June 2008 Archives

I live in California, and starting tomorrow (July 1), drivers must use a hands-free device for all cell phone calls. Now I know the iPhone comes with a set of headphones with a built-in microphone, so technically there's a free solution. But that doesn't make for a very good story. It turns out the iPhone ear buds simply do not stay in my ear. So for better or worse, I needed to find a different way to go hands-free.

About a month ago I ordered the new Jawbone when it first came out, thinking that would be my solution. It was $140. Yow. But it had great reviews about the performance, especially in noisy situations. And I really didn't like it. I just feel weird wearing a headset on my ear like that. Besides, it turns out I use my iPhone a lot to listen to podcasts and music. So I already have earphones. I just need a microphone to go with my existing headphones (Nike Earhooks).

Turns out these exist; they are short extension cords with an inline microphone. Both Monster Cable and Griffin make one, and they cost about $10-15. As I was looking around a bit more, I found no-name versions for $5-10. Then I found Cross Mark.

They are a wholesaler in China, who will sell you electronic gadgets and accessories at pretty amazing wholesale prices. You can get a cheap knock-off iPod for $23.16, or an LED light bulb for $3.17. Or, an inline iPhone microphone for $2.79. With shipping and handling (from China!), it cost $3.62. And if I wanted to buy 50 of them, it'd cost only $1.80 each. Gotta love the disintermediation power of the web.

So who wants to go in for an order of 50+ LED light bulbs?

(Since Dave gets to have his own blog offering wisdom on the best products, I'll just have to post my usual drivel here.)

There are two ways one can spend time and money: acquiring things or acquiring experiences.

We all need some base level of things to survive: food, shelter, clothing... basically the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. But once you have the basics met, what do you do with the rest of your time and money?

I used to be all about acquiring things. One of the first things I did when I got a full-time job was to buy a $2000 music synthesizer (a Kurzweil K250) I had always coveted. Some go to Europe with the money from their summer work. I bought a Sony HiFi VCR and a new Mac 660av (you can make phone calls from it!).

But this gets old after a while, and at some point you just don't need another thing to clutter up your life. I used to walk through REI and could pick out 10 things I coveted. Now I have those 10 things and another 30 more. There's really not much else I need from an outdoor equipment standpoint.

So I'm now trying to err on the side of spending time and money on experiences. Travel, outings, restaurants, events, classes, etc. Or get things that can be experiences, like 12 different chocolate bars for a chocolate tasting party.

I'm the first to admit I'm no Zen master, and I still like stuff. But I try to be more mindful about it. I don't acquire nearly the volume of stuff I did in my youth, and I do believe its a better lifestyle. So next time you're thinking about what to do with your time or money, choose an experience.

I was talking to my co-blogger David Creemer the other day about how I thought the single most valuable piece of technology created in the era of the personal computer was the clipboard. Copy and Paste is the an essential staple of countless workflows, and it's by far one of the most consistent and reliable ways to share data across applications.

But then sharing this with some friends at work, we talked about the more recent past. What technologies have changed your life in the past 10 or so years? Broadband is number one for me. I've been blessed in that I've gone to school and worked at places with high-speed, always on connections. But until about 8 years ago, I relied on dial-up at home. It used to be faster to drive into work and copy large files down to my computer there than to attempt to download them over my dial-up connection.

And the second big game-changer in the last 10 years is wireless. This coupled with a laptop computer and always-on high-spped broadband has fundamentally changed the way I interact with the computer. Using the computer used to be a batch process: turn it on, boot it up, connect to the internet, do some tasks, shut it down. Now it's always available, always on. Looking up some info, checking email, or IMing a friend is as easy to do as picking up the laptop from the coffee table in front of me. (or more likely, just looking down onto my lap, as it's there most of the time now).

Basically what happened was the cost of internet connectivity has dropped to practically nothing. And when I say cost, I mean several things: monetary of course, but also time, convenience, accessibility, speed, reliablity... really any metric you can measure.

So what's next? Well, I think the desktop -» laptop transition that has happened over the past 10 years will repeat in a laptop -» mobile transition over the next 10. I have seen the future, and it is something that looks a lot like the iPhone. Now it's not just freedom of connectivity at home or work. It's practically anywhere I am. And that's a powerful thing.

Five years ago, Wired reported on the state of the art in the diamond fabrication business. Now the Smithsonian is running an updated version of the story in the June 2008 edition of their magazine (and here on the web).

