile, a perfectly fine but ultimately unimportant actress like Ileana Douglas has 64 pictures in the system. Hexum simply missed the digital age, and the relative decay of his being and memory are greatly accelerated because of it.
Every day, things are being forgotten. At greatest risk now from a movie or music perspective would be pre-World War 2 artifacts, those that clearly pre-dated digital technology and which are not necessarily historically important enough to be remembered beyond those who actually experienced them. As each older person dies or ceases to remember, that serves as the end of those artifacts. Other than the synthesis of new things that were built on their being, they have completely ceased to exist. Digital technology might be slowing this process, particularly in years ahead when normally it would be only within memories or long-lost books that these things still exist. But now, today, there is this bizarre chasm between the reams of information being collected on the mundane and un-notable of today, even as things of (relative recent) past value and importance vanish.
3. I continue to get amazing, insightful emails from people who used to know my father many years ago and learned recently that he passed away, in many cases discovering this only through my website. For those past generations, those who haven't en masse signed up for Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace and other types of online services, they are unlikely to find or connect with one another in life. There is not institutionalized behaviour, pattern, expectation and method from which to find and communicate with each other. Whereas it would be impossible for me to imagine not being a couple of clicks away from contacting anyone from my past, for older generations those same, seamless channels don't exist. They are left to the traditional and seemingly quaint "method" of maybe or maybe not reconnecting with old friends, maybe or maybe not learning that old friends have passed away. In observing this happen with my father's peer group in the wake of his death, I'm struck by the poignancy and sadness of this. If only I could help turn back time and give my father one last chance to meet those people again, to reminisce one last time, to share what they mutually meant to one another. But time marches on. IUt will never happen. If nothning else, please learn from my lack of opportunity and encourage your own parents to seek out and re-connect with those that matter to them!
As I learned some 12 years ago now in graduate school, decay and disappearance is the eventual destiny of everyone and everything. But especially in these examples, in things that are still nearly removed, and intensely personal, and directly relevant to not just our memories but our lives today, the disappearance and obsolescence certainly matters. Again in the wake of my father's death, and as I am now a middle-aged adult who is trying to understand their cosmic place in the long now, I find myself railing against the boundaries of time. What I wouldn't give to get one evening with Morton, or one evening with Siegfried. The questions I have for them as an adult, as a fully formed person who wants to better understand the seeds from which I spawned, really matter and would provide me with insight and tools completely incommensurate with the relatively brief time being spent with those people would require. To see their facial expressions! Hear their voice inflection! To understand what motivated them, and who and what they became! Similarly, I wonder who was my great great great grandfather was? What could I learn from him? How could I bend time to have that conversation?
Sadly, for me, these channels and paths will likely never exist. But perhaps through these newfangled digital technologies I can leave some record or capturing of myself that enlightens my far future offspring. Rather than chasing immortality for its own sake, I now appreciate the importance of communication and continuity through generations, and fully understand the power and significance that a detailed record of previous generations can shine onto and into those that follow. How and if I am able to eventually capitalize on that remains to be seen, and I can only hope that my making the time and taking the action precedes my death and the immediate and eventual decay that will necessarily follow, until I am also, finally, forgotten by history.
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| A simple take on global warming |
| Thursday April 3, 2008, 16:29 PM EST |
Disclaimer and background: I'm no expert. I pay attention, I listen, I think. I'm pretty well convinced that we're headed toward a crash course with global warming in a highly deliterious way to our and other species, but I don't know if that is 5 or 50 or 500 years away. I understand the idea of "carbon footprint" and have a clumsy idea of how the relationship between carbon and global warming works.
However, I also think the whole thing is more complicated than it needs to be. And - importantly - I also do not see how even the most aggressive reductions and behaviour changes coming from mainstream sources can even begin to be adequate to turn around what seems to be a runaway train (good bye, size of Connecticut ice shelf in Antarctica this week!).
So, lets forget carbon for a second. Lets try and think about and understand global warming at the most basic level. More ...
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| American Airlines: a customer service black hole |
| Thursday April 3, 2008, 15:48 PM EST |
I'm in the midst of a nasty flu, the worst illness that I can remember having as an adult. I began feeling ill last Tuesday, tried to fight thru it because of some things that I needed to take care of, before finally becoming incapacitated on Thursday. I felt like warm death through Sunday, and since Monday have felt sick but no longer in bad pain and constant discomfort. All of this happened while I was on a blended business and personal trip back home to Ohio.
On that Saturday, while still firmly in the worst of it, I was scheduled to fly back to California. Realizing my unfitness to fly I called American Airlines to see what my options were to fly on a later day. They did have some openings on other flights Sunday or Monday but would require a whopping $980 to change my ticket, $880 for the fare difference and $100 for the change fee. This was a fee I could not afford, so I asked if they had a policy to let people who were sick change flights at an affordable price point. After all, it was certainly not in American's best interest for me to be flying, coughing loudly, and potentially getting people seated around me sick. He checked with his supervisor, told me no, and told me to have a nice day. If only! More ...
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| Rosenfeld Media's first publications |
| Tuesday March 25, 2008, 12:13 PM EST |
One of the things I'm currently involved with is the Advisory Board for Rosenfeld Media, Lou Rosenfeld's user experience publishing company. Besides giving me another opportunity to work on something with Lou, which is always a good thing, I'm working on the AB with a group of really smart people. So it goes that, after a couple years of preparation and internal growth, the first books are being published and are now available: Indi Young's "Mental Models" was released about six weeks ago, and Luke Wroblewski's "Web Form Design" is set to hit the streets in about four weeks. Wow, these books are really living up to the promise of Lou's vision, back when this thing got started!
One of the things I like best about RM books is the book design. The size, length and presentation feature a lot of good design decisions that make the books easy and enjoyable to read. Also, being focused on specific and practically applicable topics, the books not only teach readers high-level concepts and principles but inculcate useful best practices. The design extends beyond the print version to the PDFs as well which are designed differently and optimized for use on the screen. More ...
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| The virtue of this website |
| Tuesday January 8, 2008, 18:31 PM EST |
Despite the fact that I do not regularly post here anymore, this website continues to be an amazingly effective mechanism for creating new relationships, and for forging closer relationships with people new and old. Over the past few years I've met multiple "long lost" first cousins, people who are interested in archival information about my grandfather, new friends, new clients, and more. Additionally, a surprisingly large percentage of new people I meet now have visited this site and have kind/thoughtful/empathetic things to say about my father's death and my eulogizing of him.
This site - which was originally on another domain and has content that precedes the archives of what you read here - was toward the front end of the personal blogging trend and preceded the rise of MySpace and later Friendster. While I don't think I would have chosen those outlets for my thoughts and sharing instead of this one if they had been available, I do wonder if those formats would have enabled me to share in the same way as I have here. I tend not to think so. The structure and intentional "social network" nature of those applications and the communities that have sprung up around them do not really lend themselves to deep, introspective sharing. The kind of long, written communication that I do here on the very top level is buried beneath layers of menu options and chrome, hard-to-access at best and largely ignored at worst.
As time has passed and I have changed, neither the design or structure of this site suits who I am or what I'd really like to accomplish here. And I suppose that contributes to my malaise with regard to writing. However, it remains an outlet where I can write and publish with both ease and impunity, and serves as an archive of things that still seem meaningful or important - at least to some people. I feel really blessed for the new relationships this site has facilitated, and serves as a living reminder of why it is important to continue. I suspect the best of what I have to do here is still to come, but it remains unclear what and when exactly that might be.
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| An answer to the fella who emailed me about starting a new company |
| Friday November 30, 2007, 18:15 PM EST |
Thanks to my upwards of 20,000 piece of Spam email each day, there are ostensibly failures in my personal email process. So it goes that an email from a gainfully employed person recently asking me questions about starting his own company vanished from my email sometime after I read it but before I responded to it. And I can't find it in my Trash, my Junk, my server-side Spam filters...it just appears to be vapor. So, to the best of my memory of the questions asked, here is my answer. I hope you get it. Feel free to email me again at the same email address if I can help you further.
When you are currently employed but thinking about or even working on a new product of your own, ownership of that product can be sticky. First off, most major corporations make new employees sign contracts upon their hire which would most likely, in a court of law, give that employer rights or ownership over products, companies or other creations that the employee created while still under employment. While this is likely meaningless or not even applicable if, for instance, you are working as an engineer at a software company and are opening up a Starbucks franchise on the side, in cases where there is overlap, adjacency or even similarity between the original employer and the new venture is a legal minefield waiting to happen. So, if you have or even may have signed anything around intellectual property, non-compete, or anything else that is even remotely similar, be very careful.
The other much more common and squishy space is when you have not signed anything around IP or competition but you develop a company or product that overlaps, is adjacent or similar to what your employer does. Especially if you are successful or the idea is really sound, there is the possibility that they might come knocking on your door. Now, I am not an attorney or an expert on these matters by any means, but I have some experience just outside of these situations happening with other people and they can be really ugly. Even if your previous employer does not "win", the very challenge and the legal gymnastics that go with it can be enough to potentially derail what you are trying to do.
That is all a long way of saying: if you want to do your own thing, leave your current employer before developing the ideas. Its just safer. In the event that you can't (or won't, for some reason) make a clean transition, just keep asking yourself questions like: "If my boss found out about this, would they see it as a conflict of interest? If someone else in the corporation found out about my idea, would they see it as a conflict of interest?" If you find yourself answering yes to any of these questions, you are taking a chance that might not be worth taking.
Is this perspective a little conservative? Sure, I guess. But its safe in a context where the downside is disastrous. And, its ethical. Which can never hurt.
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| Introducing: Involution Master Academy |
| Wednesday September 26, 2007, 13:59 PM EST |
I'm pleased to announce my most recent project: Involution Master Academy, an educational program for mid-career software professionals who take their career seriously. For Fall 2007 we are offering a pilot group of three courses, taught by some of the best-known people in their areas of expertise.
My business partner, Andrei Herasimchuk, is teaching a one-day Product Architecture Symposium; Steve Portigal is teaching a one-night-a-week-for-six-weeks course on Design Research Methods; Luke Wroblewski and Tom Chi are teaching a one-day course on Influencing Strategy by Design. Needless to say, we are very excited about this teaching line-up.
The best thing about these classes? Each class is capped out at a maximum nine students for every one instructor. That is literally unprecedented in our industry: courses that engage the students so deeply with a top thought leader. The focus is on acquiring real, practical skills, not just learning principles and hearing aspirational speeches. Whereas people who attend the myriad conferences out there might come away with insight, awareness, and enthusiasm, our approach lets participants roll up their sleeves over a relatively long period of time in a tiny class and working side-by-side with their very senior instructors. It is a unique approach to post-secondary education, and one that firmly values quality of education and training over maximizing profits.
This is only the beginning for Involution Master Academy. Additional courses will be offered next year, eventually building to a full curriculum of expert knowledge and skills for software professionals. But this is an outstanding start, and these are courses that people who need to develop skills in any of these areas will seriously benefit from. Check it out, get signed up and, as always, let me know if you have any questions!
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| A Broken Experience: when progressive thinking runs amok |
| Wednesday September 12, 2007, 16:05 PM EST |
Product by product, Yahoo! is slowly losing my business.
Ever since the so-called "Ajax" phenomenon, Yahoo! has been a leader in the software industry of trying to weave JavaScript magic. Leveraging their legions of talented software professionals, the company redesigns one product after another, in most cases heavily using JavaScript and various fancy tools and design decisions in order to provide a superior experience.
While well-intentioned, in reality it is a case of letting theory and big thinking grind the practical user experience into oblivion.
The latest example is what was formerly one of my most-used products on the Internet, Yahoo! Local. On at least a weekly basis I would call up Local and use it to find some sort of business in the San Jose area. Being relatively new to the SF Bay area, I do not know where the best restaurants are, or where to get particular supplies or tools that I might need from time-to-time. So, I hit Yahoo! Local and quickly and easily found what I was looking for. It wasn't a perfect product, and I certainly had suggestions to make it better, but it worked well. And, more importantly to Yahoo!, I kept coming back to use it.
Please note the past tense; Yahoo! has lost my business.
Superficially, the redesign of Local looks a lot better. It is more visually appealing and has corrected some information problems with the old version. But where Yahoo! jumped the tracks is in their attempt to improve usability by making the map with plotted results in the right column "move" as you scroll up and down the page. While a good idea IN THEORY, in practice it is completely broken. When I use web pages, I hold down my left mouse button while scrolling the screen up and down. Now, thanks to the fancy-dancy JavaScript, my browser does not scroll normally when I do this. It alternately does not move up-and-down at all or "jerks" up-and-down in a very unappealing way. For the way I use my web browser, this is entirely unusable.
