If you've studied design at all, you've probably encountered Lorem Ipsum placeholder text at some point. Anywhere there is text, but the meaning of that text isn't particularly important, you might see Lorem Ipsum.
Most people recognize it as Latin. And it is. But it is arbitrarily rearranged and not quite coherent Latin, extracted from a book Cicero wrote in 45 BC. Here's the complete quote, with the bits and pieces that make up Lorem Ipsum highlighted.
Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?
At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus, qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti, quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint, obcaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa, qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga.
But what does it all mean? Here's an English translation with the same parts highlighted.
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.
Of course the whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that the words aren't supposed to mean anything, so attempting to divine its meaning is somewhat … unsatisfying, perhaps by design. Lorem Ipsum is a specific form of what is generally referred to somewhat cheekily as "Greeking":
Greeking is a style of displaying or rendering text or symbols, not always from the Greek alphabet. Greeking obscures portions of a work for the purpose of either emphasizing form over details or displaying placeholders for unavailable content. The name is a reference to the phrase "Greek to me", meaning something that one cannot understand, so that it might as well be in a foreign language.
So when you need filler or placeholder text, you naturally reach for Lorem Ipsum as the standard. The theory is that, since it's unintelligible, nobody will attempt to read it, but instead focus on other aspects of the design. If you put readable text in the design, people might think the text is important to the design, that the text represents the sort of content you expect to see, or that the text somehow itself needs to be copyedited and updated and critiqued.
(Regular readers of this blog may remember that I am fond of using Alice in Wonderland in this manner, when I need a bit of text to demonstrate something in a post.)
However, not everyone agrees that relying on a standard boilerplate greeked placeholder text is appropriate, even going so far as to call for the death of Lorem Ipsum. I think it depends what you're trying to accomplish. I once noted that it's better to use real content to avoid Blank Page Syndrome, for example.
There are quite a few websites that helpfully offer up the classic Lorem Ipsum text in various eminently copy-and-pastable forms.
Beyond that, if you just want a bunch of, uh, interesting text to fill an area, there a lot – and I mean a lot – of websites to choose from. So many in fact that I was a little overwhelmed trying to index them all. I've tried to broadly categorize the ones I did find, below. If you know of more, feel free to leave a comment and I'll update the list.
Novelty
Clever English Tricks
Literature |
ProfessionsSocial NetworksTV, Movies and Media
Possibly NSFWRegional |
This is a lot to go through. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd say Fillerati because it's all dignified and stuff. But I think truer to the spirit of Lorem Ipsum are definitely the homophonic transformations, which consistently blow my mind every time I attempt to read them. Isn't that the implied goal of any properly greeked text? You were one deliciously perverse professor of romance languages, Howard L. Chace.
In today's Pinteresting world, images are arguably more important than text. But what is the Lorem Ipsum of images? Is there even one? I guess you could just slap some Lorem Ipsum text in an image, but where is the fun in that? Anyway, there are also plenty of websites offering up placeholder images of various types to go along with your Lorum Ipsum placeholder text.
I'm not sure the world needs any more Lorem Ipsum-alikes than we already have at this point. Like the market for ironic t-shirts, the Internet has ensured that our placeholder greeked text needs have not merely been met but vastly exceeded for the forseeable future. But after discovering all the creative things people have done with Lorem Ipsum, and text placeholders in general, it's sure tempting to dream yet another one up, isn't it?
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In this interview with The Daily Beast, Ridley Scott reveals that he's currently working on a sequel to Blade Runner.
Tags: Blade Runner Ridley Scott moviesFunny enough, I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week. We have a very good take on it. And we'll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.
by Jason Kottke at May 18, 2012 08:59 PM
Aside from showcasing indie/boutique/family-owned/design/artist-designed hotels, motels, inns, B&Bs, lodges, ryokans, riads, hostels, treehouses and, yes, even tricked-out tents and campervans, designtripper also focuses on the speedily growing network of for-rent vacation homes, apartment, villas, and haciendas.
- Bonkers Russian gymnastics video
- 48 Things That Will Make You Feel Old
- Fifty Shades of Grey: The Paint Chip Edition
- A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job:
You know those high-school kids who study hard, get great grades, have part-time jobs, and manage to excel at athletics all at the same time? That was us. The university students who go to class, make the dean's list, run extra-curricular clubs, and still make it out to the bar once in a while? We were those guys. We've got nothing against hard work and earning our way. I'd argue that we're even rather good at it.
- Yo, Should I Dump This Asshole?
IT IS A COMMON JOKE ON THE INTERNET THAT TYPING IN ALL CAPS IS THE TEXTUAL EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING. By extension, honking to a cyclist is like putting those caps in bold and 48-point type.
- Photo of MGM's stable of movie stars in 1943
- Seeing Yourself as Others Do
This image, titled “Pressure Point,” was the beginning of a self-portrait series that intimately chronicles Ms. Davis’s evolving relationship with her body. Often shot in natural light in her apartment or with friends, Ms. Davis’s photos have a documentary feel. However, they are art-directed moments borrowed from real life.
- Pin-up girls before and after, 1950s
- A few of my favorite recent tweets:
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Stuff I found while looking around. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
by dooce at May 18, 2012 08:58 PM
People have jobs. The "slum" we discussed last week has begun to come around and seemingly, it was an easy fix. This particular neighborhood had a couple bus stops, usually with only a 30% usage. But after noticing a few empty corners with no bus shelters or transit, we added a few more. That worked. Within a couple sim days the no jobs logos disapeared and transit boosted its use to something we now don't know how to handle.
The photo above shows a neighborhood corner in Spacington- our slum neighborhood from last week -with one of the new bus stations. This station since its beginning has had usage of about 134% and seen 1340 Sims in and out its doors in just one month. More than it can handle, more than we know how to handle -there is already stations of almost every corner.
Needless to stay, the bus and slum problems we used to know aren't really problems anymore. So then what's next?