What I love most about this story is that these diamond manufacturing businesses are finally taking the artificially-inflated value out of the industry. This quote from the article is most telling:

When Linares [CEO of artificial diamond company Apollo Diamond] was at a diamond conference a few years ago, he says, a man he declines to describe slipped behind him as he was walking out of a hotel meeting room and said someone from a natural diamond company just might put a bullet in his head.

Wow, there is some big business at play here, no doubt.

But right now diamonds are mostly a luxury item. Sure, the occasional bit of diamond dust is used for cutting tools and other industrial means, but the artificial value created by the luxury industry puts it out of the reach of many applications. Not only will artificial diamonds open up these applications for the first time, it will also help put an end to African violence.

Blood diamonds won't fund military efforts anymore once the bottom drops out on the diamond market, and that's a good thing. I only wish scientists would work on a way to artificially create rhino horn, elephant tusk, and yes even tiger penis. Flood the market with artificial clones indistinguishable from the original, and it eliminates the biggest reason to kill these endangered animals.

Now that AB 1634 is effectively dead, I thought I'd mosey on over to the AKC (American Kennel Club) site to see what information they provide to the public on spay/neuter.

A text search of the home page shows the only reference to spay/neuter is an alert about the final hearing for AB 1634. So I did a site search for spay neuter. All the results point to pages talking about spay/neuter legislation, with the top link going to their "action center" page.

OK fine. I'll dig through their pages manually. I go to their Guide to Breeding, including the page on Sending Your Pups to Their New Homes; no mention of spay/neuter on these pages. I went to their Responsible Breeding page and their Puppy Tips page: nothing. I went to the Dog Owners page, with its section on Responsible Dog Ownership, and there it is in item 84 out of 101: Spay or Neuter. I also found a section on it by digging down through Health/Overview/Healthy Dog section.

So there you have it. For the 99.99% of people who casually visit the AKC site, or even dig around at a high level, their perception of the AKC's stance is spay/neuter legislation is bad. And unfortunately, human psychology will tend to generalize that to spay/neuter is bad.

The AKC is sending the absolute wrong message to its site's visitors regarding spay and neuter. I encourage them to fix their design and flip the focus. Bury the legislative alerts info and promote the message to spay and neuter your dog.

One man's truck step is another man's soap dish. From Cool Tools.

 

Freedom is a funny thing. Even when one theoretically has freedom, there are inherent biases in the system that influence people to choose one path over another. In essence, this is what interface designers (like me) do when they present you with this UI:

or click me
It's pretty obvious which one the designer wants you to click.

The same is true for food. Yes, one could argue that we have the freedom to choose what we eat in this country. However, the system is set up with its own set of influences that push us down the path of least resistance.

It all starts with the Farm Bill. This monstrosity of the democratic process looks a hell of a lot more like socialism than any American politician would care to admit publicly. Yet it's the foundation from which our food choice are foisted upon us. For example, the corn subsidy, which is so outrageous that the vast majority of processed foods have some form of corn in them: corn syrup, corn-fed livestock, corn meal, cornstarch...

The same goes for the meat and dairy (livestock) subsidies. They get massively subsidized water rights, which is one of the primary reasons no drop of the Colorado river reaches the ocean anymore. They also get to externalize costs such as the huge pollution caused by their animals: land, water, and yes even air (Cows excrete massive amounts of greenhouse gas. Literally.).

And all this means that the government and the corporations are the ones who are ultimately deciding what you eat. By making all of these things cheap and prolific via subsidies, it makes them the path of least comestible resistance for a public that views food indiscriminately. Whatever is nearest, or cheapest, or yummiest, or marketed best, or placed at eye level on the end cap of the middle aisle of the super-convenience store, that is what is bought and eaten, likely out of its wrapper while the consumer talks on a cell phone driving 80 down the freeway in a H2 Hummer.

OK, so I'm ranting a bit here. But think about this: choose any random restaurant, then choose any random dish on the menu. Or choose any random supermarket, then choose a random product off  its shelves. What are the odds that its healthful? What are the odds that it is unprocessed (or minimally processed)? What are the odds that it has fewer than 5 ingredients in it? What are the odds that it has no meat, dairy, or corn in it?

I'll give you a hint: It's the same as making love when the temperature is just barely above freezing.

Fucking close to zero.

I love the speed with which an internet meme appears, grows in popularity, peaks, then dies out, only to become a footnote on a Wikipedia page or worse . One that popped up this week is the Sewer Horse -- as and "sewer horse is watching you." This makes no sense unless you view this picture . I've been unable to trace the source of the photo (I didn't try too hard). The folks at Reddit were so amused by it that it spawned a long list of mashups and and remixes and comments.

In a week it will be forgotten, except for the occasional shirt showing up at Goodwill. Sewer horse, you brought us much joy (for a day) we hardly knew you.