This is becoming de rigeur at Yahoo!. When they updated their mail client a year or two ago - again going with a theoretically better, JavaScript-as-steroids heavyweight redesign - the performance was even worse. I simply stopped using Y! Mail until I eventually learned there was an option to go back to Classic and did so post haste. They're just lucky I didn't catch the gmail bug in between.
And don't rationalize this as my being a Luddite or not comfortable with rich interfaces: my company designs software products, and we frequently use very rich interfaces. But we only do so if the performance of the final product measures up to the theoretical benefit of the idea. It is sad that a company as large as Yahoo!, which values the user experience and invest sosososososo much money in myriad UX professionals across the organization - continues to make these fundamental mistakes and release products that are clunkers. The applied technology in the context of my browser (Firefox for Mac, latest version) simply does not provide a good user experience. And the customers are left to suffer for it.
But not me. I'll bet that Google has a comparable product that will eliminate my need for Y! Local. I'm gonna go check it out right now...
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| Facebook Follies |
| Thursday August 23, 2007, 17:11 PM EST |
I'm a passive user of Facebook, which is to say that I have an account, have spent 10 minutes or so filling out profile info, but otherwise only use it to accept Friend requests that other people make of me. So it was today that, for whatever reason, I ended up on my main Facebook page and gave it a quick scan.
It was the typical stuff that I'm not terribly interested in: Twitter-level short blurbs about what people are doing on Facebook. Only this time, I did a double take. Here is the content within my News Feed, with names changed to protect the innocent:
***
Jane Doe added the Define Me application.
John Smith joined the group Plazes.
Jane Doe added the Group Recipes application.
John Smith joined the group NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network
John Smith and Bob Jones are now friends.
John Smith updated his profile. He is now looking for random play and whatever I can get.
John Smith is now married.
Jane Doe added the Hangouts application.
John Smith and Alex Adams are now friends.
***
So, which of these things is not like the other?! Of course, it is the fact that John Smith got married. Yet, using the exact same fonts and emphasis, differing only in the specific, tiny 16x16 icon similar to all of the other "News" items, John Smith being married is buried amidst a pile of crap.
This is Big Real-Life News! John Smith is only a very casual acquaintance but - my goodness - the fact that he is now married is perhaps - and this is my literal estimate of relative importance - 5,000,000 times more important than any other item on this interminable list of who had made new friends on Facebook or what Facebook application my various friends are using.
Please, Facebook, give me some information hierarchy! Give me a fighting chance to realize that someone got married, amidst the endless droning of completely irrelevant announcements and (non-)events.
In the meantime, I'm going to congratulate my friend. He's married! How exciting!
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| Withdrawal |
| Sunday July 1, 2007, 16:25 PM EST |
My sons visited recently, spending three straight weeks here in California with Fran and I. It was an amazing experience: this was the longest consecutively that we've been together since I moved out of their house back in 1999. I only had them for weekends when I lived on my own in Ohio, and the longest trip they've previously taken to visit me since I moved away was less than two weeks. So this was a very special - and new - experience.
Of course, we did many of the requisite California things. Both boys absolutely love the beach so we spent a good chunk of two of our weekends together hitting the sand and surf. On one of the trips, Brandon and Fran took a surfing lesson which they both really enjoyed. Another one of their favourite things to do out here is eat ethnic food: at home, they get a steady diet of standard American cuisine, punctuated by such unusual extravagances as hamburger or chicken. Yet, they have a great affinity for various ethnic cuisines and we take the opportunity to feed them as many different things as we are able, since they get little-to-none of this back home. Their favourite is Indian.
We also spent a lot of time playing different games together, ranging from Ticket to Ride (my favourite that we play together) to Risk to a cool Pirates game using constructible ships to Alibi and beyond. This was perhaps what I enjoyed most as it set a very family-oriented rhythm to our activities: I would come home, prepare dinner (which we would all eat together) and then move into playing games. Or taking a walk, or watching movies. But, regardless of what we were doing, we were operating as a unit. This is a dramatic departure from my typical solitary evenings at home and was really quite fulfilling, even moreso because it was centered around my beautiful sons.
So it was a lovely three weeks, but now it is over. Although my being sososo busy at work is keeping me somewhat distracted, I'm nonetheless feeling withdrawal pangs due to their absence. I'm a family kind of guy, and returning to the status quo sans my sons is really tough. Still, our time together was excellent and rather than dwell on the lack I'm going to cherish what we had, while ostensibly anticipating the next time.
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| Time and change |
| Tuesday May 8, 2007, 1:39 AM EST |
In recent weeks I've had neither the interest nor energy to do any writing beyond what is absolutely necessary in a professional context. And its a shame, for I'm in a really lovely little professional place: working with clients and co-workers that I enjoy, designing or directing some really interesting products, and immersed in the exciting process of building out and furnishing our sweet new digs. Tonight, finishing up a very full and somewhat intense day that included: interviewing a design candidate, meeting with a client, doing some design, teleconferencing with a prospect, dozens of emails going in both directions and many various business-management-ish activities, I put in a solid 11 hour day and feel absolutely energized by the fun of it all. And still, I'm not compelled to write about any of it.
On the other hand, what writing I have done recently has been largely personal in nature. And such is the impetus for dusting off the keyboard and doing a little writing right now. More ...
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| Patterns and dreams |
| Sunday April 1, 2007, 14:08 PM EST |
Lately my dreams have been unusually sharp and - at least the ones I can remember - consistently involve the same two elements:
1. Poker. As my friends know, poker has been one of my preferred leisure activities over the last four or five years. Recently, I haven't been playing much as I ran through a rough patch and burnt through my assigned bankroll. But, in my dreams, I always seem to be playing in poker tournaments (which is unusual, because I am almost exclusively a cash game player). The dreams are less about the mechanics of playing hands and more about situations; for example, in one dream I was one of the big leaders in a tournament when it ended for the day. The next day, before the action started, I met a new friend and was hanging out with them. When I finally got to the table, almost all of my chips had been "blinded off" and I panickedly tried to make something happen and fight my way back - unsuccessfully. This is just one example, with no particular thread or theme between them. But in each case they are dealing with situations that are unusual or not even possible in the ways and context that I typically play poker.
2. The house I grew up in. My dreaming self spends a lot of time in our old home, lately. And again, the contexts are very different from reality. Last night my dream involved bathing in the walk-in closet in the guest bedroom (?), and the dream also featured actress Mary McDonnell. I must also be channeling Battlestar Galactica for some reason!
I'm not coalescing any particular deeper meaning or significance from these things but wanted to write them down, for my own institutional memory as much as for sharing.
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| Musing on inevitabilities and unanswerable questions |
| Sunday April 1, 2007, 5:35 AM EST |
I go through most of my life in what I can only term a sleepwalking emotional state. This is a coping mechanism. My emotional receptors are naturally hyperactive: I both take in too much of what is happening around me, and I internally contextualize the many inputs around Big and Difficult Questions that are central to my emotional core. After struggling to function this way I learned at a fairly young age how to shut these receptors off, and now I adopt a variety of routines to keep them dormant. One consequence of this compensatory behaviour is that my typically active emotional receptors are greatly subdued, to such a degree that - in the uncommon times they are turned back on - it makes me feel like a completely different person and can be rather overwhelming. This is not a complaint so much as a statement of fact: turning them off enables me to function and succeed in society and the constraints of day-to-day reality, while perhaps at the expense of the parts inside that I consider most special.
I share this context so that my questions and lamentations from tonight will make more sense, as it simultaneously reflects both the way I naturally process and behave emotionally, and something that - over the past 20 years or so - I've conditioned out of my life to the point that they only get turned back on once every couple or few years.
So it was that we were watching Donnie Darko tonight. I'm not sure what perfect storm of the life-and-death complexities/time traveling/1980s setting and culture of the story created this moment, but the experience of watching much of the movie ripped open my many dormant emotional receptors and took me on a haunting roller coaster of introspection worthy of my own personal wailing wall. More ...
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| Big News #3: Involution buys a building |
| Tuesday March 27, 2007, 19:28 PM EST |
Today the closing papers were finalized and we received the keys on a new building now owned by my company, Involution Studios: a 3,600 square foot space in Sunnyvale, California. Located at 1294 Kifer Road, we're right in the heart of Silicon Valley and easily accessible by highway or CalTrain. Buying a building is an enormous step in the evolution of a small business, and the fact that we're in the position to do so after less than three years in business is a testament to the exceptional work done by our entire team.
Our next step is to build out the space, a process that looks like it is going to take about six weeks to complete. But once it's finished we're going to have one of the most pimped-out spaces for digital product design around. The most important part of this move for us was a determination to provide an outstanding work environment that our team looks forward to coming into every day, maximizing not only our collective productivity but also our individual happiness and lifestyle. Once it's all complete I will share pictures (likely via Flickr) and there might even be a party.
Go, Invo, Go!!!
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| Lessons from Spivot #2: Quality over Quantity |
| Thursday March 15, 2007, 13:22 PM EST |
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This is another topic that looks MUCH different from the ownership side than the service provider side. As a service provider, I am very well disciplined in helping clients control scope: start with a smaller product that works well, then systematically expand features once you have a tight and stable working version out in the market. It just makes sense, and we've had some excellent successes with our services company Involution Studios, counseling and guiding clients in this way. And yet, now that I'm serving as an owner as opposed to a consultant, this little bit of logic did not seem so cut-and-dried. More ...
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| Lessons From Spivot #1: The Power of Users |
| Wednesday March 14, 2007, 1:25 AM EST |
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I've long been an advocate of designing for users. I encourage investment in research and employ design processes that include regular and ongoing feedback from the actual people who will be using the ultimate product. Superficially, realizing how powerful and important users are would not seem to be a lesson that I need to learn. But, wow, I only knew part of the story. More ...
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| Rosenfeld Media: a burgeoning user experience powerhouse |
| Wednesday March 14, 2007, 1:16 AM EST |
One of the many things I'm involved with is Rosenfeld Media, the user experience publishing company founded by Lou Rosenfeld in 2005.
For those of you who don't know Lou, he's as good as it gets. Passionate, dedicated, smart and humble, he's a close professional colleague who I wish lived in my neck of the woods so we could hang out more and be closer friends. He is also a pioneer in the field of information architecture - the co-author of the seminal book on the subject - and a key influencer in the field of user experience. We serve together on the Board of UXnet and he has contributed meaningfully to a number of other industry non-profit organizations. It was an honor to be invited to serve on the Advisory Board of his company.
I'm writing about Lou and Rosenfeld Media now because the company is flirting with a tipping point (sorry, I know that's not a trendy term anymore) of exerting really important influence in the field of user experience. Consider the assets RM has already accumulated: More ...
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| Big News #2: Involution adds a third partner |
| Saturday March 10, 2007, 16:33 PM EST |
Of my three major professional announcements, this is the one I'm most excited about: Benjamin G. Listwon has joined Andrei and myself as a principal and co-owner in Involution Studios.
Ben joined our company on a contract basis in November of 2005, serving as the lead product designer for one of our start-up clients. He quickly took leadership over all of our corporate IT and engineering while working on client projects. He engaged with Andrei and I through a brainstorming process about possible new software products we could build and develop, eventually resulting in Spivot (which Ben engineered). Like Andrei and myself, Ben is passionate about design. However, whereas I bring a business focus to design, and Andrei brings a pure design focus to design, Ben brings an engineering focus to design. It makes for a powerful triumvirate, each of us valuing and expert in complementary aspects of design. More ...
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| Big News #1: Introducing Spivot |
| Monday March 5, 2007, 14:00 PM EST |
I'm thrilled to share with you that my company, Involution Studios, has just released our first 100% internally built product: Spivot.
Spivot is an all-purpose media reader, providing a uniquely integrated media experience. It brings together the functionality of news aggregation (Google News), with social news (Digg), with the functionality of a feed aggregation tool (Bloglines). Our goal is to connect people with the media they want, when and how they want it. Here is a partial list of features: More ...
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| big Big BIG! |
| Friday February 23, 2007, 20:55 PM EST |
Over the next ~2 months I will have (at least) three major announcements to share, each one in and of itself constituting a very large, extremely significant development in my professional life. Intrigued? I hope so. And it will also help explain why I've been so quiet the last couple of months.
In the meantime, be careful out there!