For next week: What if we did subways? Just what if?
Spacington: Want to see previous posts about Spacington? Click on the "Sim City: Spacington" link in the "RELATED" box just below.
Keep up on the action and follow Spacington on Twitter.
by Dylan Collie at May 18, 2012 08:43 PM
Eighteen months on, the alien who discovered Voyager's Golden Record still hasn't gotten around to listening to the whole thing.
"The wind, rain, and surf sounds are pretty cool, but I usually sort of zone out when it gets to the crickets chirping, and then I just end up turning it off," said Ellinger, adding that he will sometimes put the record on as background noise when he's cleaning his electro-biological habitat.
Current status of The Onion: still really pretty good.
Tags: audio space Voyagerby Jason Kottke at May 18, 2012 07:42 PM
‘He who is contented is rich.’ ~Lao Tzu
There has been little in my life that has made as much an impact as learning to be content — with my life, where I am, what I’m doing, what I have, who I’m with, who I am.
This little trick changes everything.
Let’s take a look at my life before contentedness:
I was addicted to junk food and fast food, and overweight and unhealthy. I bought too many things on impulse, owned too much clutter, and was deeply in debt and struggling to make it to the next payday. I was unhappy with who I was, wanted desperately to change, tried a thousand different programs and books. I was always worried I was missing out on exciting things, and wanted so much to be out doing the fun things everyone else was doing. I was always changing the way I did things, because it seemed everyone else had a better system or tools. I strove to meet goals, because they would get me to a better life.
And as I learned to be content, here was what changed:
I learned to be happy with healthier food, with less food, and my health improved and waistline shrunk. I relied on a good book, spending time with people I loved, going for a nice run … and my debt began to be reduced as I learned I didn’t need to spend money to enjoy myself. I learned to be happier with who I was, and what I was doing, and so no longer needed self-improvement books and programs, no longer needed to try all kinds of new systems and tools. I became happy with myself, with those around me, and with what I had — and so didn’t need to strive to change everything. Letting go of goals helped me to simplify things so I had less to worry about, less to do.
That’s just the start. There is no way to account for the tremendous change that happens when you learn to accept who you are, when you tell yourself you are perfect just as you are, when you love yourself and everything about yourself. You stop criticizing yourself, you are happier, you are a better person to be around, and you can now help others and work without the insecurities you had before.
This is not a magical state, and doesn’t require any new tools or books. It’s simple, and I’ll share what has worked for me.
If you are in a bad place in your life, and are unhappy with everything about it (job, relationship, yourself, house, habits, etc.), it can be a miserable thing. But here’s something interesting: it can also be a happy thing.
I’ve been in situations where you might think things were bad, and sometimes I was very unhappy, and other times I was happy. The difference wasn’t in the external circumstances, but in my mindset — I learned to appreciate what I had, instead of focusing on the things I didn’t have or didn’t like. I was grateful for my health, for the people in my life, for having food and being alive.
If you can learn to develop the right mindset, you can be happy now, without changing anything else. You don’t need to wait until you’ve changed everything and made your life perfect before you’re happy — you have everything you need to be happy right now.
The mindset of waiting for happiness is a never-ending cycle. You get a better job (yay!) and then immediately start thinking about what your next promotion will be. You get a nicer house and immediately start looking at how nice your neighbors’ houses are, or the faults in the house you have. You try to change your spouse or kids, and if that works (good luck), you’ll find other things about them that need to be changed. It keeps going, until you die.
Instead, learn that you can be content now, without any external changes. Here’s how to start:
It might be useful to look at what life would be like if you learned to be content:
This is all just a few scratches on the surface of a contented life, but it gives you a picture of what might be. And the truth is, once you learn the simple trick of contentedness, it’s really a picture of what already is. You just need to let go of the fears, and see what is already here.
‘Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.’ ~Lao Tzu
by Leo at May 18, 2012 07:31 PM
Before anyone freaks out, the leopard used for that skirt is totally fine. Very closely shaven, but fine.
Blouse: F21
Leopard skirt: Thrifted (similar here)
Heels: ASOS
Sunnies: House of Harlow
Leather clutch: Clare Vivier
Bracelets: Vintage & Susan Hanover Designs
(You can find Cami here. Photos by Billy Concha.)
by dooce in Daily Style
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Crazy Leopard. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
by dooce at May 18, 2012 05:24 PM
Hi Spacing readers. I'm pleased to announced that while continuing write and edit Spacing things, I've just started a new weekly column over at the Toronto Star exploring how and where we live in the GTA. I'll wander from downtown to wherever the farm fields start (and maybe, once in a while, hang out there too). The first one went up today, looking at Mississauga City Centre. Thanks for coming along for the walk all these years.
by Shawn Micallef at May 18, 2012 05:15 PM
When I moved to the farmhouse, I first replaced myself with a new CEO for my company, and then started reading enough about interior design to get a degree in the subject, if I believed in graduate degrees. I became enthralled with Steampunk as a way to blend the rustic nature of my surroundings with my fascination with putting objects with an old purpose into homes for a new purpose.
Steampunk is the updated yet still-dated look of the Industrial Age. A recent Harvard Business Reivew has a timeline of business. I was surprised to remember that the Industrial Age was actually during the aftermath of the Civil War. The timeline also shows the Space Age, which, by the way, Restoration Hardware has interpreted in a genius way so as to be able to sell to interior design mavens with a fetish for mid-century modern.
Looking through the timeline, you start to notice that so often in history there is little awareness of the prevailing movement of the time. At the time of the Space Age, people were not aware that it was actually the Woodstock Age, when Baby Boomers began ramming their narcissistic view of self-actualization down American throats, as their Greatest Generation parents slipped in one last good deed, the Civil Rights Movement. (Here’s a great article about how Baby Boomers are selling out Generation Y. Read it before you defend baby boomers in the comments.)