Firefox 3 has just been released, and it is really the best web browser out there. You should get it. Now. Go ahead. I'll wait...

OK, still not convinced? If any of my non-techie friends and family are reading this, install it and I will help you with any technical questions you have in using it vs. your current browser.

There are some pretty nice features in Firefox that Safari or IE don't have, but the best one is the address bar. They are keeping track of which links you visit most often and surface those at the top of the auto-complete menu as you type. They also search on all keywords in the URL and title of the page, so it's easier to get to a page in your browser history. I've always been a huge fan of weighted auto-complete lists like this; in fact my one of the designs I'm proudest of was this very feature for addressing messages in Outlook Express for Mac and Entourage. I then designed an auto-complete bar for Yahoo! Messenger 9 that greatly simplified the interface and made it a lot easier to start conversations with people both in your Messenger list and your address book.

But I digress. Download Firefox 3 now.

For lack of a better blog post today, I provide this humorous juxtaposition from the depths of the internet. The seagull's profile perfectly matches the sign.

This past week the Associated Press announced that they were sick of being a relevant, widely quoted and important news source, and that the internet is clearly a passing fad, full of criminals who need to be annoyed, harassed and sued. They didn't used those words of course, but that's the upshot. By taking legal action against the Drudge Retort for quoting headlines and a sections of an AP article, they have clearly stated that fair-use has no place on the internet as far as they're concerned. Worse, their response to the backlash has been to announce forthcoming guidelines on how to quote from the AP and avoid getting sued.

Not that we're a big media outlet, but we have occasionally linked to an AP article or two here at KPAO. Until the AP changes their policy and issues a statement indicating that they were wrong and have gone back on their medication, I have decided to update KPAO's policy¹ on referencing AP articles. It used to be "stay within established fair use case law." It now reads "go fuck yourself."

Many far more influential bloggers are taking a similar stance .

¹ Copies of our policy manual are available for review in our New York office.

A while back, The Facebook added instant-messaging (IM) through their web interface. It's a neat little trinket that can connect you to your friends when you are both on the Facebook site. What's more interesting is that the various multi-protocol IM clients have started to support Facebook chat. The latest Adium beta (for Mac OS X), and Pidgin (for Linux) and Trillian (Windows) and probably every other client now support Facebook chat.

Which leads to an interesting question: where do you spend more time managing your list of friends and groups of friends? AIM? Yahoo IM? Probably not -- for many people, the Facebook is their definitive list of friends and acquaintances, and having that list in your IM client is a perfectly natural fit. I use Pidgin on Linux as my primary IM client, and if I "show my offline buddies" (and sort by status to make the list manageable), then I can even hover over any contact to see their most recent Facebook status message. That message is almost always more interesting than a simple IM status too (compare "David is juggling baby geese" vs. "David is away"...).

I know that people folks are slow to change, and IM platforms are especially sticky. But in looking through my IM list, I have only two or three folks left that I communicate with via AIM (the rest are via Yahoo or Facebook). I can easily see AIM going away for me in a year. Will Yahoo Messenger follow AIM down the path of irrelevance? The writing may be on the wall for non-social network instant messaging.

Our group started working on a new project this week related to mapping and navigation. As part of the investigation process, we decided to check out some of the existing services out there. For practically every one we looked at, I was stunned at the poor execution. The basic premise of the sites seemed reasonable, but drill down into the details, and it doesn't even pass a simple "is this useful" litmus test.

So I've decided that in the future, I'm going to spend as little time as possible doing a competitive analysis, and instead spend the time on honing the problem statement and the key use cases to perfection. Because if you nail the vision, define the critical problems, and then solve them, it doesn't matter what the competition is doing. You will win.

When we ship our product, I'll go into detail about this.

I recently rediscovered a great short story I enjoyed in my youth, Love is a Fallacy. I never did study logic formally, other than in the computer science sense. But that didn't really address things like the emotional appeal of Ad Misericordiam; it really doesn't come up when programming.

It did get me thinking about an interesting argument technique: asserting not(x) to focus the topic on x, elevating an otherwise non-issue as something contentious and open for debate. As an example:

My opponent is not a child molester. He is not the type of person who would blatantly rob children of their innocence for his own perverted sexual gratification. Why would anyone associate him with pedophiles like Father Brendan Smyth?

And so on. Does anyone out there know a formal name for this technique, or examples of where it has been used? Let me know in the comments.

Under the auspices of the Templeton Foundation, Michael Schermer edits (and contributes to) a series of interesting essays that attempt to answer the following question: "Does science make the belief in God obsolete?"