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| Two Pointers |
| Wednesday November 15, 2006, 23:39 PM EST |
1. For more than a year now, one of my favourite business proofs for the value of design and user experience was research done by the Design Council UK, illustrating how companies that focus and spend more on design have greater stock market success. Its a really elegant - and effective - proof. So I was surprised and thrilled to learn (via InfoDesign) that hotshot Canadian user experience firm Teehan+Lax has created their own UX stock fund. Not surprisingly, they are dramatically outperforming the S&P 500 so far. It is smart and inspiring, check it out!
2. One of the presenters at the STLUX conference was Dave Grey, CEO of XPLANE, "the visual thinking company." I've been a fan of XPLANE since first discovering them in 2002, and Dave's presentation on re-thinking meetings was an interesting exercise. But I'm mentioning Dave because he did an absolutely fascinating thing as a participant at the conference: he took visual notes, sketching the presenters and interweaving our comments and examples with his visual narrative. Really cool stuff, even if his excellent sketches leave me feeling a little self-conscious: has my face really gotten that fat?!
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| As difference reveals similarity, perceptions begin to unravel |
| Thursday November 2, 2006, 14:46 PM EST |
The three most common attributes of successful investors are, according to Michael Mauboussin, the Chief Investment Officer for Legg Mason Funds:
1. A focus on process versus outcome
2. A constant search for favourable odds
3. Understanding the role of time
Which upon reading immediately made me think, "But couldn't you argue those are among the most important attributes for a successful designer?" Which led me to inspect that thesis further and conclude, "Aren't those attributes universally important to almost any endeavour that does not have a specific, defined absolute outcome?"
First, to validate the connection (since the language of finance is generally foreign to the language of design), here is how each of the three apply to the cornerstones of design activity:
1. A focus on process versus outcome
This one is obvious on its face. A consistent theme among great designers is a focus on process and experimentation as opposed to a specific outcome. There are no surprises here.
2. A consistent search for favourable odds
Odds? What does a designer care for odds? Well, a designer is attempting to arrive at the most appropriate possible solution for their design challenge. This inherently involves constructing a solution that, both on a component and complete basis, is successful. The process involves considering many, many possibilities to varying degrees before settling on the ones that appear to be most right. While the context is different (i.e. not with a numerical/monetary endpoint similar to an investor's settling on their conclusion of what investments lay the best odds), the DNA of the motivation and activity are essentially the same: It is a process of whittling down, of beginning with many possibilities before ultimately executing only a few.
3. Understanding the role of time
The role of time is absolutely essential to design. How much degredation will a material or item sustain as a result of the passage of time? How much time will it take someone to complete their desired task with a product or experience? How will styles and tastes change with the passage of time and completely alter the perception people have of the design, despite the design itself not changing? These are foundational, fundamental considerations for a designer. Typically, time is the enemy of design for these and other reasons, and it is incumbent upon the designer to understand and harnass time, even using it to our advantage whenever possible. I will go so far as to say the role of time is the most important external and unchangeable force on design. For once a design is "complete" (in those contexts where design culminates in a "final" product), it is the effects of time that largely dictate how it is perceived, how it evolves, and the degree to which it succeeds or fails. Is it timeless or trendy? Helpful or clumsy? Long-lasting or ephemeral?
So with kind thanks and respect to Michael Mauboussin, here is my gently revised three most attributes for successful investing design:
1. A focus on process versus outcome
2. A constant search for better solutions
3. Understanding the role of time
How truly different are investing and designing? Dare I say that the Wall Street power suits and ubercool designers-in-black may be much more alike than we've been conditioned to consider?
And contextualizing this in design is only the first layer of unpeeling the onion: this basic structure holds up very well as a process and foundation for many different vocations and activities that do not have an absolute and defined outcome (such as accounting, where there is only one best, correct and legal answer, or most manufacturing disciplines, where creating a specific, exact and precise end product is the goal).
This, then, opens up much larger questions such as: other than the materials being used, what is the difference between designing and investing? (Careful...once you acknowledge that the materials being used are different it is not as easy as it seems to argue that the activities themselves are otherwise fundamentally different!) Or bigger questions like, are things that seem superficially different in the world truly different in any meaningful or sustainable way? And if we've constructed our reality around those things being different, if we begin to see them as the same, how does that change our fundamental realities? This can quickly fan out to cover the most contentious and fundamental beliefs and perceptions we have, ranging from religious to ethnic to cultural to values to science and beyond.
Of course, I am not doing the profundity of the issue justice in this humble medium. But these are fun, profound and important questions, worthy of deep conversation in comfortable chairs while drinking good scotch. Talisker, anyone?
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| Silver Linings |
| Wednesday November 1, 2006, 14:57 PM EST |
During dad's ordeal and in the aftermath of his death there were a number of good things that happened: I got to know or get reacquainted with some of my parent's friends; all of my father's siblings - each of whom I've only met once or twice - were in close contact and visiting, allowing all of us to spend time together and make connections; people in my life stepped forward and thru some form of compassion, consideration or empathy showed parts of themselves that not only helped me but made me appreciate them more deeply. And I even got to spend a lot of time with my sons which is always my very favourite thing to do.
These are independently valuble examples that collectively represent people becoming closer. More ...
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| Finding equilibrium |
| Friday October 27, 2006, 2:02 AM EST |
A little over three weeks have passed since Dad departed and I finally feel like I've reached a point of stability. I haven't finished reconciling everything that has happened - not by a long shot. But I've caught up enough professionally that I can see light shining around the edges of the massive "to do" piles in front of me. And I'm getting back into a routine that portends superficial normalcy. These two small things have had a very positive impact on my state of mind.
There have been so many things I've wanted to write about for a while now, but the idea of taking what's in my mind and putting it to paper (or pixels, as it were) has proven too large a gap to bridge. Now, I'm getting close to the point of expressing myself publicly again. That's another good sign. Of course, one of the things I really want to write is a post to memorialize Dad. But I'm nowhere near ready to do that yet.
Its funny: two days before I first learned about Dad's condition I was going to write a post talking about how I was ready to make a big step forward in my life, firing on all cylinders and tackling new and significant challenges. Today, how naive that state of mind seemed, and how sober I feel.
In any event, I'm coping well I think and am returning to some form of normalcy.
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| Dad passed away this evening |
| Monday October 2, 2006, 23:52 PM EST |
It was quiet and peaceful and he wasn't in any pain. I'll be in Toledo thru the weekend helping to wrap things up. I will post a memorial to him in the Heart section once I've had some time to grieve.
My deepest thanks and gratitude to everyone who has reached out to dad, mom, Karen and myself during this ordeal.
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| An update as I prepare to head home |
| Wednesday September 27, 2006, 14:02 PM EST |
Over the past six days dad has been on a bit of a roller coaster about what is going to happen. Late last week he decided that the conclusion he reached at the end of three weeks of testing in the hospital - to go to Hospice and die relatively quickly and peacefully - was made in the duress of the situation and that he actually wanted to fight. Since then we've gone through a process of tests, a doctor's visit, a trip back to the hospital, two days of deliberating, and finally a decision. This morning he elected to try radiation treatment. This specifically means that he is abandoning any hope of recovery (which would have been a chemotherapy option, which had very very little hope of success) but is electing to endure some short-term discomfort in the hopes of a temporarily improved quality of life, and perhaps extending his life some months beyond the current "weeks, perhaps a month or two" prognosis.
As always, thanks for your kind thoughts and well wishes. I will post any updates here as appropriate.
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| Hospital care desperately needs design |
| Friday September 22, 2006, 18:27 PM EST |
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There have been a lot of things broken during my father's encounters with the health care system over the last two weeks (and even previously before that, considering he was misdiagnosed in a way that has now made it impossible for him to recover). But among the most egregious of all was the method and content of communication while he was in the hospital getting tests to determine what exactly his problem was. More ...
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| Heading back to San Jose next week |
| Friday September 22, 2006, 16:11 PM EST |
I'm tentatively scheduled to return to San Jose next Wednesday, returning to Toledo on Friday October 13.
My father's condition is variable right now: in addition to the cancer there are issues surrounding his kidney function, which is ultimately the part that could end things pretty quickly. There is also a possibility that he will now accept treatment, which he previously declined. So things are changing on a near-daily basis, and we don't have any solid answers or information at this point. It is all very day-to-day.
My sister and I are trading off being home for the time being in order to support our mom who is the primary caregiver and is exhausted in pretty much every possible way. Bless her strength, as she soldiers on without complaint and with an always positive and empathetic demeanor.
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| Heading Home for Now |
| Sunday September 17, 2006, 23:18 PM EST |
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My father's condition is deteriorating quickly and I am heading back to Toledo on Tuesday, duration TBD. Many thanks to all of you who have shown concern and support during this difficult time.
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| Presentations |
| Saturday September 16, 2006, 23:00 PM EST |
November 10, 2006
My slides from the St. Louis User Experience Conference (The Future of Digital Product Design) are located here. More ...
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| Adjusting and Sorrow |
| Saturday September 16, 2006, 23:47 PM EST |
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My 67 year old father was recently diagnosed with inoperable stage four cancer, and we're trying to adjust to this unexpected and devastating news and its effect on our family. So if you don't hear from me much lately or if I'm not responding to things as quickly as usual, sadly this is why. Thanks in advance for your kind thoughts and prayers.
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| Living in harmony with machines |
| Wednesday August 30, 2006, 14:08 PM EST |
Today I had to send a fax to a friend, but the fax machine and I just couldn't get along. The first couple of tries the number rang busy, then it rang thru but wouldn't successfully send (neither of these the fax machine's fault, by the way). But I was losing time trying to figure this out and beginning to get irritated. So unfortunately the fax machine chose this moment to start getting jammed. Every. Single. Time. I. Tried. To. Send. This. Bloody. Fax. My irritation is pretty obvious, yes? Even moreso for the fax machine! Impatience turned into cursing; cursing turned into actually hitting the machine. Yes, I was the one who looked ridiculous. No, it wasn't making any difference (other than unintentionally prompting a co-worker to see what was going on and help me figure out what the problem was: hurrah for working with people who are smarter than me!)
I've never had tolerance when machines fail to complete the tasks I want. It's a failing, and one that often keeps me in some degree of disharmony. Even as I've matured and curbed much of the braoder angst from my youth there are still the periodic edges of green that manifest in largely benign (if counter-productive) ways. But I think an important battle will be won at the point I can exist in harmony with even the least compliant of machines that I'm relying on to help me.
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| Graduation and variance |
| Monday August 28, 2006, 17:13 PM EST |
As my friends and followers know, poker has become my primary leisure activity over the past few years. And what I'm finding is that the more I play, and the better I get, the higher of stakes I'm playing for. Consider this basic evolution:
2003 - 3-6 and 5-10 limit games
2005 - $100 max buy-in no limit games
2006 (Spring) - $200 max buy-in spread limit games
2006 (August) - $500 max buy-in spread limit games
That's a pretty steep curve - at least for me, who has taken a conservative approach to my poker playing. More ...
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| We are the choices that we make |
| Thursday August 24, 2006, 13:53 PM EST |
I've spent the last more than two years without an automobile. That was a choice based on a few things, each holding approximately equal weight:
* Unnecessary. When I lived in Boston (and initially dropped my car) I was working out of the home and within walking distance to the grocery store, post office, restaurants and other necessary destinations, plus had access to Fran's car when necessary. Now in San Jose we live literally right behind the CalTrain station, which can take me to most of the towns between San Jose and San Francisco, albeit with limited mobility once I get to those places.
* Inconvenient. When I lived in Boston (and initially made this change) there was not free, convenient parking.
* Irresponsible. As someone who is concerned about the environment and the future of our planet and species, I have long viewed any unnecessary ownership and use of a car as being irresponsible.
* Expensive. Even in the best case, between car payment and insurance and gas, it costs at least $500 a month to drive around these days. That's money I could put to better use elsewhere.
But lately, as my life has been getting more complex and the near future will require me to function more as an actual CEO as opposed to humbly running our services company, it became evermore apparent that I would need to have full-time access to a car in order to do that. More ...
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| Introducing Design Futures |
| Wednesday August 23, 2006, 13:46 PM EST |
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Remember the Design Vision conversation earlier this year? Those conversations never really stopped, and we're going to start publishing some more of them over at Luke's website, Functioning Form. Start following the conversation, called Design Futures, here.
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| Embracing the temporality of life |
| Thursday July 13, 2006, 15:21 PM EST |
As a teenager and in my early 20s I spent what I (presume to be) an unhealthy amount of time fretting about the temporality of life. And I had an active desire to somehow move beyond that, to break that seemingly essential boundary of existence so that I would not cease to exist. This exploration never reached a particularly concrete or action-oriented place, but it was definitely something that I actively thought about.