Most recently in the timeline is the Information Age. You know the story: the rise of computer, then the Internet, and now the rise of mobile everything. But I don’t think that’s the story, really. I think the story of our time is the personal responsibility. Here’s why:
1. You are responsible for your own health.
We used to put our health in the hands of our doctors because the doctor knew best. Today, there is too much information and too many decisions required in dealing with a medical problem for any single doctor to manage.
When my newborn son was diagnosed with hemifacial microsomia, there was a team of fifteen doctors assessing him. The person who ultimately handled the coordination of this data was me, his mom, with no medical training whatsoever.
But even for the healthy, a useful relationship with your doctor is quickly becoming an anachronism. Newsweek reports that the average amount of time a patient has to explain symptoms before being interrupted by a doctor is 23 seconds. Doctors are so overworked that they are seeing about 30% more patients than is recommended to ensure quality medical care. You are better off using the Internet to figure things out for yourself, which most of us do anyway, and then going to a doctor to double check.
2. You are responsible for your own retirement.
There is not going to be Social Security for you. I love the article about how the Baby Boomers have sold out the whole country so much that I’m going to link to it for the second time in this post. Right here. Because here’s a great quote about today’s politicians: “This isn’t conservatism. It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby boom generation.”
There is also not going to be a company that gives you a gold watch and some sort of security blanket to go home with after 40 years of service. More likely is a pink slip after three-to-five years of service, over and over again, until you can’t work anymore. And there will be no children who will take you into their home when you get old. I know, there has not been this for a long time. There had been this practice, before Social Security and before pensions. But it’s unheard of now.
3. You are responsible for educating your children.
Public school began as a safe place for kids to go while their parents worked in factories. Today school has evolved into the best babysitting service in the world. But the truth is that your kids do not need to be in school to learn. Your kids were born knowing how to learn. Math? Yes, even math.
So we can no longer ship our kids off to school with impunity. It’s completely clear that individualized learning plans are best for kids, and there is no way that public education can afford that, yet it’s very easy for parents to provide it merely by providing food and shelter and love. Which means the education of your children is in your own hands. And, actually, it’s been there forever when you realize that the only part of education that matters is teaching grit and perseverance, and those are values that children learn from parents who model that behavior. Kids never learn that from memorizing facts to pass standardized tests.
4. You are responsible for your career.
I think the theme of this blog is personal responsibility for your career. Make sure you take care of your own career development. You have to keep your learning curve high. If people don’t like you, it’s probably your fault. If you have a bad boss, it’s probably your fault.
What I have found in my own career, and in the careers of people I coach, is that the more responsibility you take, the more you can affect change. If you blame outside forces for your problems, you have to wait for outside forces to fix things for you. Which means you have given up control over your own life.
The Age of Personal Responsibility is exciting. Because the more responsibility we take, the more control we have over our own happiness. And we are lucky to be living right now.
by Penelope Trunk at May 18, 2012 04:07 PM
I try to keep up on my reading. It’s important.
In the past year or so, I’ve come across three books that I think complement each other nicely, and taken together outline a program for improving IT management. The books are:
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, by Douglas Hubbard
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, by Don Reinertsen
Analytical Network and Systems Administration: Managing Human-Computer Systems, by Mark Burgess.
The book is readable and highly applicable; it is not an exercise in dry theory. You can go to Amazon and see all the great reviews and summaries, so I won’t say more other than this book fundamentally changed my thinking. How is it relevant to the IT practitioner? It takes some work on your part, but if you apply his thinking you’ll find you have powerful tools for understanding IT value.
Don Reinertsen’s The Principles of Product Development Flow is completely different, and yet similar. First, his work is relevant to IT, especially on the development side. It is a deep exploration of “Lean,” which is a word that can easily be mis-construed. In its origins, Lean represents a set of specific and important concerns around value, flow, waste, and human motivation. Reinertsen gets beyond vague imagery and explores the quantifiable issues surrounding Lean philosophy. In particular, he examines how Lean, which is often incorrectly seen as applying merely to manufacturing production, also applies to the problem ofdeveloping any product, including software.
In software and product development broadly, work is more variable and uncertain, and cannot be managed via naive “assembly line” metaphors; yet this does not mean that product development need be considered a mysterious craft. Like Hubbard, Reinertsen is deeply knowledgeable regarding quantitative methods and research, and uniquely able to summarize and translate this depth into practical guidance. His book presents an accessible application of economics, queuing theory, batch sizes, work in progress, flow, feedback, and even military doctrine on the question of decentralized control.
You’ll come away realizing that you’re not alone in the challenges you face and there are sophisticated tools available to you in your search for development excellence, and hopefully you’ll also start thinking about the problems of unmanaged queues in your organization and the promise of Lean IT more generally.
While both Hubbard and Reinertsen have deep familiarity with IT (judging by their references and backgrounds), neither has written a book specifically for IT management per se. Mark Burgess, on the other hand, in Analytical Network and Systems Administration presents a tour de force examination of systems management through the eyes of a scientist.
Science is of course a dreadfully misused term, and I seek to use it here correctly. Burgess (who wrote cfengine) got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics and developed a keen interest in applying deep and rigorous analytical methods to the problems of the IT systems he was tasked with administering. His landmark work can be summarized in this provocative quote: “The field of system administration meets an unusual challenge in computer science: that of approximation. Modern computing systems are too complicated to be understood in exact terms.”
This of course runs counter to the deeply held worldviews of many IT professionals, who are steeped in the deterministic, axiomatic aspects of computing. But just as cellular automata generate complex behavior from simple rulesets, so must IT systems be understood as complex entities. Burgess weaves a masterful narrative starting with fundamentals of the scientific method (just enough for his purposes) and taking the reader through a variety of interesting dimensions: systems, sets, graphical models, fundamental examinations of concepts such as change, information, and stability, and much more.
