March 2009 Archives

It's that time of year again--"March Madness". The NCAA men's basketball tournament. And it once again reminds me why I have an increased feeling of alienation from my alma maters. The core value proposition of any college or university is education. And the semi-professional athletic programs do nothing to help this goal. Far from it, I believe they detract from it.

Really, what is the link between althletic and intellectual prowess? Sure, one needs to keep in shape physically to be in top form mentally. But college sports have forgone the balance between the two long ago. The pressure to win ensures that when choosing to spend time and energy on academics or athletics, athletics inevitably wins.

This is a hell of a mixed message to be sending to the other students, too. There are essentially two tracks to getting a diploma. One involves actual education, and the other involves being good at sports, taking simplistic classes and getting a degree in "Sports Management" or "Communications".

James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan, wrote a book called Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University. I only wish more people in positions of power at the university would subcribe to this point of view and do something about it.

I got a speeding ticket a few weeks back. The first one I ever got in CA, and my first one in about 15 years. It was pretty stupid. I was just daydreaming while zipping up to SF for yet another job interview, and was cruising a bit too fast on one of the downhill sections of 280.

So of course I opted for the traffic school option to erase the point from my record. I used Finish Fast, which only cost $15. It was an OK experience. The writing wasn't particularly well done, but it was clear enough to answer the quiz questions.

But what was really annoying were some of the quiz questions.

• What color were the sunglasses in the section titled Driving Hazards?
• What song was Uncle Edward singing at karaoke?
• Which color car does not appear in the diagram showing blind spots?

Seriously? Questions about the inconsequential details of the training material? The fact that I remember Uncle Edward was singing "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman" isn't going to make me a better driver. And what about those colorblind people taking the test?

Read the full article here.

Apparently I'm late to the party on this one. LifeHacker blogged about TED 3 years ago. Then again, I only just ditched my DirecTV service, and I'm still looking for the best way to watch my favorite TV shows without it.

I have a digital antenna and converter box. But it turns out even with an amplified antenna, I'm far enough away from the broadcast towers to get consistent drop outs. Annoying. Hulu is good, but they don't have all the shows I watch (e.g. MythBusters and Robot Chicken).

I tried out Boxee and some of the other media center aggregators out there. But then I stumbled upon TED. I love the simplicity. You subscribe to a show. It looks for torrents for that show. When it finds one, it downloads it. You can then watch at your leisure. Brilliant.

I own a MacBook. Generally I like Apple products. But when it comes to the video output, they get it completely wrong.

The MacBook has a non-standard video port for hooking up an external monitor.

Here's a screenshot of two stories right next to each other on Reddit:

I spent last Saturday afternoon in San Francisco with a room-full of other interaction designers for Interaction 09 Redux. It was a great chance to see a few of the presentations from the Interaction 09 conference last month in Vancouver, and to mingle with my colleagues.

As I get older and have more experience, I find I don't learn as much at these sort of events. It more just reiterates and reinforces things I already know. But that can be a good thing. And it can help me think about things I already know, but from a fresh perspective.

Such as it was on Saturday. Steve Portigal gave a condensed version of his workshop Well, we did all this research...now what? But the one thing I took away was something so simple, yet obvious in hindsight. When you are doing observational and ethnographic research, the observee is the boss. They are always right. Their knowledge, experience, feelings, work environment etc. is The Truth, and it is the truth that you seek. You are not there to fix things, or correct them, or show off how smart you are. You are there to learn about the world from their perspective.

He told an interesting anecdote about a person he was talking to about digital entertainment systems. The guy kept talking about "Tie Voh", mispronouncing the popular TV recording device. Steve did his best to continue the flow pronouncing it as the guy did. But then a product manager who was also observing corrected the man: "It's called Tee Voh." And that entirely deflated the conversation. Now the guy felt self-conscious, humiliated, and would no longer be giving his genuine, unfiltered perspective.

It's hard for someone smart driven, and with a strong teaching/mentoring impetus to slam on the brakes and let these things go. But in observational mode, you have to. You aren't there to show off your smarts, or retrain these people. You're there to understand how they think. Good stuff. I'll be sure to use it next time I'm in the field.

Wow. Ex-Microsoft executive Jim Allchin apparently released an album today. And it is pretty awful, judging from the 30-second previews on Amazon. I'm not really a fan of his singing voice, but the lyrics are particularly painful:

I believe in trying,
I believe in flying,
I believe the innocence of
take a chance on love.

Fast forward if you will
I got some job, it ain't no thrill
I want to play, but I need dough...

This is a good idea. A simple version of the Wikipedia web site. It is written using simple words and short sentences. This makes it easy for people who do not know very much English to read. It is good for people learning English.

I am trying to write using the simple English rules. It is hard. I want to use longer words and sentences. But if I work hard at it, I can find a simple word to use instead.

Click here to go to Simple English Wikipedia.