Happily, that changed in an instant. In graduate school, during a philosophy class on The Meaning of Life (taught by the late and wonderful Professor James Child) I came upon a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called Ozymandias. I share it hoping that its perspective will prove at least interesting and perhaps enlightening for some of you:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear -
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of the colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
We are all forever and completely mortal. We might, perhaps, control the duration of time for which we are somehow memorialized, but at some point our memorial ceases to have meaning, and at some further point it will even cease to have any degree of physicality. That is inevitable, it is just a question of time. Even the King of Kings, at some point, will functionally cease to exist. And (in Shelley's conception) even though artifact of his existence continues, it is meaningless and without context to the world.
This may not be a very happy line of thought for some of you, but for me it was an epiphany. Resolving the drive/fear/tension/yearning to prevent the end of my existence enabled me to identify and focus on what really matters: creating meaning and contributing to the happiness and well being of the people I care about. Not that I didn't do that before, but it became more of a solo pursuit as opposed to being part of a jumbled chorus.
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| I like lawyers |
| Wednesday July 12, 2006, 17:11 PM EST |
Acknowledging a relatively small sample size, I've had the opportunity to work with a handful of different lawyers over the past nine months and have gotten consistently fast, friendly, informative customer service. It has been so good, in fact, that I'm struck by the overall quality compared to (fill-in-the-blank-with-pretty-much-any-other-general-type-of-professional). I don't really have the knowledge base or free analytical bandwidth to deconstruct this observation any further right now, but needless to say my impression of attorneys as a class is quite strong and far, far from the tired stereotypes that are commonly propagated in our culture. Many so-called "customer service reps" could take a page from the attorney playbook as I'm experiencing it.
P.S.: how do you spell check when you're in an environment without a native spellchecker? In order to correctly spell "propogated" (which was my original mis-spelling) Whereas I used to use dictionary.com, I now just Google the word, which immediately lets me know if I got it right or not. What other formerly stand-alone tools is Google (or just search in general) disenfranchising? All the world's information, baby...
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| End of an era (as it were) |
| Thursday July 6, 2006, 15:22 PM EST |
I'm in the final stages of wrapping up what has turned out to be a 3 1/2 year orgy of publishing articles on design and business.
Since February 2003 I've published over 75 articles in more than 15 different places. That's about two articles per month during that period. As my regular readers have noticed, my production has dropped dramatically over the past six months or so. For a while I thought it was burnout. Then I wondered if I'd run out of things to say. But finally I think that I've just moved on and want to focus on new things.
My latest kick is building organizations. Of course, I've been building Involution Studios for about two years now. We're up to five people and are just in a really stable and successful place. But I've also been helping to build the User Experience Network (UXnet) and was recently named the organization's first President - a humbling and empowering honour. Now I'm also incorporting and building a software company (more news on that as appropriate), and sketching out plans to build a second services company. I'm not real clear on how I'll be able to function as the CEO of three companies and the President of a non-profit all at the same time, but I suppose it will come down to relying on the brilliance and hard work of the people I'm lucky enough to be working with.
So while I will periodically continue to write articles, this specific moment in time is notable because my last Core77 poker article - and thus commitment - just published. And I just sent in the rough draft for my last article for Digital Web Magazine in to the editor. Working with DW has been a lovely three+ year relationship that has finally reached an end. That leaves my only commitment as being periodic columns for UXmatters, which on its own is plenty manageable regardless of how busy I get.
The other thing I hope comes from this? More time to write here. With less writing commitments hanging over my head I am already feeling the lifting of a great weight, the heft of which I suspect has been blocking my leisure writing for some time now. Happy, this.
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| Exploring the Overlap |
| Friday June 30, 2006, 21:37 PM EST |
Over the Memorial Day weekend now not-so-recently past I participated in The Overlap, an event that I helped organize in Monterey, California. Focused on topics in the overlap between business and design, the event attracted ~40 top thinkers and practitioners in the design space, and precious few participants from business and other fields.
First, the good: lots of bright and amazing people. Meeting new friends (and seeing some old cyber-friends in the flesh for the first time). Smart and engaged outside-the-formal-session chats. Richard Farson, a behavioural psychologist, who gave what was considered near-unanimously the presentation of the weekend. A very appropriate setting at the slightly-roughing-it and eminently comfortable and casual Asilomar Conference Grounds. Amazing, beautiful weather and vistas, capped off by a fun-but-rigorous hike through the hills and valleys south of Monterey.
All that said, I left The Overlap deeply disappointed. By its very charter, The Overlap endeavoured to take the existing business and design conversation to the next level. As someone who is spoiled by getting to attend many conferences and events around the world in a myriad of different business and/or design spaces this focusing on the next level was incredibly appealing, even inspiring. But in reality the presentations - while very nice and given by bright and insightful people - were little different than the better typical conference fare that I already experience. I've seen uplifting presentations on how the design process at (enter your design firm or entertainment company of choice here) resulted in either smarter more user-centered design, or in some sort of meaningful social change. Excellent content, but ultimately stale. More, being shown different people/company's concepts of design and process and conceptual models suffered from being both redundant with so many other conference presentations and ultimately did little to move forward a meaningful collective conversation, given that most of us by definition are very senior people with our own conceptual models. Just getting an extended taste of one other attendee's approach did little to generate any blue sky thinking or group synthesis.
The Overlap - compared to your typical conference - was a wonderful experience and by most measures a success. But compared to the high hopes I had for it going in, expecting the event to be a unique dialogue that empowered us to at least attempt to transcend the current conversation and rhetoric around business and design together, for me it was a huge disappointment.
Some things I'd do differently next time:
1. Create a truly multi-disciplinary event: more people from fields other than design
2. Make it multi-track. Trying to accomplish everything as a single group suffered from not consistently appealing to everyone. Have a tactical track. Have a strategic track. Have a blue sky track. Allow people to move between them, and bring them all back together periodically to participate in synthesis exercises/presentations
3. Make it more participatory during the sessions. We wanted the sessions to be "sparks" to large group conversations, but most of the time during the sessions it was The Presenter talking to The Crowd
I got involved in organizing in The Overlap when I mentioned to my friend Steve that I wanted to help create a conference that took these conversations to the next level: he promptly connected me with the principals of The Overlap. This yearning to build something on my part began after I missed out on Andrew Otwell's legendary Design Engaged event in Berlin last fall, having found out it was open for registration only after it was already oversold. A subsequent conversation during dinner with my pals from Ziba, Bill and Tom, led to fermentation of the idea to envision and create something, which led to my talking about this with various people and eventually connecting me with the Overlap. (not that you asked for the whole bloody history, but there you have it!)
I'm really glad to have been part of The Overlap and feel blessed for getting to work with smart and talented people in organizing it - to say nothing of the privilege of hanging out with this group for the better part of a long weekend. But, to take a bit from Bono, I still haven't found (or created) what I'm looking for.
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| From Sin City to DCamp: a three day adventure |
| Monday May 15, 2006, 18:44 PM EST |
I lead a pretty privileged life: I get to do an amazing array of interesting things. So it was this weekend (Thursday-Saturday, close enough!) when I took a day trip to Las Vegas followed by a day-and-a-half at DCamp in Palo Alto.
The Vegas trip was all about friendship: my good buddy Tim is getting married next month (NYC, here we come!) and Wednesday-Sunday of last week represented the bacchalanian bachelor party beforehand. Since I'm both very busy right now and not attracted to most of the good ol' boy fun that marks a bachelor party, I elected to just fly in for a single day, to participate in a poker tournament at the Bellagio with him. More ...
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| On workplace attire |
| Saturday May 6, 2006, 14:23 PM EST |
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I'm not sure if this is an "own your own company thing" or a "life in California thing", but on most days I wear jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and sandals into work. Sure, if I'm meeting with clients the sandals get dropped for my trademark cowboy boots, and the plain white T-shirt is replaced by some manner of Nat Nast or Thomas Pink collared shirt. But most days, I wear to work the same basic thing that I wear in the evenings, and on weekends, and when I'm traveling. And there's a real comfort to that, a more relaxed and improved lifestyle that no amount of money or opportunity or luxury infrastructure can replace. It is just me getting to be me, and I'm finding that I enjoy that quite a bit.
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| Ephemeral zaniness |
| Saturday May 6, 2006, 14:15 PM EST |
We've been watching Miami Vice lately via Netflix: at first it was just a nostalgic trip to "I wonder what it looks like now?" but we've ended up watching a lot of different episodes, largely owing to Fran's enjoyment of the series, since she is from Miami which spurs an entirely different level of nostalgia for her.
The show doesn't hold up very well: it is extremely high style, showing the bleeding edge of 1980s fashion, design and architecture. Unfortunately, that is one bleeding edge that probably should never have been exposed. Then, the writing and storylines are brutally bad. Stupid bad. Really, really bad. (Did I mention the writing is bad?!) The acting oftentimes is even worse.
Sure, its fun to see Crockett and Tubbs do their thing. And there are some aspects of that culture of cool that are interesting or perhaps even informative from a design perspective. But on the whole the show just doesn't hold up very well.
However, getting to the inspiration for this post... More ...
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| Spring? Oh Sprrriiiiiing? Wherefore art thou? |
| Sunday April 23, 2006, 23:49 PM EST |
Exactly four weeks ago I was walking thru the neighborhood and smelled beautiful Spring flowers. And I was already writing in my head a post entitled "The Smells of Spring" that happily announced Spring's arrival in Silicon Valley. But I didn't get around to writing it that day, the next day it rained, and I forgot about it.
Two weeks later I was walking to the train station and heard the sound of bright, happy, Springtime birds. And this time I thought, "I'm going to write a post called The Sounds of Spring!" But I didn't have time to do it that day, and it rained the next day, and I shrugged and waited for Spring again.
This week I went to Atlanta, and all week before I left it was beautiful. And I happily emailed friends reporting on the arrival of Spring. But last night I returned from Atlanta, and today it rained.
I'm still waiting for Spring.
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| Remember the Titanic |
| Tuesday April 11, 2006, 5:03 AM EST |
This weekend, I finally shed my distinction of being the last adult over the age of 25 in the U.S. to see James Cameron's movie, Titanic. Aside from being underwhelmed - and slightly embarrassed for marking out a bit for the melodrama - I was struck by the incredible parallels between the voyage and demise of the Titanic and the path we seem to be on right now in the world. Consider:
Titanic was the biggest, mightiest ship in history. It was perceived as unsinkable. Its stakeholders were very motivated to leverage its fame and capabilities as much as possible in order to maximize their business interests. Because of the arrogance surrounding all of this, they did not notice an iceberg ahead of the ship that would sink it. They tried to change course once they did see it, but it was too late. The ship smashed into the iceberg. More ...
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| All design, all the time |
| Saturday April 8, 2006, 18:13 PM EST |
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Not quite, but after spending much of the last year focusing on management consulting-type activities for clients (as well as running the company), I'm now taking the lead product design role on a few different, interesting projects. Nice change of pace, and I'm happy for what will surely be a relatively short-but-juicy affair, designing products again.
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| The quantification of happiness |
| Wednesday March 29, 2006, 14:09 PM EST |
As a handful of my friends and colleagues know, my thesis in graduate school was on "Happiness in American Culture." That research and analysis was the first step toward a planned career in philosophy, attempting to provide solution(s) to broad questions about broadly achieving and enhancing human happiness and well-being.
So it is that I took particular interest in a couple of related stories on CNN Money this morning: More ...
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| Software design and industrial design are the same damn thing |
| Friday March 24, 2006, 4:03 AM EST |
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Our recent Design Vision conversation includes hundreds of non-published pages of email conversations that ran in parallel to what was publicly published. Among the unpublished stuff are many valuable nuggets. Here is one of the themes articulated during the discussion that I think is valuable to share in the interests of helping people better understand the whys and what-fors of design. I'm copying this verbatim (with the consent of the participants), and picking up in mid-stream: More ...
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| Of what dreams are made |
| Sunday March 12, 2006, 1:29 AM EST |
200 years ago, people dreamed of flying. They dreamed of what stuff stars were made of. They dreamed of the man on the moon. They dreamed of far-away lands that were inaccessible, or undiscovered. There was mystery and the unknown and things that were within the magic of imagination but beyond the grasp of reality.
But what of today? What are the dreams that dance in the space between our imagination and reality?
* We have seen the human body from the inside-out
* We can create the power of the sun
* We have flown to the moon and back - and have pictures of it for all to see
What dreams remain? At best, dreams of scientifically-enabled immortality. Or of some extrapolation of technology on top of technology on top of technology. The natural world no longer holds mysteries or wonder. Yes, periodically a new species is discovered, or something interesting happens. But what remains that people truly dream about? A world of peace and enlightenment? I suppose that would be my personal answer. But the dearth of tantalizing possibilities relative to the past is stark.