Of the three books, there’s no doubt Burgess is the most difficult intellectually – the book is characterized as based on “undergraduate math” but we’re talking at least the first three years of an engineering curriculum, and I have to admit I found some of the material required more effort than I was willing or able to devote. But whenever I found myself starting to wonder if Burgess’ coverage was too “theoretical,” I was able to think of practical applications based on my own experience, and Burgess himself liberally sprinkles the abstract discussions with such real world examples. Even just scanning the more challenging chapters should present new avenues for the imaginative IT manager. (Assign it to that person on your team with the math degree.)
Again, these are books for the next ten years, not for this year’s fads. All are rich and challenging and bear deep, repeated reading. Applying to your particular problems will take work on your part. But so much one reads is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. These volumes provide true sustenance for the long journey of improving the human race’s management of its increasingly powerful and critical infrastructures of information technology.
Postscript: One notable coincidence across the three books — all cite Claude Shannon, the originator of information theory.
by alphasong at May 18, 2012 02:45 PM
I remember reading a blog entry in which a cartoonist mentioned how much she loved drawing the back of the knee. I thought, now that's the kind of thing a real artist says. At the moment I have a love-hate relationship with Jonah's robe as he sinks: I don't have confidence in my ability when I start drawing it, but then when I finish it's very satisfying. Look, I drew billows! And a ray. That's an eagle ray.
A few people have asked me why I feel the need to illustrate the Book of Jonah. Well, there's a lot I like about it, but what makes it necessary for me is this part of Jonah's prayer from within the fish. He is talking about drowning, but he's not talking only about drowning literally: he's talking about his soul drowning, fainting, imprisoned, crushed, blind, forever. He says this in the past tense: "the earth with her bars was about me for ever." The mere grammar of this sentiment makes it impossible, but of course it isn't impossible, anyone who has suffered knows it's not impossible. Suffering stops time. That's what makes this part the kernel of the book, for me: Jonah's words here are the best description of depression I have ever read.
I'd like to point out that this is the third time in the book that Jonah has been not-really-alive. The first time was when he went to sleep in the hold while the storm raged outside. That was a spiritual deadness, a numbness to the presence (and omnipresence) of God, and if you think that's a reach, consider how closely it is paralleled later by Jonah's time in the womb-grave of the fish's belly. As above, so below (far, far below): if Jonah wants to play dead, God can help him with that. That's the second time. And the third time, seen in a flashback, is Jonah's drowning, which lasts forever even though it doesn't. I don't know if this is what the author of the book had in mind, but as I set out to draw the second panel I realized that Jonah is bound in weeds as a corpse is bound in cerements. Remember Lazarus tottering out of the vault with a napkin over his face? How scary must that have been to watch? "And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go." Dude, you loose him and let him go. It's scary when people are only kind of dead, and once is bad enough, but Jonah's making a habit of it.
Maybe this is why God chose Jonah specifically for this episode: he wanted someone who would really sell that prayer from inside the fish. He wanted someone so full of himself that he could actually exaggerate a near-death experience.
There's been lots of buzz on the topic of whether or not you should learn to code. As an engineer, I don't have unbiased thoughts on the matter. I tweeted Jeff Atwood's piece because, well, I agree that it's pretty silly to think that the world is going to be a better place if the Mayor of New York City learns how to code. I agree with Atwood that his valuable time would be better spent elsewhere.
I believe there are essential skills you learn as an engineer who codes. It teaches you how to structure your thinking, and the process looks something like this:
Coding is unforgiving. Its structure is well-defined and enforced by whatever interpreter or compiler you might be using. You are punished swiftly for obvious errors. You are punished more subtly for the less obvious ones.
Once you've mastered a particular language, you've also mastered a means of thinking. You understand how to decompose a problem into knowable units, and you learn how to intertwine those units into pleasant and functional flow. Perhaps you've figured out how to get that flow to perform at Herculean scale. There is no doubt in my mind that this is an essential and valuable skill for anyone to learn and master.
However, there is a language you could master that teaches many of the same lessons, appears far more forgiving in terms of syntax, and has immediate broader appeal.
The language you can learn is your own.
I argue that there is an essential set of skills that intersect both with writing words and writing code. Let's revisit the process:
Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its/it's issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here's the rub: there is a compiler and it's fucking brutal. It's your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?
The articles on Rands keep getting longer and longer, and as I'm finishing a piece, I worry, "Is it too long?" I worry about this because we live in a lovely world of 140-character quips and status updates, and I fret about whether I'll be able to hold your attention, which is precisely the wrong thing to worry about. What I should be worried about is, "Have I written something worthy of your attention?"
Writing is the connective tissue that creates understanding. We, as social creatures, often better perform rituals to form understanding one on one, but good writing enables us to understand each other at scale.
Now... go.
It's six years since this blog flickered into life. Not bad for a site that was going to be a six month experiment to learn how blogging works. I'm giving away a few books to celebrate.
by skeptic at May 16, 2012 04:07 AM
Let’s see if this rings any bells.
When the clock hits 8, I sit. I plop back in my rolling chair, crack open the laptop on my desk, and spend the next nine hours with my butt glued firmly to seat. I stand on occasion to step into the bathroom, but I’m back to my post again shortly thereafter — hunched over, bleary-eyed, and nursing my coffee like it’s the greatest thing since toilet paper (I make no claims to the contrary).
When that clock hits 5, I bolt. I’m out the door in the blink of an eye, gunning my way through traffic to finally make it home. There, at long last, I do what I’ve been dreaming about doing all day: sit. I sink into the couch, smile, and seize the remote, content to shut the brain down for a few glorious hours before calling it a night.
Rinse. Repeat. See the common theme here?
We’ve grown used to idleness. The modern life too often asks us to sit, type, and keep off our feet, inviting the kind of sedentary lifestyle our waist lines are so better off without. As someone steadily entrenched in my chair over these last few months in the office, I’ve had to get creative. I’ve had to try and puzzle out how I can devote my daily 9 to 5, in other words, to the betterment—not the detriment—of my health. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
1. Move.
Any motion is better than no motion at all. That’s the core idea behind each of these tricks, and that’s the biggest bullet point worth incorporating into your daily routine.