I find it quite amazing that such a seemingly innocuous piece of legislation (AB 1634) has generated such vitriol from its opponents. After all, the bill is modeled from the Santa Cruz ordinance passed 13 years ago, and according to the animal services workers in Santa Cruz, the program has been a huge success: they take in 60% fewer animals compared to 1995, the percent of animals euthanized is nearly ½ what it was, and worker morale has improved. "Killing dogs and cats is a difficult thing to ask good people to do."

So why are some fighting it so hard? As in most things, it comes down to money. According to the CA State Board of Equalization (BoE), $14 million of taxes go unpaid each year from animal sellers who -- either through ignorance or willful disobedience -- have not registered with the BoE and do not declare their sales as taxable income. In April 2008, the BoE put out this press release in an effort to raise awareness of the issue.

So if it truly is an issue of ignorance, then the press release and news posts like this one will no doubt educate. I know animal sellers are seeing these posts; they have Google Alerts set up for the keyword AB 1634. and pounce on every blog post with aplomb to spread their message of FUD. Whether or not AB 1634 passes, the BoE will crack down, so there's one fewer reason to oppose the bill.

As a great paper on project management noted, the biggest factor in determining the success or failure of a project is a shared, crisp vision (or lack thereof). In the same vein, there's a great quote in the book Good to Great that talks about how said vision should be framed:

If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you'd be struck by the utter absence of talk about "competitive strategy." Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.

I played hockey the other day and after the game I was drenched in sweat. It occurred to me that people are always drenched with sweat -- they are almost never covered or coated or whatever. "Drenched with sweat" is a clichéd phrase -- but even stronger than that, it seems to be one of many pairs of words that always seem to be used together.

Curiously, most of the examples I can think of have negative connotations:

• bus plunge
• slipped into a coma
• massive heart attack; massive stroke, etc.
• engulfed in flames
• humiliating defeat
• blissful ignorance

Are we just stuck in our ways? Or are we just happily ignorant of interesting new word combinations?

The NY Times published this really interesting chart (above) on where the gas price increases are having their biggest effect. Not surprisingly, it's in areas that are relatively poor and rural, where people undoubtedly need to drive long distances for work, school, shopping, and even socializing. I wonder how this might effect the election... 

According to our logs, my font posts have been some of the more popular on this blog. So that got me thinking: how can I pander to the crowd and create a few more font posts to generate even more traffic? Seriously, it did get me thinking about web fonts again.

The root problem of typography on the web is current model that the browser will only render a font that is installed on the computer. Designers get around this by rendering text as images, but there are obvious scaling, localization, and internationalization issues. SIFR is a great utility for working around this -- and I highly recommend it -- but ultimately it too is a hack and is not very easy to use.

CSS 2 documents the @font-face rule, which allows designers to point to a font file on the web, thus ensuring that anyone viewing the page will see it in the proper font. However, Safari is the only major browser that currently supports this; heck, even Opera doesn't support it. Without support from IE or Firefox, this is bound to be another piece of amusing trivia, but not useful for actual web design.

But that got me thinking... Firefox does have an add-on architecture. One could write an add-on that supported @font-face. Nice, but why stop there? The designer in me wants a new system that will work with all the web sites that are already out there. What I want is a Firefox add-on that makes a list of all the fonts needed on each page, and if they aren't installed on the computer, goes out to the web and gets them. 

Google recently announced their AJAX Libs API, which enables any web developer to link to popular Javascipt libraries and let Google worry about hosting and updating. It's basically a central repository for commonly-used web resources.

So here's my grand vision (1.0): a central server that hosts the most-recent version of all popular open-licensed fonts, and a Firefox add-on that uses the font repository when the required font is not installed in the browser's OS. It turns out we don't really even need support for @font-face, though it would be useful for those who want to use a font that isn't in the central repository.

Update to grand vision (2.0): Actually there doesn't need to be a central repository, just a central index of font files. So all we really need is an open font directory server that lists all of the known ttf and otf fonts out there by name with URLs to them, much like DNS is a directory of IP addresses based on domain names.

Anyone want to take this on? Ping me in the comments if you're interested. Googlers looking for a 20% project, take note!

When I worked at Microsoft, I attended a week-long immersion course called Management Essentials. This is where all of the rising stars at the company are sent to prep them for a transition from individual contributor to manager. It was here I fully realized for the first time that Microsoft was first and foremost a business.