If we do indeed dare to dream, what remains to dream about?
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| Yahoo! = Wal-Mart |
| Friday March 10, 2006, 20:34 PM EST |
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Even though I've largely been out of the branding business for a few years, my mind still deconstructs companies and products from the perspective of a brand strategist. One of the typical exercises in the process of branding a company or product is one of making associations between your company or client and existing, iconic brands in the marketplace. One of the most common such exercises is with automobiles, because they have such distinct and emotionally-charged brand associations. When you talk about wanting a brand like Volkswagen, that has myriad specific meanings and enables a rapid and meaningful shared understanding. So it is that I've been thinking about different technology companies in the context of other brands, and the most striking parallel I've distilled is between Yahoo! and Wal-Mart. More ...
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| Random acts of juxtaposition |
| Tuesday February 21, 2006, 20:26 PM EST |
This morning I was sitting outside of "my" Starbucks (the closest one to our home) and observed an elderly man, seemingly of modest means, sitting at a table about 10 feet in front of me. Then I looked to my right and saw the USA Today front page headline in the newspaper box: "Drives to ban gay adoption heat up". Less than a minute later, a gay couple walked out of the Starbucks, and one handed the elderly man a venti (large)-sized drink.
Samaritan (gently): "Its hot chocolate."
Elderly Man (surprised): "IT IS? THANK YOU!"
Samaritan (kindly): "You will really like it, it is delicious!"
And then the samaritans left.
So my question to the people who are "heating up drives to ban gay adoption": kindly explain to me why we wouldn't want our future citizens to be parented by this man who, at least in this moment, proved so kind and thoughtful and unconditionally giving? Cos I just don't understand. To spin the question a different way, when is the last time the people who are "heating up drives to ban gay adoption" were so spontaneously generous in spirit, in a particularly gentle and kind context?
But regardless of sexuality and politics, it really brightened my mood and made me smile to see this random act of kindness play out on a chilly Tuesday morning.
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| (Possibly) hiring again |
| Monday February 20, 2006, 15:03 PM EST |
As Involution Studios continues to pick up steam, it looks like we might need another graphic designer/front-end developer (read: excellent at CSS, XHTML, and Javascript, open to picking up the last few skills to provide AJAX functionality, too) in the near future. So, I'm softly starting to cast a net out.
If you or someone you know has these skills and is interested in working for a growing interface design company - either close to or willing to relocate around the Santa Clara, California area - please have them get in touch with me. We're building and redesigning some really interesting products, and this opportunity will also allow a successful candidate to learn directly from my business partner Andrei Herasimchuk, the finest interface designer I've ever worked with, who led the UI development on Adobe's primary creative apps during the mid-to-late 1990s. This is a great opportunity to join a talented team of designers in a growing studio setting, contributing your own expertise and insight while learning from the best.
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| Either I'm getting old or Muzak is getting cooler |
| Thursday February 16, 2006, 15:15 PM EST |
Today I had a first appointment with a new dentist. As I was waiting in the chair, I became aware of the music gently playing through the office: it was Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd, from one of my very favourite albums, Wish You Were Here. What happened to the (in my opinion, horrible) smooth melodies of dentist's offices gone by? I attribute the gap to one or more of these factors:
* Muzak generally reflects the musical tastes of middle aged people, of which I am in the process of becoming a card carrying member
* Any cultural cache that Pink Floyd once had has now gone the way of the dinosaur
* The iPod revolution has impacted professional offices in a very happy way (people now broadcast their own personal music)
* This dentist is WAY cooler than my previous dentists
Regardless of the reasons why, hearing Roger, David and the boys made an uncomfortable cleaning eminently more pleasant.
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| Design Vision: Parts 5-8 |
| Thursday February 16, 2006, 12:25 PM EST |
Design Vision is an ongoing conversation between four industry veterans who want to explore the boundaries and definitions of design leadership today, particularly in digital product design. The first four parts of this conversation appeared on Luke Wroblewski's Functioning Form; parts 9-12 are hosted at Jim Leftwich's Orbitstar Interactica, while the last four parts will debut at Bob Baxley's Drowning in the Current. Also, check out my intro to the series here.
This week, the group explores the question, "What about an organization makes it ready for design vision?" More ...
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| Morality and the lessons of youth |
| Wednesday February 15, 2006, 21:38 PM EST |
Yesterday, the ride validator at the train station wasn't working. It would have been a simple matter for me to get on the train without the validation, since I was only traveling one stop and they would almost certainly not do a check at that point - meaning that I would essentially get a free ride by doing so. But that never crossed my mind: I kept the ticket in my hand, walked up to the conductor when he got off the train, and had him manually mark my ticket.
The reason this got me thinking is because, in the past, I have essentially stolen train rides. Sure, it was some time ago, and it was always the product of some sort of inconvenience such as a validator not working, but I took the free rides knowing it was "wrong" without ever really thinking of it as "stealing." But it was stealing. More ...
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| My first foreword |
| Wednesday February 15, 2006, 20:30 PM EST |
I recently had the chance to see a foreword that I'd written for a book that is now officially in print. I've seen plenty of things that came from my own hand in print, but to be asked to provide this content for someone else's vision is a pretty humbling and exciting experience! The book is an encyclopedia produced by my friend Dan Lee for a historical baseball league that I founded some 13 years ago now, the Ohio Old-Time Strat-O-Matic League (OOSL). Even though I've moved on from the league it has continued to grow and thrive thanks to the leadership and participation of its members.
The role that this league played in my life during those crazy 1990's is at the same time foundational to who I was and entirely disconnected from who I am. Providing more context to this rather cryptic statement would take a lot more thought, introspection, and writing time than I have the capacity for at the moment, but will at some point in the (probably more distant) future circle back and share introspective deconstructions of these formative college and graduate school years. For the time being, I'd like to share Dan's introduction and my foreword here, and in the process thank him for so generously including me: More ...
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| The power of the CalTrain |
| Wednesday February 15, 2006, 15:06 PM EST |
When Fran and I aren't riding to work together I take the CalTrain. Our house is right behind the Diridon station in San Jose, and the Invo offices are a 15 minute walk from the Santa Clara station. So it is extremely convenient, affrordable, environmentally-friendly...a lot of good things about doing this.
The train I most frequently take home at night is the 7:08 train, which arrives right after an express train that bypasses the Santa Clara station. And I've come to look forward to this train passing by: it moves incredibly fast, and I am able to stand within a foot or two of it. The power of the train as it goes by - WHOOOOOOOOOOOOSH - is really a visceral pleasure. The sound. The wind. The raw power of the machine hurtling down the track. It is really something to experience.
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| Saturday at the Stanford Theater |
| Tuesday February 14, 2006, 19:05 PM EST |
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There are a lot of perks that come with living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Stanford Theater is definitely one of them: an old-world movie palace, faithfully preserved by the heirs of the Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame) family fortune, screening classic old movies on a weekly basis, complete with an old organ that a real organist plays before the shows and - in some cases - even during the movies as was the case in the very early days of cinema. More ...
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| Video content to meet lifestyle needs |
| Monday February 13, 2006, 14:49 PM EST |
Does it strike anyone else that the current model of creating DVDs (read: groups of thoughtlessly bundled content) that provide the linear "every single episode" model is not particularly usable or desirable? I mean, how much of a specific show can most people possibly see?
I remember when I was a child, each Christmas there was a basic set of shows that I expected to catch: Frosty the Snowman. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. A Charlie Brown Christmas. Now, I have no idea if they were all on the same television network, but one way or another I was taken through that gauntlet each year. I looked forward to it. Those artifacts were as much a part of Christmas as the tree, the presents, the dinner with the extended family.
Wouldn't it make more sense for media companies to package their content that way? More ...
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| Planning and building: the craft of design |
| Friday February 10, 2006, 16:48 PM EST |
Guess who said:
"I'm engaged in a specific job, to tell a certain story, with a certain group of people, and the work is details. The work is problem solving. The work is steady application of your energy and intellect to the process."
Buckminster Fuller? Could be, but no.
Jim Leftwich? Good guess, but it ain't my pal Jim.
In fact, its not a designer at all. It is actor Harrison Ford in a recent cnn.com interview.
Reading this quote perked me up. Even though I try to stay out of the "defining design" conversations these days, Ford's word choice made me realize how so many of those conversations about "what is design" really say absolutely nothing. By far, the most common definition that I hear distilled from these conversations is that design is problem solving. Oh joy. That really communicates a lot. More ...
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| Late to the Four Things party |
| Friday February 10, 2006, 15:33 PM EST |
Got the invites a week or three ago, here are my tardy contributions to the Four Things meme (credit to my pal Peter):
Four Jobs I've Had (none of which you'd probably guess I've done)
1. Nude model
2. Knife salesman
3. Fry chef at LJS (Long John Silver's)
4. Paperboy More ...
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| A unique and illuminating conversation |
| Sunday February 5, 2006, 23:57 PM EST |
I've had the privilege over the last month to engage in a spirited, often contentious, ultimately respectful dialogue on the topic of design vision and its role in business today - with some of the top digital product designers in the business. This is the sort of conversation where, as you look at and listen to the other people seated at the table, you realize that you are part of a truly special experience, working through critical issues with some of the very best minds and talent in the field.
Our conversation included passing back-and-forth Word documents in a structured way, and engaging in passionate and highly contentious heat-of-the-moment explorations in email threads that stretched into the hundreds. These exchanges were all the more remarkable considering how expansive each of us tend to be. More ...
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| Around the kitchen table |
| Friday February 3, 2006, 20:32 PM EST |
Going back many millenia, the "kitchen table" has been at the center of all social interaction: the favoured shared human activity (copulation excepted) across cultures is eating. The place where food is shared - ostensibly near where it is also prepared - serves as a signifier for interaction, unity, and togetherness. More specific to my culture and recent generations, this space is represented by a "kitchen table," the general fulcrum for family life and somewhere near the center of where each of us grow up. It is a powerful - dare I say near-magical - thing really, something that most of us have as a shared experience and is woven deeply into the fabric of how we grew up. No two experiences are the same, but all share a surprising number of common characteristics.
At my company, Involution Studios, we are in the process of building out our new office space. And I use "building out" very literally: one of our new designers, Ben, has a degree in architecture and volunteered to design and, with Andrei's help, build most of the furniture and other physical things (like, walls!) that make up our space. As you might imagine, this is an ongoing process, one that is now closer to complete than not but still with a ways to go. One of the last things that we will get (probably buy) is a conference table to go in our sun-bathed upstairs loft area. But in the meantime, when we are meeting, we do so downstairs, around the kitchen table.
So it was today that we had clients in the office, sharing lunch with us, getting some software training from Andrei, and then digging into a very complex philosophical conversation about the present and future of a software application we are redesigning with them. And there was a moment, as I leaned back and took in the passionate exchange of information and ideas, that seeing this play out over and around the kitchen table held an incredible degree of symbolism and meaning - both in that our conversation was a signifier of so much about the what and where of human dialogue and negotiation, and in that it tapped into an extensive vein of personal memories for me, involving a very similar setting but quite different players and contexts - at least some of which dramatically shaped the trajectory of my life.
There will come a time when the kitchen table ceases to be the place where we have these sort of meetings at our company, and having made some of these connections today I can't help but be a bit wistful about it, for only the most romantic and nostalgic of reasons.
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| For completists, or those unfamiliar with my background in researching human sexuality... |
| Tuesday January 31, 2006, 18:45 PM EST |
...Jeff Osborne, Principal at the management consulting network Plan Resonate, interviewed me recently and touched on some topics that don't often come out in my corporate bios or usual articles and interviews. While we didn't get very much into societal aspects of business and design, one of the things I love about Jeff is how he lives in the overlap between business and culture, with a critical bent toward acting for the holistic good.
Check the interview out at: New Improved.
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| Channeling Emeril |
| Wednesday January 25, 2006, 19:07 PM EST |
Things have really been heating up for me: after finishing a lengthy consulting project at the end of the year and traveling for 2 1/2 weeks to Toledo and Miami and various points in Brazil around the new year, I'm back home and working. But things are not as they once were: we're in some great new studio space, the Invo team now numbers five, and we're working with a new group of clients on some really interesting companies and products. We're kicking it up a notch, and this year looks like it is going to be an important transitional one in the growth of the company.
I've also been involved in a really good design conversation that you will hear and read a lot more about in the weeks to come. (I'm sworn to secrecy for now, but early details will be hitting the streets next week)
Things are settling in, and growing bigger. 2006 is going to be an excellent year! (2006?!?!? Are you kidding me?)