Your job might demand you spend a lot of time in a chair. You can’t always change that, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing your best to work within those (admittedly comfy) constraints.
2. Set a timer.
Most modern phones come with a built-in timer, but you can always just keep an eye on the clock if you’re not keen on the sound of an alarm. The idea, in either case, is the same: to remind yourself at regular intervals to get up out of your seat and take a quick stroll around the office. I’m the kind of worker who gets quickly absorbed in my work, eyes locked on the screen as the hours sneak by, meaning an alarm set for every 45 minutes is often the only way I remember to stand up, stretch, and do one of the tricks below.
3. Incorporate bodyweight exercises.
It’s tempting to save all your sweat for the gym, but that’s not always practical — especially when life likes to take our rigorous training schedules, punt them into a trash can, and send us scrambling on back to the drawing board.
Saving your exercise solely for the gym, too, misses a simple point: several small sets of bodyweight exercises—knee or wall pushups and air squats as an example—throughout the day can be just as beneficial as thirty dedicated minutes on the treadmill, especially if those sets are timed to interrupt hours otherwise spent barely moving at all.
If you’re aiming to add a little more motion to your routine, in other words, don’t forget that you have a weight room already available. Have arms? Experiment with the Hundred Pushups program, a personal favorite of mine, and don’t be afraid to enjoy some wall pushups in the privacy of your own office. Have legs? Air squats, so long as you go slow and ease them into your routine, work the body like few other movements, and you don’t need more than five minutes to get the blood flowing before you’re forced to move back to your seat.
If you’re keen on setting a timer, too, this is the perfect opportunity to have a mini-workout. When that clock strikes 0, crank out 10 to 15 pushups, lunges, etc., and see how many you can collect over the course of the day. As the weeks progress, so will your totals, and so too will your overall fitness.
4. Capitalize on the size of your bladder.
This might be the first time in your life where a small bladder comes in handy. The next time you hoof it over to the toilet, why not spend an extra few minutes inside the stall? You can easily do twenty to thirty air squats in the privacy of that little box, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing five to ten wall pushups while you’re there. (Nothing, that is, aside from hygiene concerns). Put a thin sheet of toilet paper between each hand and the wall, however, and embrace the additional chance to work in a little exercise without having to wash your hands for the next hour.
And when you walk to the bathroom in the first place? Opt for the one the farthest away from your workstation, even one that forces you to take the stairs to a different floor. The additional minutes spent walking might not seem like much, but they always add up over the course of the day.
5. Keep walking.
You’ve heard the usual tricks: take the stairs where possible, park out as far as possible, and so forth. That’s solid advice, to be sure, but there’s no reason to stop there. Why not go further? Why not keep walking as much as possible?
When your timer goes off, pace around your office for five minutes. At the end of your lunch break, don’t sneak back to spend some time on Facebook — take a walk around your office instead, or head outside to soak up the sun while you circle the block.
When you take a phone call, don’t lean back in your chair to accept it. Pop up and move around for the duration of the call instead. In the case of long calls, this can easily—and effortlessly—add minutes of walking into your daily routine, minutes you otherwise might spend with your jaw flapping and both legs stuck motionless to the floor.
6. Take a stand.
This is revolutionary thinking, so brace yourself: standing is not sitting. It’s so far-removed in how it tasks the body, in fact, that you could call it a kind of exercise in itself (especially when stacked up next to relatively motionless hours spent in a chair). Standing desks, unfortunately, haven’t hit the mainstream, but they’re still a great start if you’re looking to tackle the core problem of the modern office: big, comfy seats, and jobs that demand we spend hours getting intimate with them.
If you’re stuck with a regular desk, however, you can still see the benefits of taking a stand. It might seem like an obvious trick, but try this: when given the choice of sitting or standing, choose standing first. When you’re visiting someone’s office, stand for a decent-sized chunk of the conversation. When you’re enjoying your lunch break, don’t be afraid to stand while you eat or prepare your meal. If you find yourself closing the door to your office for a good think, why not do it up on your feet?
When you get home from work, too, don’t immediately drop down on the couch. Stand in the kitchen while you cook, stay upright while you talk with family, and just try and delay that familiar combo of TV and couch for as long as your legs allow. A sudden increase in your standing time won’t come too easily at first, but stick with it and you’ll see your endurance rise within the span of a week.
If you’ll allow a repetition: any motion is better than no motion at all. Given how many hours we spend sunk deep into our chairs, any new emphasis on steady, simple activities can go a long way to helping you keep active. The tips above might not replace dedicated exercise, to be fair, but I think they can do one better: supplement your existing routine, or even put you on the path towards implementing one in the first place.
Remember, lastly, that exercise doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t demand three hours in the gym or long, sleepless nights on the treadmill, but it does ask you, now, to take an interest in your well-being, and to take small, steady steps toward improving your health.
Start today. Set a timer, stand when you can, and take a walk at every chance you get, and I think you’ll realize something exciting: your 9 to 5 doesn’t force you to sit still. Make the decision to start moving, in fact, and you might even find that your time at the office can have a positive impact on your health.
Matt Madeiro is the author of Make Every Day Count, a blog devoted to answering a single question: what does it mean to live well? He explores simple ways to do just that in his latest book, Happiness Is. Follow him on Twitter.
by guest at May 15, 2012 03:00 PM
The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012.
A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript code to do his job, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with politics in the state of New York. Even if Mr. Bloomberg did "learn to code", with apologies to Adam Vandenberg, I expect we'd end up with this:
10 PRINT "I AM MAYOR" 20 GOTO 10
Fortunately, the odds of this technological flight of fancy happening – even in jest – are zero, and for good reason: the mayor of New York City will hopefully spend his time doing the job taxpayers paid him to do instead. According to the Office of the Mayor home page, that means working on absenteeism programs for schools, public transit improvements, the 2013 city budget, and … do I really need to go on?