Auditorium is a unique and fun game that I mentioned previously on this blog. My friend Jason did a version of it for the iPhone called Light Jockey, and it is really great.

Considering the original game was in Flash, and Flash isn't supported on the iPhone, it's quite a technical achievement. The animation is smooth and organic. And the direct manipulation of the disks in the game make it more engaging than the original.

The only downside is there is no accompanying audio. Apparently the iPhone can't use compressed audio files for synchronous playback, and uncompressed audio would have made the app huge.

Still, the visuals and gameplay are the star of the app and Light Jockey delivers on both. It has replaced Bejeweled for me as the game to play in those down moments during the day.

Plus it's only 99¢. So buy it already! :-)

I appreciate all the happy birthday wishes I've received today. (If Facebook's good for nothing else, it's at least good for that.) And while I did receive a nice gift from my wife of something I really desired but didn't actually need, I got the best gift of all from a guy @ Oracle that I just met on Monday: a job offer.

I suppose it's about time for me to stop being an unemployment statistic and do my part to pull this economy out of the doldrums.

I just read this article on how the value that the free market puts on a song from iTunes in China is about 1.3¢. And then there's this article claiming that the inevitable price of music is zero, and it will happen in 2011 or 2012.

But that got me thinking... why not throw some variability at the cost of music and see what effect that has on demand? I believe Amazon did this back in the day, showing different prices to different people. And I suppose it can be annoying if you're one of the few that bought the song for 80¢ when the guy down the street got it for 49¢. But it would be interesting to see what value consumers place on a song, rather than what the industry has dictated.

Amie Street is a music site that has a similar model. They start every song out as a free download, and the more popular it is, the more expensive it becomes (capping out at 98¢). But since they are selling more obscure music (stuff you've probably never heard of) and since the price is monotonically increasing, it's not a true free market.

Still looking forward to that day where all the music is free, though. Until then, there's always Seeqpod and Playlist.

Don't have kids.

Controversial, yes. But it's true. All of the environmental problems on this planet stem from people, and it's pretty much a linear progression. The more people on the planet, the more impact we collectively have on the environment.

Of course there are other things you can do to reduce your environmental impact. Don't eat meat (or at least eat less meat). Don't fly, and minimize car travel. Buy used things. Buy local. Etc.

But think about the impact of every new child brought into this world. They will consume. Food. Diapers. Car seats. Clothing. Heat. Water. They will grow up into an adult and likely do the same things you do. Travel. Buy a house. Get married. Maybe even have kids. Frankly, the world would be better off without yet another person living above the sustainability level.

Taking it to the extreme, why not start culling people from the planet? Well, that's simply immoral and inhumane. Sure, maybe the most green thing you could do is a suicide bombing, but there is a line you cross at that point. There is quite a difference between simply not having kids and actively killing people.

China has done well in this regard (well, aside from the human rights issues). Their policy of one child per family is a logical, fair, and humane way to minimize the human impact on their country, and thus the planet.

Ironically, organizations like the Gates Foundation are probably having a detrimental effect on the environment. Sure, on the surface inoculating the poor people of the world is a noble humanitarian effort. But having more, healthy people on the planet is actually detrimental to the environment. It's a sad fact that the Earth simply cannot sustainably support a human population as large as we have today, especially when we actively work to de crease the mortality rate.

So what are the solutions? Number one in my mind is education, especially of girls and women. It's a fact that educated women take control of their reproductive abilities. And when they do, they invariably choose to have fewer children. That's where we must start.

For the longest time, I didn't give much thought to my first name. I told new acquaintances it didn't matter if you called me Dave or David. I had a tendency to use David for the most part, since that's my legal name it it makes things easier when filling out forms, signing documents, and the like.

But then I started to become aware of my personal brand. I worked on the design for Nombray, a site for personal domain name registration. And that's when I started thinking about my name.

It turns out there is already a relatively well known David Cortright out there (according to Wikipedia, he is "an American scholar, peace activist, and president of the Fourth Freedom Forum"). It's hard to compete against someone with a Wikipedia page. Plus, he owns the domain davidcortright.com. That pretty much settled it.

So I decided that I would start going by Dave Cortright professionally. I switched the name on all of my public profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter...) to Dave. I secured the email address davecortright@yahoo.com. I use that name and email address on my resume and when I create public content (such as on this blog). And of course I registered davecortright.com using Nombray.

This strategy has worked out well for me. My domain is the #1 result on both Yahoo and Google when searching for Dave Cortright, and I have the top 8 results on Google. There is a real estate agent in Michigan who shows up as well, but my strategy of creating compelling fresh content on multiple sites gives me a big edge over him.

So my advice to you if you want to build a personal brand on the web: pick a name to go by that is realtively unique and consistently build your brand around that. If you need to, go by a nickname, include a middle intitial, use a title, or whatever it takes to get something that will separate you from the others out there with your name.