Of course I knew it was a business; but I wasn't truly exposed until that week. I was an IC, passionate about the customers and the technology. But I didn't feel that passion here. It seemed like all these things were mere obstacles to be dealt with, and that software was  a necessary means by which they minted their money. I got the feeling that if crack were legal, Microsoft would be dealing it on every street corner. OK, maybe a bit harsh, but it was quite a wake-up call for a naïve, passionate technophile such as myself. So hopefully you can understand and excuse the hyperbole. It was here that I first started thinking that MSFT probably wasn't a good place for me long-term.

I do remember that my team kicked some serious ass in the Tango business simulation; the facilitator said it was the best he'd ever seen. Not bad for a bunch of tech geeks.

But the most interesting thing from that week that I remember was the evening chat with SVP Brian Arborgast. He gave some great advice about working with others, talking about building up trust, paying into the "trust bank" so if you ever need to make a withdraw, you can. Microsoft is a meritocracy, so be open, honest, and transparent. Those people are rewarded. I know because I found my notebook from the course.

But the most interesting thing--and I'll never forget it even though I didn't write it down--was when I asked about Microsoft's weak position in Internet search, I asked the obvious question: "Why doesn't Microsoft simply buy Google?" Brian's answer: "I don't think the $4 billion it would take is a good investment for the shareholders. We can spend that money better  building out our own search technology." Giving him the benefit of the doubt, this could have just been his nice way of saying "We'd love to, but Larry and Sergey won't sell to us for anything close to reasonable." But if not, then that's the most massive business mistake I've been remotely close to.

Does anyone have details on Microsoft/Google talks in the years before their IPO? I'd love to know the real story here.

One of the biggest problems with serif fonts on the web, is they are visually busier than sans fonts. They simply have more complexity and details in their letterforms. But if a web design, it's often nice to have a contrasting font to help communicate different types of information, and using a serif is the most reliable way to do this.

I've found that the italic version of serif fonts are less complex and busy than their normal counterparts, and they are more beautiful too. Plus, there isn't that much italic serif used out there on web pages, so you can create a more unique look simply by going italic. Notice that in this blog I use it for blockquotes:

Passerby were amazed by the the unusually large amounts of blood.

I also use it when UI text appears where content should be, sometimes using my favorite web color for alerts, firebrick:

Sorry, no items matched your search. view all

Times New Roman is actually a quite beautiful italic, and nearly everyone has it. I also really like the new Microsoft font Constantia as a serif (and conversely, I really dislike Cambria). I'm not a big fan of Georgia either; it's a bit too big and clunky for my taste.

Constantia  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Times New Roman  Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Georgia  Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.

Here is the letter I sent to her today. I encourage you all to not vote for her in any future elections in which she may run.

---

I sat through about a dozen start-up pitches today, and TipJoy was one. Others have tried it before, but they're trying again with a tipping micro-payment service on the web. So I thought, what the heck. Let's add it to the blog here and see if anyone likes the stuff enough to cough up a dime.

According to the Canadian Press:

[KFC customers]...will also be able to order a vegan "chicken" item, according to the deal...

I wonder if it will be based on Gardein, the soy "meat" created in Canada.

You know, if they offered it, I'd actually go eat at their restaurant. I just went to Johnny Rockets for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago, since they have a vegan burger called the Streamliner. It was really good; I recommend it.

Click here to suggest that KFC offer vegan chicken in the USA!

As an uniformed or under-informed consumer, filtering through all the options out there is hard. A while ago when there were fewer choices, it was easy. If you needed an item, you bought the only one that was available. Now you go to the store and there are 10 or 30 or even 200 choices, whether it's a digital camera, cable TV, energy bar, or sleeping bag. So what's a consumer to do?

Seek help, of course. So you read a buyer's guide or product reviews or even read the marketing copy on the packages in the store. But while these help you narrow the field down, they still force you to make the final decision: A vs B (vs. C vs. D...). My idea is to take the filter to the extreme. So I started a new site: rated-best.org.

For every product and service category I review, I will give you one recommendation. That's right, there's no decision to make (other than whether or not you actually need this new product or service); I will have already done the work for you. Granted, you're going to have to trust me. And I have to earn that trust. Fair enough. But once I do, this site will save you a ton of time, effort, and stress.

So a single recommendation isn't going to work for everyone. That's fine. The site isn't for everyone. It's for the 80% of the population out there who has been overwhelmed by the paradox of choice and just wants the best overall product out there without having to do a ton of (or really any) work. High value, low cost decision making. And if you think I'm wrong, let me know. Write in the comments. Suggest a better alternative. You might just change my mind. :-)

Thanks for checking out the site, and I hope you enjoy the recommendations. I want to keep this open as a 2-way conversation, so let me know what products and services you recommend. I need your help in filling out the full product and service space. Thanks.