To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can't see it.
Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing. That'd be ridiculous, right?
The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.
I suppose I can support learning a tiny bit about programming just so you can recognize what code is, and when code might be an appropriate way to approach a problem you have. But I can also recognize plumbing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work. Being able to get around on the Internet is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into code.
Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …
These are skills that extend far beyond mere coding and will help you in every aspect of your life.
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While Bela is great, he's a freshwater fish. I've promised to include him if I ever draw a story in which a prophet is thrown into a rice paddy.
by rachel at May 13, 2012 11:25 PM
I was out shooting today, putting the x-pro through its paces. No real purpose – meandering around the Portobello Road, shooting stall keepers and tourists alike. I turn for home, walking alongside the westway, when a cyclist zips past. I see him, heading towards me, bring the camera up, track him and *click*. Enough time for one shot, and it’s perfect. He is captured on the top right, pin sharp, looking straight into the lens. The background is beautifully blurred. Perfect shot.
I walk on, and get a tap on my shoulder. I turn around to see the cyclist.
“Can you delete that, please?”.
And I do.
Walking back, I think idly “I could probably recover that…”. Legally, I’ve done nothing wrong. And it is a great shot – one of the best I think I’ve taken. But I sigh, and know I won’t. At least this is one shot I can’t claim to have lost due to the Fuji x-pro’s AF.
by Sam Newman at May 13, 2012 05:07 PM
Claire: In real life there would be tons more benders. There would be over a hundred benders.
Jeremy: Technically it’s using “element” in a different sense.
Rachel: No! I’m with Claire! I wanna be a uranium bender!
Jeremy: I’d be a tungsten bender.
by rachel at May 13, 2012 02:37 AM
Today is TwoBert's seventh birthday party, and I don't have a lot of time. The kids are due here in about 20 minutes, Moxie is running some last-minute errands before she brings over the cake, and the three of us...
by Doug French at May 12, 2012 08:09 PM
I’m out walking with the baby, she is everyone’s opening line. Rastaman walks up beside us, “Happy Mother’s Day,” he says. His voice is beautiful, the precision of his consonants against the long, round vowels. I thank him, and then, as if it were the most natural turn, he asks, “You read this book Million Shades of Blue, or Grey, whatever it is?”
“I’ve heard about it.” I’m lying. I read some of it over a shoulder on the subway. “I think it’s sort of racy, isn’t it?” I was about to say “dirty,” and thought better of it. That’s a different conversation.
“Racy, is that what it is? Okay then.” And I don’t know whether that interests him, or closes the case.
Rastaman wishes us well and lights out for the corner, we are ambling, me and the baby. Then he turns around again.
“Where would I find a book like this? Around here. If I wanted to read it.”
I point him toward the bookstore, but he doesn’t go that way.
by Kio at May 11, 2012 10:26 PM
Fortune magazine has started reporting about family in corporate life.
We all know corporate jobs are messed up. Fortune magazine is a monument to how messed up corporate life really is. In November, Fortune wrote that the company that Sheryl Sandberg, a working mom, runs, has employees “on lockdown” and their kids come to the office to say goodnight before bed.
In December Fortune reported that to get his almost-top spot at GE, John Krenicki relocated his family 11 times while the kids were growing up. Working at GE requires the same type of sacrifice from a family that the US expects from military officers.
In January, Fortune profiled Wei Hopeman, from Citigroup (pictured above). She has one of the coolest jobs in the world — investing Citi’s money in startups in Asia. Here’s how she describes her life: “I have an apartment in San Francisco, but I usually stay in hotels in Palo Alto because I’m generally in the office 12 hours a day; no matter where I am, I’m almost never home.”
The workplace is in a war with family life right now. It’s not a question of balance or accommodation. If you want a big, serious job, you have to give up your family.
I never really noticed this stuff when I did not have kids. But once I made the goal to have a fun, exciting career that also accommodated kids, I started paying attention to everything related to my goal.
That key shift toward attention and focus pops up everywhere. Our instinct is to try to ignore what’s going wrong so it doesn’t bring us down all the time. But really, the key to improving what we don’t like in our lives is to pay attention to it. By paying attention we can’t help but make it better.
Here are a few examples I’ve noticed:
1. Careers
People who hire me for career coaching are invariably high performers. Even the people who got themselves stuck, or the people who have no idea what to do next, all have a common past: strong performances wherever they have been.
I realize that this is because people who are strong performers at work get lots of advice for how to manage their career.
2. Love life
At a point in my life when I had tons of disposable income but no boyfriend, I hired a feng shui consultant. My apartment had almost nothing in it, but I was curious. What would a feng shui expert advise? What differences could feng shui make?
She made tons of suggestions. Like, put something purple in my money corner. But I noticed that the suggestions I paid the most attention to were the bedroom suggestions, because that’s the part of my life I wanted to change. I threw out old pillows. I changed the lighting. I added some pink. And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg for what I did.
I am not sure that I believe that the feng shui got me my husband. But I do think my mental shift to paying attention to things that create a life of romance gave me the ability to find a guy.
Feng shui, like career consulting, reflects a commitment to focusing on what matters most during that time of your life.
3. Finances
My friend is investigating whether she should cancel a credit card to get a better one or if it’s not worth it because it’ll ding her credit score.
The first thing I thought to myself when she said that was, “Oh god, I have to check my credit score.”
This is why: People who know their credit score do better at managing their money. Not because you will somehow be a high earner if you know your score. It’s because people who pay attention to their money are better at handling their money.
I know this first-hand because I’m actually terrible at managing my money. I get away with it because I’m great at earning money.
When I met the Farmer, one of the first conversations we had was about money.
He told me he made $15,000 a year.