You'll be seeing more of me here, too. Apologies to those who've been asking about the "Heart" section, but that will be infused with some long-overdue updates once I have a new and easier solution for uploading photos to share.
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| Do URLs give corporations control of ideas? |
| Thursday December 15, 2005, 20:06 PM EST |
An ever-increasing trend with big companies is buying clever little marketing URLs that tie their initiatives and ideas into a short-and-clever "catch" that enables people to easily remember the URL while reinforcing their underlying marketing objectives. Just now, I saw an ad that urged me to visit "willyoujoinus.com", with a very Green and environmentally-friendly message. Something about it looked suspicious, so I decided to visit the address and figure out what smelled. Imagine my surprise to discover a Chevron corporate website that provides a forum for "discussion" of the "issues" related to world energy consumption over the next century.
I'm not even going to get into the completely biased perspective here and the soft-and-subtle way Chevron is using this website as a platform for seeming environmentally responsible when their real goal is to keep the oil rush flowing freely and turning into gold in their considerable coffers. No, of great interest - and perhaps greater impact, I think - is the way they and other companies are increasingly appropriating ideas and conepts into their DNA, to the detriment of the ideas and concepts themselves. More ...
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| Me, A Generalist? |
| Wednesday December 14, 2005, 19:01 PM EST |
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I had a really strange experience recently, while helping a friend sell a large application design project. As the meeting began and the key players were being introduced from both sides, I was, in part, positioned this way: More ...
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| Insight from a fevered man |
| Sunday December 11, 2005, 18:11 PM EST |
I don't get sick very often, but this week saw me stricken with some sort of cold-flu thing. I was feeling it on Thursday, completely on my ass Friday, beginning to stir on Saturday, and now seemingly fully functional, albeit with a box of tissues at my side, a light head, and achiness throughout my body.
But we all get sick, and this is not about looking for sympathy: it is about sharing an idea; call it necessity as the mother of invention. More ...
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| Clearing the idea box |
| Thursday November 17, 2005, 20:08 PM EST |
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So rather than just saying "I'm too busy to write!" I'm going to empty my burgeoning idea box. Some of these go back 6 months. I'd love to develop each of them into a longer post if not an essay or article, but to get some traction here and clear my head, I'm just dumping them for you to leaf through. Sorry for the very unstructured nature of it all! More ...
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| Larry, Sergey, and Big Steve: A Bizarro World Scenario |
| Tuesday November 1, 2005, 16:08 PM EST |
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One of the things I most enjoy about trendspotting is taking the current trends and business activities far into the future, imaging what might happen that is not being talked about – let alone thought about. One possible merger or acquisition pairing that strikes me as eminently logical – although seems far-fetched right now – is between Google and Apple. These two very powerful and diverse companies actually represent a good strategic marriage of next generation technology, media, and computing. And the current growth paths of both companies suggest that it may be a realistic possibility. Here are some of the reasons why: More ...
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| Content is King No More: Web 2.0 Is About Interaction |
| Friday October 7, 2005, 15:20 PM EST |
How many of you are sick of hearing about “Web 2.0”? Alright, put your hands down. Me too. But the fact is, this cute little label hasn’t even reached much of the mainstream yet. We’re going to hear it trotted out so much in the next few years that we’ll always be wearing our iPod Nano earbuds, just to stay sane and stop the noise. But regardless of the hype, we are entering into a very new and exciting time where the web is more powerful, usable, and enjoyable. For all of us in the industry, this is accompanied by a lot of buzz, energy, and optimism – not to mention opportunity. Good things, all.
We hear a lot about the basics of Web 2.0: how it is about user control of content. Or about websites that behave more like thick client applications. Or about web products that are designed to facilitate network effects and serve as a co-collaborative space between the product’s provider and the user community. But we haven’t talked enough about the larger implications of these things, and how this affects the structure and importance of design teams and approaches. In short, what it means to people like us. While a lot can be written on this, the thing that is most glaring and poignant to me is the seismic shift in importance from a focus on content and information to behavior and interaction. More ...
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| Update from the front |
| Wednesday October 5, 2005, 20:55 PM EST |
So I haven't written much lately, and its for one simple reason: I am REALLY REALLY BUSY! Good thing, busy in good and productive and profitable and happy ways. But busy in a way that means my cognitive load is simply too high to write productively at the moment.
But, good things are happening: Bruce Nussbaum wrote about my recent poker article over at Business Week, and it sounds like they might be reprinting the entire series! Also, today I had an article published in a new place, the gotoreport. Check them both out at the provided links.
The good news is, I've been an idea factory lately: the volume of interesting ideas I want to develop and write about is higher than its ever been. And when I get a chance to breathe, you'll start to see the fruits right here. In the meantime...onward!
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| Musing on technology and society (an unformed and rambling exploration) |
| Saturday September 17, 2005, 14:01 PM EST |
Is it possible that, since we see SO many images of people thanks to modern technology and media, that our perception and value of humanity are being warped? I mean, for almost the entirety of human existence, we've been exposed to a fairly limited number of people during our lives. Prior to modern transportation like the automobile and airplane, there were real physical limitations on how far and often we were able to travel, thus limiting the people we were exposed to by physical proximity. Even if we lived in a large city, chances are we would only be exposed to a small percentage of the city's inhabitants over our lifetime. Once we add modern media to the mix - blasting us with faces and voices from all around the world in a constant stream of exposure - there is no question that we are being exposed to many times more people than ever before. "So what," you ask?
I wonder" Is it possible that human life is being unintentionally devalued as a result of our comparative overexposure to other people?
There is a clear relationship between understanding people and how much we value them. More ...
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| Emerging mindset: work/play |
| Tuesday September 13, 2005, 23:33 PM EST |
My latest subject of interest is the relationship between work and play. This has followed a winding and complicated path, synthesizing game design work I did recently, with myself getting more into gameplaying as a way to connect more directly with the interests of my sons, with exploring notions of achieving healthy lifestyle - both in general and for myself. One of my favourite quotes is from Noel Coward who, looking back on his life, commented that, "Work was more fun than fun." The wisdom there cuts much more deeply than the simple quote would suggest, and I'm making lots of rich connections between work and play, professional and personal.
Check out my recent Core77 article to see one of the various directions I am heading on this. Also, I will be presenting at About, With & For this year, and their entire conference is on the topic. It should be fun. Perhaps - if we're lucky - it will even be more fun than fun!
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| Reframing our questions to reshape innovation |
| Monday September 12, 2005, 18:23 PM EST |
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Have you ever asked yourself why digital innovations occur? The basic answer is that they are in response to a need or desire in the world, an opportunity that either someone visions or that others request. The more specific - and complicated - answer depends on the specific context. More ...
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| Anarchy in the United States |
| Friday September 2, 2005, 17:36 PM EST |
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Quotes taken from cnn.com about the situation in New Orleans, Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, followed by my analysis, thoughts, and feelings on these events: More ...
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| Personas: time for a new perspective |
| Sunday August 21, 2005, 17:47 PM EST |
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for Core 77 (to be published in a few weeks) that is very critical of the use of personas by contemporary design teams as a tool to guide design and create understanding and empathy toward customers. And this weekend I was pointed to an article by Dan Saffer that is also critical of the ubiquitous use of personas today. Personas are both overused and misused, and it is time for them to be viewed in a more critical light. I expected my article to be akin to the lone voice in the crowd protesting that the emperor is not wearing any clothes, so it was heartening to read that I am not the only person willing to publicly challenge the operating dogma. Perhaps this is only the beginning of creating new sets of approaches, processes, and tools to replace, complement, or improve the old. Check out Dan's article here. I will post a pointer to mine once it is published.
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| Media empires: the 21st century equivalent to a "military-industrial complex" |
| Sunday August 21, 2005, 15:23 PM EST |
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
- U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961
President Eisenhower's vision of the dangers posed by the rise of the military-industrial complex proved visionary: first with the Vietnam War, through the years, and most recently characterized by the foreign military operations of the United States today, this military-industrial complex he cautioned us against has become manifest. In fact, his entire Farewell Address is absolutely brilliant: thoughtful, humble, seemingly altruistic in providing a window into a better future for the country and world. Its messages are relevant and inspiring even today. I urge you to read it (after you've read this, of course!)
Unfortunately, not only has the military-industrial complex realized Eisenhower's vision and essentially seized control of the key power centers of the U.S. (and if you dispute that assertion, I welcome you to lead the equivalent of a peaceful revolution and see what happens to you and your other idealistic followers) but a new and potentially more troubling control has fallen like a haze over our horizon: modern media. More ...
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| Lessons of the everyday |
| Friday August 19, 2005, 17:45 PM EST |
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On my short walk to the dry cleaner's this morning, I had three valuable observations/insights: More ...
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| The Interaction Frontiers - July 2005 |
| Tuesday August 16, 2005, 16:16 PM EST |
I was honoured to be invited to Milano as the keynote speaker for this first-time, projected-to-be-annual event. It was an excellent half-day affair, with uniformly strong presentations, an engaged and interested audience, and a very progressive and upbeat tone. Since I am so late in getting around to reporting this I will let the pictures do the talking. In particular, check out the beautiful slides of Giovanni Bellocchio, which have inspired me to take a fresh look at my own visual language.
As an aside, this was a very educational experience for me from the standpoint of cultural awareness. This is the only conference I've ever been to where I was the only person who presented in English. I'm accustomed to being part of the majority of the majority of the majority, and it was enriching and enjoyable to participate as the distinct minority. Thanks again to the bright and enthusiastic young PhD student who was assigned to answer my questions and provide clarifications when I could not understand the other presenters.
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| Europe - July 2005 |
| Monday August 15, 2005, 23:59 PM EST |
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I spent roughly the first two weeks of July in Europe, and it was a lovely trip. I am blessed to have a variety of good friends, the number of which seem to grow every time I hit the road to spread the gospel of design, experience, and Involution Studios. There were three basic legs to this trip: More ...
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| Ever have one of those work days where... |
| Friday August 12, 2005, 14:43 PM EST |
...you are full of energy, good vibes pumping through your body, optimistic and energized, working at a mile a minute and producing high quality stuff, and just couldn't be happier?
That is me, RIGHT NOW. And I'm LOVING it! Can you FEEL it through your interface???
Hope some of it rubs off on you...have a great weekend, all.
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| More nuggets from Stan Lee |
| Thursday August 11, 2005, 22:14 PM EST |
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Lots of surprising little tidbits from Stan Lee that are relevant to me and I think will be to much of my readership: More ...
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| What do comic books and complex digital products have in common? |
| Thursday August 11, 2005, 20:32 PM EST |
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Watching (really, listening to) Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels while doing some paperwork. It is marginally interesting, but required for me as a shameful Kevin Smith completist. And as they are talking about the creation of comic books, I'm struck by how similar that process is to every formal design project: similar to the advertising design I oversaw earlier in my career, similar to the digital product design that I oversee now. And at its heart, design in various and sundry contexts follows an incredibly simple architecture: More ...
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| My favourite widget |
| Thursday August 11, 2005, 14:41 PM EST |
Like many of us in that nebulous thing called the "design community," I conduct my digital interactions on the Mac platform. The latest version of the OS, Tiger, makes available thousands of cool little tools called Widgets that allow you to do any number of things in a very simple, easy, personalized way operating dynamically with either or both of your desktop or the internet.
While many of the Widgets are cool or fun or helpful, one has really changed the way I think about the concept of time: it is the Sunlit Earth Dashboard Widget created by Don Carona at the Texas A&M Astronomical Observatory. More ...
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| Home in California...Again |
| Monday August 8, 2005, 21:08 PM EST |
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So it seems like all of my posts now are explaining absences and proclaiming my return and, in general, not proving terribly interesting in either topic or content. But, finally, I am home for essentially a long time - some short-and-sweet business commitments notwithstanding - and am getting ready to settle into a very productive period of both work and writing. My list of ideas to write about is teeming, and I am itching to get the earlier-announced regular Podcasting series started. Not to mention updates on all of my recent trips, perhaps even a guest or two for a wee bit of fun, perhaps a new culture or paradigm to pronounce dead (just kidding!). Yes, indeed, lots o content goodness is finally on the way. It should be fun.
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| RSS-powered! |
| Wednesday July 20, 2005, 20:03 PM EST |
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Thanks to the encouragement (read: demands!) of various people - especially my friend Josh who actually put together a working prototype for my site! - and the ultimate development by Daniel, knemeyer.com is now RSS-enabled. Enjoy!