I couldn’t believe it. “I make that from one speech,” I told him.
“But you have no money,” he told me.
It was true. I have lived with no savings for the last fifteen years. In my defense, nearly half of the US lives paycheck to paycheck, and you’d be surprised how high the incomes go in the paycheck-to-paycheck world. Although surely I’m at the high end of it.
I realized, from watching the Farmer in action, that people who have a grip on their money don’t necessarily earn a lot, but they focus on what they have. People who don’t have a grip on their money choose to focus away from their spending.
I know this because I am acutely focused on earning. I am always hatching plans for new revenue streams.
So my point is that you can learn about yourself by seeing what you focus on day to day. That’s what you’re going to do well in. And the stuff you hate thinking about? That’s the part that will never improve.
I once interviewed Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School. She does research on social skills in the workplace. Midway through the interview, I started to panic and I asked her how I could tell if I have terrible social skills.
She told me that it’s nearly impossible to judge one’s own social skills. But there’s one good way: Measure the amount you care about your social skills. If you care, and think about ways to make them better on a daily basis, you probably have decent social skills.
This is true for most things in life: It doesn’t matter so much exactly what action you choose in working toward improvement, it just matters that you’re trying, with genuine intention. The common problem is not wrong action so much as it is no focus.
by Penelope Trunk at May 11, 2012 05:22 AM
I like ITIL. I use it quite a bit. But it puzzles me why ITIL is the default source of bestgood, generally accepted practice for IT processespractices. Often people talk as if it is the only source.
My default source of IT good practice is COBIT. It wins over ITIL, hands down.
by skeptic at May 11, 2012 01:29 AM
I tried drawing Jonah in the belly of the whale in the first panel, but it didn't seem to work. I might revisit that idea. (The orca stomach, happily for me, is right below the dorsal fin, which should look nice.) But don't worry, he'll be back after these four verses, because after this is when he spins off into metaphor. The things he talks about in these three panels are things that more or less have really happened to him, except for how he says he's in sheol when really where he is is the belly of a fish. Maybe one of you can tell me if narrating ongoing events as if they were in the past is a common rhetorical device for Hebrew storytellers, because otherwise I have lots of guesses. Is Jonah's monologue in the past tense because he wants to suggest to God that his salvation is inevitable, like the end of The Mikado? Is he in so much pain that he can talk about it only by pretending it's already over? Or is it just that being thankful suggests the past tense, and Jonah wants to express thanks as powerfully as he can?
I like the way God turns Jonah's escape attempt upside down here. Jonah fled by ship in the hope of getting out of God's service area, basically; the storm already showed him how mistaken that idea was, but God, instead of stopping there, actually shoves Jonah farther away -- not to get rid of him, but just the opposite, to show him that there's nowhere God can't find him. There is no such thing as being far away from God. Jonah has clearly learned that lesson, because he's praying now, knowing (or at least fervently hoping) that God hears him in there.
Or, if Jonah is talking about things that really happened in the past, not about what he's currently going through, this is a neat piece of revisionist history: "Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple." Is that right? Because I don't remember it that way, Jonah. The holy temple's back that way, in the opposite direction from Tarshish.
Whichever way he means it, it's soon going to become clear that Jonah is suffering, or has suffered, in ways that can't be explained by what he's literally endured so far. As in the Book of Job, another of my favorites, here the immediate suffering is an excuse to make our antihero a conduit for a universal howl of pain. Job after all has endured a lot, but you'll notice that when he's complaining he doesn't mention any of the specifics, the camels that got hit by lightning or the children crushed by a wall. He speaks of a pain even bigger than that, the suffering of the whole world, spoken of in universal terms. You might expect altruism on such a scale from a guy like Job, who is the most upright man of his time, a father who loves his children and treats everyone with kindness, but we're about to get a bit of something similar from our misanthropic protagonist Jonah. Being in a fish is bad but there's more to it than that, isn't there, Jonah? That's not what's really bothering you. Let's open that up, as my therapist says.
This one is for the managers out there who straddle the Dev and Ops divide.
Alex Honor and Betsy Hearnsberger have seen the importance of release management dramatically change over the past decade. Through their collective experiences working inside organizations like E*TRADE, Ask.com, NASA Ames, and Zynga (as well as Alex's subsequent consulting work at DTO Solutions) they've each amassed a wealth of experience and insight into dealing with high velocity release engineering in large scale and complex organizations.
Since their professional paths have crossed multiple times, I figured I'd get Alex and Betsy together in front of a whiteboard for a chat. In these videos they talk about the common challenges they see, advice for managers addressing these issues, solution approaches that work, and criteria for tool selection.
Please note that these videos were originally shot on July 29, 2011. Due to a technical problem is was thought that these videos were lost. Lucky for us, they have been fully recovered. I'll have to get them both on camera again soon to discuss how their thinking has evolved since then.
Part 1: Common problems
Part 2: Management's approach to the problems
Part 3: Solution patterns and tool selection
by Damon Edwards at May 09, 2012 10:03 PM
You wake up in a small, enclosed glass cube. There's a bed, a toilet, a radio playing music, and other bare essentials, but no door. You have no idea why you are here or what's going on.
After a few minutes of looking around your tiny space, a calm yet creepy electronic voice begins speaking. The voice explains that you're part of a testing program, and a moment later a door-sized, orange-tinged portal opens.
Portal, developed by Valve Software in 2007, is a first-person puzzle-platform game where you're running around with a gun that shoots... doors. The handheld Portal gun allows you to create a doorway by placing both an entry and an exit portal. These portals can only be created on certain types of surfaces, and only a single portal pair may exist at a time. Using a combination of these portals, your beloved companion cube, and your brain, your character will experience a series of puzzles in test chambers where the goal is simple: get out - don't die.