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| Home in...California? |
| Wednesday July 20, 2005, 17:34 PM EST |
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Remember what it feels like to spin around and around, to the point of dizziness where you cannot see straight, are stumbling and unable to keep your feet, feeling a rush in your head and a marginally pleasant tingle in your body? I've been feeling that way for weeks now and the effects have finally (almost completely) worn off. Normal is nice. More ...
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| Surfacing in Europe |
| Thursday July 7, 2005, 20:04 PM EST |
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My posting here has been sproadic over the last month: I've been preparing to move across the country, hosted my sons for a great visit, have spent about half the time living out of a suitcase, and now am in Europe trying to manage a speaking tour while all of my worldly possessions are somewhere between Massachusetts and California. But, for the first time in weeks my brain is starting to fire on all synapses again, and I'm feeling like myself (despite ongoing and dreadful jetlag). And I am in a writing frame of mind. So, even though I'm not sure if I will have time to post much, I'm feeling dangerous again. And I like it. More to come...
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| Next stop: Silicon Valley |
| Thursday June 16, 2005, 10:52 AM EST |
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Fran accepted a design research position at Yahoo! last week (congrats!). Our last day living in Boston is June 30. The adventure continues...
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| Beyond the pixels: consider the entire experience |
| Thursday June 2, 2005, 20:48 PM EST |
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My recent article, Completely Rethinking the Web, has picked up a good deal of secondary traffic. One line in particular - from the comments, not the article proper - has proven to be a particular area of focus: "We need to begin controlling the environments that our work is going to be experienced in," first by Joshua Porter and later by Peter Merholz. And while I think the issues taken by Joshua, Peter and others are more a question of understanding - either because I poorly communicated my original point, or they are reading something beyond what I intended - these critiques provide the perfect catalyst to reinforce the intended point More ...
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| Good design follows healthy management |
| Wednesday June 1, 2005, 14:43 PM EST |
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The more clients I work with and projects I take, the more convinced I become that the essential challenges facing design have to do with organizational management, not the actual design of experiences. More ...
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| Vegas, Baby! Vegas! May 2005 |
| Wednesday June 1, 2005, 13:41 PM EST |
So I took my first trip to Vegas in May: a 24 hour, wide-awake, adrenaline-infused mystery tour, largely spent at the no-limit poker tables at the MGM Grand and Bellagio. I never had a particular pull to visit Vegas: the simulacra, superficiality, and "what happens in Vegas..." nature of the experience are not particularly my speed. This trip pretty much confirmed Vegas is not my kind of town, although I expect to return to play more poker at some point.
Flying into Vegas on a Thursday night, the lights in the city were incredible. More ...
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| Being home, and a new adventure |
| Wednesday June 1, 2005, 1:37 AM EST |
I'm home this week, and expect to stay home for the next four weeks or so, at least. Over the past almost four months, I've spent more than 75% of my time on the road, including a near-weekly cross-country commute, leaving on Monday morning for San Mateo, California and returning home toward the end of the week, typically on a Thursday-Friday redeye flight. In between, I also visited New York City, Las Vegas, Houston, Austin, Portland Oregon (twice), Jacksonville, my family back in Toledo, and probably some other places I am forgetting. In total, it was all a bit dizzying and disorienting. It is good to be home, and home for a while. I'm starting to find some routine again, and it is good.
I've got to catch up on about two weeks of posts here, and I cannot catch up soon enough as there is reaction to my recent article that I immediately want to respond to while the topic is fresh. Plus, I'm going to experiment with something completely new in the next few days:
Podcasting More ...
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| Doing something worthwhile |
| Thursday May 19, 2005, 21:14 PM EST |
My latest article for Digital Web Magazine is about stretching the boundaries on where the future of web design could - or should - live. I always get a lot of comments and feedback on my writings, but this private note really encapsulates why I love to write and share about the things that I think:
I suddenly feel adrift, not sure what the next practical steps to take as a designer; the realization that I am not up to speed at all. Very insight, if distrubing, piece. Thank you, I think.
Ultimately - for me - the point is to productively provoke, to open horizons and illustrate alternate paths. While it is not my intent to make people - like this designer - uncomfortable, I most certainly intend to open eyes and change worldviews. So while I enjoy most of the positive and contructive feedback that I receive, the responses like these are the most fulfilling.
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| An open question to amazon.com |
| Wednesday May 18, 2005, 19:57 PM EST |
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Why, in most places on the site including the home page and search results, don't you have single click functionality to put each displayed/featured item into your shopping cart? Ideally, there would also be single click functionality for a 1-Click purchase, as well as Add to Wish List, as ubiquitous design components attached to every object available for new Amazon purchase. Wasting clicks drilling into the product details of something I already know I want to buy makes Dirk an irritable boy!
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| Implications of technology on human behaviour |
| Wednesday May 18, 2005, 14:18 PM EST |
Last weekend we saw a modernized Julius Caesar on Broadway. Because the setting was updated for the late 20th Century instead of the height of the Roman Empire, much of the costumes and props reflected the change. One of the first things that struck me was the use of guns instead of swords as weapons, and it quickly got me to thinking:
Through technology, the human species has completely commodified killing. More ...
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| My Music Today |
| Wednesday May 18, 2005, 13:45 PM EST |
(adapted from the Musical Baton, via Nick Finck)
Total volume of music files on my computer: 9.59 gigabytes
The last CD I bought was: Hot Hot Heat/Elevator
Song (album) playing right now: Moby/Hotel Disc 1
Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me:
1. Lots of Moby, including: Feeling So Real, Everytime You Touch Me, Porcelain, Bodyrock, Extreme Ways, Harbour
2. Lots of Pink Floyd, including: Wish You Were Here, Have a Cigar, Young Lust, Vera, Run Like Hell, The Final Cut, Not Now John, On the Turning Away, Sorrow
3. IZ/Over the rainbow
4. Kid Rock/Only God Knows Why
5a. Royksopp/A Higher Place
5b. Dirty Vegas/Simple Things Part 2
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| Technology and decay |
| Wednesday May 18, 2005, 4:17 AM EST |
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I've spent a lot of time thinking about technology recently. Of particular interest is the relationship between technology and decay. This thread came to me while uncomfortably sitting on an older airplane, preparing to take a redeye flight home to Boston from San Francisco: I was taken by the very tacky and outdated pattern on the internal plastic walls of the aircraft, amused that it had once seemed dynamic, or fresh, or stylish or...something positive and compelling. Today, it is a relic of a More ...
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| New York City - May 2005 |
| Wednesday May 18, 2005, 3:58 AM EST |
Fran and I took a quick two day trip to New York City this past weekend. Initially we planned the trip to see Julius Caesar on Broadway, but extended it into a graduation trip, to celebrate Fran's finishing three years of grad school. Along with the play, we visited with friends, had some good meals, did some light shopping in SoHo, walked far too many blocks for our aching feet and bones, and I treated Fran to a massage and other spa services.
I've been looking forward to seeing this Julius Caesar ever since reading about it in an on-flight magazine on one of my seemingly perpetual business trips. Starring Denzel Washington as Brutus (fair for a big Hollywood actor, but mediocre compared to the more classically trained theater actors I'm used to seeing play Shakespeare) and a variety of other recognizable Hollywood actors: Bill Sadler, Jessica Hecht, and Colm Feore as Cassius. This was a special treat for me, as I saw Feore play Cassius in 1990 at Stratford with Brian Bedford as Brutus, still the finest Shakespeare I've ever seen. This was a largely disappointing production, and made me appreciate the quality of theater in Stratford all the more.
We've made it a habit to head out to New York City every couple months, and I'm going to miss our access to the Big Apple once we move out west.
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| "Its the lifestyle, stupid." |
| Friday May 13, 2005, 13:01 PM EST |
"I don't think the success of the iPod can continue in the long term, however good Apple may be. I think you can draw parallels here with the computer -- here, too, Apple was once extremely strong with its Macintosh and graphic user interface, like with the iPod today, and then lost its position. ... If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I'd bet on the mobile phone for sure."
- Bill Gates, May 12, 2005
While I will not be the one to stand up and champion a stand-alone mp3 player as a viable, long-term market solution, this quote in a nutshell captures how and why Bill Gates - even after all these years - will never, ever get it. More ...
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| Work. Leisure. Wireless. Lifestyle. |
| Thursday May 12, 2005, 20:07 PM EST |
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Digital technology - particularly of the wireless variety - can now take us anywhere we want to go. It is possible to sit beachside and have the physical means to accomplish essentially the same tasks and have the same access to information as if one was sitting in their office in the middle of Corporate HQ. Marketers are positioning this newfound "freedom" in such a way that would suggest it is the beginning of a revolution in how and where business is done. More ...
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| Starbucks: corporate messaging, sustainability, and better design |
| Thursday May 5, 2005, 13:25 PM EST |
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I've been spending most of my workweeks in San Mateo, as part of a weekly cross-country commute. One thing that has become part of my daily routine here is getting Starbucks on my way into work in the morning. Today, while waiting patiently for my Venti Iced Americano with light ice (why is it either too much or too little and never just right?!) I happened to notice Starbucks little family of pamphlets strategically positioned by the counter. What a sad example of poor experience design. More ...
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| ESPN and poor information design |
| Saturday April 23, 2005, 17:26 PM EST |
Watching the NFL Draft on ESPN. For those not familiar with a sports draft, one team after another selects a draft-eligible player, whose rights they own by virtue of the selection. So, it is a process of analyzing a pick once it happens, speculating what the next pick will be, watching the pick occur in real-time, then the process starts all over again. Not terribly exciting, but nice background music while designing or writing.
But here's the inspiration for this post: More ...
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| The State of User Experience |
| Thursday April 21, 2005, 13:44 PM EST |
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.
- Theodore Roosevelt
It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that so much focus, attention, and energy are given to the opinions of critics and analysts, who sit detached, off to the side, choosing to criticize the efforts of others for seemingly no reason other than to make a bold statement.
I've had the privilege of participating in the More ...
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| Suspension of disbelief |
| Wednesday April 20, 2005, 4:50 AM EST |
Historically, there are always a couple of television shows that I really enjoy and make a basic attempt to see each week. During its original run - at least for the first five or six seasons - The X-Files was one such show. I really liked it, thought it was interesting and sophisticated, and derived a lot of pleasure from it.
Now that I am traveling so much, I spend a lot of late evening time in hotel rooms. One channel that is prevalent is TNT, which some nights of the week shows marathon-like stretches of The X-Files. And I have to say, it really has not held up well, only a few years later. More ...
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| Hotels - a model for experience design |
| Tuesday April 19, 2005, 23:48 PM EST |
My professional life is all about designing experiences. Whether it be a digital system, or a corporate strategy, or an information visualization, or a trade show booth, clients expect me to help them concept, design, and implement superior experiences. In order to do that successfully, I spend quite a bit of time engaging in a variety of experiences, going out of my way to try many different things, and often things that most people don't have the opportunity to do. Happily for me, I relish new and interesting experiences.
As an example of this, I've taken to staying at better bed and breakfasts, or spending one night at high-end boutique hotels, when I engage in personal travel - which I do frequently. Additionally, because my clients and speaking engagements are both far-flung and often, I've stayed in more than 20 different hotels in the last year. More ...
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| Good Digital Design in Portland |
| Saturday April 2, 2005, 17:43 PM EST |
They do paid on-street parking a little bit differently here in Portland. Rather than the typical parking meters, they have, approximately on each block, a digital interface device that you pay for your parking, which provides a paper print-out and a little sticker so you can put it on the window of your car. This has all of the information on it to allow parking meter maids to make judgements on the legality of each auto. Better yet, these devices are - at least in part - solar powered. Assuming the little paper tickets are biodegradable or tied into a dedicated recycling program, the system is even green.
This system accomplishes a number of things: More ...
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| About Portland - April 2005 |
| Saturday April 2, 2005, 16:35 PM EST |
I'm in Portland for five days, in conjunction with CHI/UXnet/DevGroup NW. Last night I gave a variant of my "The Future of Digital Product Design" as part of the Visionary Speaker Series leading up to WebVisions 2005. It was a good evening: I met a lot of interesting people - including Dave Bedingfield, who does work for us at Involution Studios. Brad Smith of Hot Pepper Studios is a first-class host, and I hope this second time giving a talk in Portland is not my last.
Exploring the city last night and today, a few observations: More ...
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| Requiem for the Boy Wonder |
| Wednesday March 30, 2005, 17:17 PM EST |
I am feeling my age. I have long basked in being - as a couple of former supervisors called me - the Boy Wonder. From the time I was a young lad, I have consistenly been the youngest person at the table in the things I've invested myself in. That has been no different in my professional career, first by rising to an executive level in my mid-20's and then participating in various industry Boards with people 10-30 years my senior over the last couple of years. Boy Wonder is a persona that I've worn for a long time, and I really liked the way it fit. My favourite part of my professional bio has been "One of the youngest thought leaders in the international design community..."
But over the course of the last couple months, things are changing: More ...
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| The substance of professional design |
| Monday March 14, 2005, 15:58 PM EST |
"The problem, as I see it, is that many people don't understand what intuition is....Useful intuition in any area doesn't come from the lackadaisical, self-centered, self-indulgence, and the hit and miss attitude so often associated with the old maestro designer mentioned by John Maeda (and he does add a postscript about intuition). Intuitive decisions and judgments come from hard work and insightful understanding. Knowledge and understanding of the content areas that is intense and articulate. This hard won, and truly contemplative, intuition certainly can lead to penetrating and innovative design solutions."
- Frank Cronk, during a conversation on intuition and the maestro designer of days gone by More ...
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| Residential design for the mobile professional |
| Saturday February 12, 2005, 14:37 PM EST |
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Here's the situation: along with my business partner, I own a digital product design firm in Silicon Valley. I'm based in Boston. We work with companies on both coasts, and in other places. Regardless of client work, I travel out to the west coast every month for anywhere from a few days to a week. Each time I need to pay too much for a pretty crappy hotel room. Now, we just got an exciting new contract on the west coast that will require my being on-site for roughly four weeks out of the next nine. What are my options? More ...
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| Happy rumblings |
| Saturday February 12, 2005, 14:11 PM EST |
People in my industry know that the last five years have been really, really tough. But things are palpably turning around. I've got more hot leads than I can handle. We're about to dig into an amazing new identity and redesign project, have a choice consulting gig with a major research and engineering organization, and various and sundry other good projects in the pipeline. And its only February!
Since we're still in start-up mode I'm not personally enjoying the fruits of this progress and labor yet, but the future is looking really, really bright. From all other indicators, this seems to be the case for the design industry in general and tech in Silicon Valley in particular. We got started last summer, and both of us felt the timing was perfect. It appears we just might have been right. I hope our friends and colleagues out there doing good work are feeling this positive rub, too!
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| mobyhotel.com |
| Friday February 4, 2005, 10:46 AM EST |
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The music industry offers some of the more interesting online experiences. A good example of a promotional site for an as-yet-unreleased album is for Moby's upcoming album, Hotel. This site uses engaging and experiential content and applications, successfully uses the hotel metaphor to imprint the product identity, and is regularly updated with new content, features, and capabilities to keep the experience fresh and provide a reason to come back. While not the technically strongest or most aesthetically powerful example of Flash, it is a good example of successfully tying together a promotional experience that raises interest in the new album while engaging people in Moby's brand. For those familiar with Moby's music and overall identity, this site advances many different parts of the Moby experience, from his art to his aesthetic to his attitude. And, honestly, where else can you play Pong online?!
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| The Elevator Experience |
| Thursday February 3, 2005, 11:04 AM EST |
Last week my friend Donna shared her insights on the elevator experience, and tongue-in-cheek suggested that I should write a post on the topic. So it goes that, when my friends ask something, typically I acquiesce - particularly when it means exploring a topic that is such a universal source of experiential discomfort and confusion.
Elevators are an unusual space. More ...
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| Brand Experience in Kansas City |
| Tuesday February 1, 2005, 20:55 PM EST |
This weekend I participated in a Board Retreat for the AIGA Center for Brand Experience.
Ann Willoughby hosted us at her Kansas City studio, and later at her home for an amazing dinner of prime rib (specially prepared by her partner, Steve), asparagus, salad, a generous Dean & DeLuca antipasto plate, tiramisu, and sinful amounts of Super Tuscan selections. Thankfully, gluttony was only a small part of the weekend. More ...
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| Sushi in Sunnyvale |
| Tuesday February 1, 2005, 20:45 PM EST |
Every now and then, something still catches me by surprise.
I spent most of last week in Sunnyvale with Andrei, handling a variety of business items. One night I missed dinner, and found myself hungry while walking back to the hotel around midnight. I did a double-take when I saw the neon "Open" sign lit in the window of Andoh Japanese restaurant. 15 minutes later, I was enjoying unagi and sake. Life is good!
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| On the boundaries of human existence |
| Thursday January 20, 2005, 14:25 PM EST |
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Technology is replacing people. We come up with ideas that manifest in new methods and products and contructs that eliminate the need for us to actually do things. Sometimes, this is adapting the natural world. Other times, it is creating new things. Our reach gets longer, and longer, and longer, even as we need to actually do less, and less, and less. Instead of doing tasks, increasingly we conceptualize, create, and produce machines that do the tasks instead. Presumably, this is a good thing. More ...
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| Rashomon |
| Wednesday January 19, 2005, 18:18 PM EST |
"I'm the one who should be ashamed. I don't understand my own soul."
- The Woodcutter, played by Takashi Shimaru, in Rashomon
This is the best film I've seen in a really long time.
Slowly, I'm making my way through watching the major, important films in cinematic history. Last night I saw Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa. It is one of those rare films that is beautiful, visually far ahead of its time, with a timeless (if culturally-specific) narrative, and is philosophically engrossing. For people who appreciate great film and film history, I cannot recommend it enough. More ...
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| The nature of hatred |
| Saturday January 15, 2005, 16:07 PM EST |
"There's no reason for us to be enemies. We're the only two creatures on this planet!"
- Lt. Starbuck to a Cylon robot on the old television program "Battlestar Galactica".
In order to get as much context of the world as possible, I expose myself to lots of different popular culture artifacts. More ...
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| A re-design of essential knowledge |
| Saturday January 15, 2005, 15:35 PM EST |
I'm reading The United States of Europe right now (highly recommended), courtesy of my friend Sigrid. It is rather eye-opening to learn more about the evolution and vision of the EU, particularly juxtaposed with the state of the U.S. Of course, it is a bit disquieting to realize how out-of-touch with the international situation I really am.
Acknowledging this led me to think about essential knowledge. Going back 100 years, for example, there was a fairly static body of essential knowledge More ...
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| Car shopping: a window into brand experience |
| Wednesday January 12, 2005, 15:51 PM EST |
More and more, sales will not be generated through sales efforts. Confused? That’s OK: the path to wisdom begins from ignorance.
Business is changing, rapidly. This is happening for a number of reasons: increased globalization, the continuing maturity and ubiquity of digital technologies, and the resultant effect on people’s perceptions, tolerances, and expectations. But what most of us do not understand is what this means to the future: how the trends of today will radically More ...
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| Digital home economics |
| Wednesday January 12, 2005, 15:39 PM EST |
In my presentation on Brand Experience, I talk about the fact that WalMart is trying to make all products and palettes be embedded with a microchip, to expedite their stocking, inventory, and re-ordering process. Walking to the grocery store today - and trying to remember the expiration dates on our milk, eggs, and other products - it struck me how powerful this technology could be for managing our household. If every package were digitally embedded, we could have a constant inventory of, not only what we have, but when they are at their best or expire. So, instead of trying to remember while walking, I could be browsing the list on my PDA. Taking it a step further, we could even input our recipes into the database and the program could not just manage when our products will expire, but even suggest what to make given the state of our food and create a shopping list for us.
Taking it in a slightly different direction, instead of never being sure when to drink wine, the system could have deep information from both the producer and consumers as to when to drink certain bottles, vintages, or varietals. The power of the microchip, in these cases, would be extraordinary.
I'm sure these are not original ideas, but they struck me as being rather cool on my little jaunt to the store.
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| Work of the confidential kind |
| Wednesday January 12, 2005, 14:44 PM EST |
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We're into some really interesting things right now at Involution Studios, but maddeningly nothing I can publicly talk about. We're working on a great application with a Silicon Valley start-up, and in the industrial design stage of creating our own hardware device. I'm learning a lot about the ID process by project managing the latter. Good stuff. And with other great opportunities in the till - both internal and client - these are interesting times at Invo...
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| Digital photography and the sciences |
| Wednesday January 12, 2005, 13:49 PM EST |
While re-sizing an image of my mom and son for this website last night - and each image was originally over 2 megs in size - at one point the entire screen was filled with my mother's hair, in super high resolution and micro detail. And I was struck: "Wow, that's my hair!"
Of course, it is obvious to anyone who sees us both that I am her son, and that our hair is similar. But thanks to the digital photography, it was clear to me at a very granular level. That made me think about the role photographic technology plays in the sciences. I do not know enough - in an actual and procedural sense - about the deep processes of the phycial sciences, but I have to think that digital photography and the enormous amount of visual content they provide will demonstrably change certain areas of the physical sciences, particularly from the standpoint of studying historical evidence or changes to the physical world over time.
Photoshop and other image altering tools add an entirely different spin to the issue, but the basic fact that we are constantly capturing the state of the world in some detail to permanent media will have a major impact.
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| The Pleasure Principle |
| Tuesday January 11, 2005, 23:07 PM EST |
"You have given both of us a great deal of pleasure."
- Lt. Columbo to virtuoso conductor Alex Benedict, a few short scenes before arresting him
Giving pleasure. Is there anything more viscerally powerful that one person can do for another? While we typically have a defined notion of what pleasure is - and the relatively limited context it exists in - pleasure is actually much more a part of our daily lives than we care to realize. More ...
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| Not just for music anymore |
| Friday January 7, 2005, 13:57 PM EST |
Visionaries and entrepreneurs take note: I read today on siliconvalley.com (an amazing daily reference for business and technology information) that radiologists are using iPods to store their medical images. From the article:
"Technology coming from the consumer market is changing the way we do things in the radiology department. With OsiriX, radiologists can sort and manage medical image files on the iPod much the same way as MP3s and transfer images from computer to computer. Radiologists deal with a very large amount of medical imaging data. I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is -- I always need more space. One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40 gigabytes of storage on it. It's twice as big as my disk on my laptop and I'm using only 10 percent of it for my music. So, why don't I use it as a hard disk for storing medical images? It's easy to use and you don't have to worry about how to load and unload it from the iPod. But the real beauty of it is that I can use the images directly on the iPod. I don't have to take the time to copy them to my computer. The iPod allows me to copy data from work to my laptop, but I don't have to do it if I don't want to."
Call me crazy, but I'm thinking the HIPAA folks aren't too happy about this.
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| Becoming part of the game |
| Tuesday December 21, 2004, 1:30 AM EST |
"Isn't the problem that, today, people don't just see themselves as spectators, they see themselves as part of the game?"
- John Saunders, ESPN analyst, in the wake of the brawl between the NBA Indiana Pacers and fans of the Detroit Pistons
The incident that led to Saunders' comments was troubling and thought-provoking in myriad ways, but it was only when I heard his remarks that I began to think of the underlying reasons and patterns behind it, and how those apply to the business challenges that we face. More ...
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| India, the U.S. economy, and more |
| Sunday December 19, 2004, 13:25 PM EST |
I met Manish Bodani this week, a Business Development Manager for Patni, one of the largest IT companies in India. We had dinner together through Robert Khan, my friend and a mutual associate.
It was a fascinating evening. Despite his relative youth, Manish impressed me with his insight, wisdom, and very balanced mindset. We had a nice time talking about our personal and professional lives.
Manish lives in New Delhi and grew up in rural India. The things he shared with me about his culture were enlightening. More ...
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| Grocery store efficiency |
| Thursday December 16, 2004, 13:18 PM EST |
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Have you noticed that, most times when you buy groceries with your credit card, that there are three total receipts that are printed out? And most of the time, the third and final receipt is the one that you need to sign. Each time, the cashier and I and all the people in line stand waiting through the printing of the first receipt...then the second receipt...then the third receipt, so I can sign the third receipt. It would save an incredible amount of time over the long haul to have the first receipt be the signature receipt, so the other two receipts can print while the act of signing is taking place.
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| Credit card security |
| Thursday December 16, 2004, 13:14 PM EST |
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Have you noticed that, when you buy something by credit card, your receipt sometimes displays your entire credit card number while, other times, all but the last four numbers are X'ed out? It should be mandatory - by law, if necessary - that all credit card receipts only display those last four numbers. Obviously the technology is in place and relatively mainstream, there is just no excuse for this to not be ubiquitous, given the prevalence of identity theft in the electronic world.
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| Sometimes, breakfast means breakfast |
| Thursday December 16, 2004, 13:11 PM EST |
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Driving to a meeting in Connecticut yesterday, around 9 AM, I stopped by McDonald's and tried to order a cheeseburger. Much to my surprise, they were only serving breakfast food and would not give me a cheeseburger. They were willing to sell me a milkshake, though.
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