That's the literal minimalist description of the Portal universe, but it explains little about how you'll survive that universe or what makes it fun. To understand the universe where Portal exists, you have to play it, and then you'll discover two things: it is a wildly entertaining place, and, while it is a game, it's a game full of well designed lessons that teach you how to learn.
The First Universe
Portal is a nerd fantasy. You've got this gun and when you blast a wall with it, you literally rip spacetime wide open with an entry portal. Blast another wall and there's the other half of your portal.
How. Cool.
That's the beginning of the cool and the simplest part of the game. As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics -- without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don't notice the learning because you're too busy playing.
Here's how...
Sandbox Learning
In addition to not knowing what the hell is going on in terms of the plot, the first time you play Portal, you have no idea how to play it. Like all games, the initial levels teach you the very basics: how to move, how to pick up an item, and how to use items to get things done. Yes, there is a heads up display indicating how to move, but it's up to you to learn. Oh look, when I put the cube on the button, it opens the door... to where? The plaques at the beginning of each level seem important, but I don't know why. Why do I feel something sinister is going down?
The mystery of the player not having a clue what the hell is going on is the initial incentive to learn. It's the desire to discover the story that situates the player in the Portal universe. It's a difficult balance to strike in designing a game or application. How much do you explain versus how much do you let them discover? Too much explanation and you get this:
Too much reliance on exploration and they may never discover what they can actually do. I'd include a great example of a game that was designed in this manner, but I can't and that's the point - you never played the game enough to understand and remember it.
Atomic Chunks of Understanding
Subsequent test chambers continue to clearly demonstrate additional rules of the Portal universe:
The discovery of these rules is paired and reinforced with increasingly complex puzzles that continue to teach the player about the increasingly foreign physics inside of Portal. What happens when I enter a portal that's on the floor, but exits on the ceiling? Which way is up? Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you've incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.
Testing, Testing, Testing (And the Second Universe)
As the game progresses, the increasing complexity of the puzzles introduces a bevy of hazards, including high energy pellets, goo, and turrets. The goal remains the same: get out - don't die. This is a tricky inflection point for any game: the arrival of the puzzle which is no longer a straightforward challenge, and I believe Portal's developers have solved for this moment in two ways.
First, Valve play tests the hell out their games. They are intimately aware of when a chamber is too laborious, too complex, or introduced before the player has learned the lessons they need to satisfyingly solve the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time. This is essential testing that must be performed again and again to find a delicate balance providing a sense of progress and accomplishment with just enough challenge.
This is a critical inflection point where the user is weighing the following: is the amount of investment I've made to date worth banging my head against the screen trying to figure out what to do next? An application like Photoshop doesn't do this type of testing because they know you're going to be committed to figuring out the challenge because you plunked down $700 for the privilege of owning Photoshop.
Yes, I'm going to compare Portal and Photoshop. Yes, they reside in two entirely different universes with entirely different motivations. This is about how these two universes should collide and that means what I'm really talking about is gamification. There's a reason I didn't mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It's not. Don't think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.
See, whether you're developing a game or an application, you want to your users to experience...
"The Moment"
Inevitably, you're going to need to make a split-second decision in Portal. The floor will literally be vanishing from under your feet and you'll have no time to consider your options; you will just improvise. It's these moments of well-informed improvisation that I believe are Portal's greatest accomplishment and best design. See, while you were busily having fun you had no idea that you were becoming an expert in the ways of the Portal universe. You now have experience using each of the individual tools and their behaviors to be able to combine them to handle the unexpected. The result: you are now able to effectively deal with novel and unknown situations.
It's incredibly satisfying to sneak out of a tight spot by performing an action you didn't know you could do, but created instinctively because of your experience.
That's how I want to learn. Don't give me a book; I don't want a lecture, and I don't want a list of topics to memorize. Give me ample reason to memorize them and a sandbox where I can safely play. Test me when I least expect it, shock me with the unknown, but make sure you've given me enough understanding and practice with my tools that I have a high chance of handling the unexpected.
Mastery is Well-Informed Improvisation
When someone raises their hand in that design meeting and suggests gamification, you have my permission to stand up, walk over, and poke them in the eye. But just one eye. While it's likely they are merely parroting a buzzword they heard from someone else, it's not pure buzz. Games like Portal have something to teach anyone interested in the motivation surrounding learning.
A video game has a very different goal than Photoshop. A video game is designed to be pure entertainment, while Photoshop is a tool by which you get work done. A game designer knows that if a game isn't both immediately entertaining and usable, the folks sitting in front of the Xbox 360 are going to stand up, toss their controllers on their beanbags and declare, "Screw it." Worse, they are going to tell every single one of their friends about this gaming disaster because they feel stupid for wasting their time and money on something that was supposed to be fun, but turned out to be lame. This is game death.
Photoshop's goal isn't entertaining unless you think the national pastime of bitching about Photoshop is a sport. Photoshop has no points or leaderboards because Photoshop is a tool and the perception of tools is that you must be willing to supply blood, sweat, and tears in order to acquire the skills to become any good at using them.
Bullshit.
Make a list. Tell me the number of applications you use on a daily basis where there is a decent chance that you'll end up in a foaming at the mouth homicidal rage because of crap workflow, bad UI, and bugginess. Is Photoshop on that list? Yeah, me too.
The plethora of online Photoshop tutorials demonstrate its power and its flexibility, but I believe they also demonstrate its poor design. Think about it like this: what if each time you plunked down in front of World of Warcraft, you had to spend an hour trying to remember, wait, how do I play this?
Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers' livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe. In one universe, you sport a handheld Portal gun that cleverly allows you to interrupt physics. In a slightly different universe, you have this tool called a cloning stamp that empowers you to sample and copy any part of a photo.
Both are concepts easy to initially understand, but eventually tricky to master. One comes from a game and another comes from an application, but the universes and names aren't important. When you master either, they both feel like magic.
Game designers have a different set of incentives to make their tools easier to learn via sandbox and atomically chunked learning. They may obsessively play test their games looking for user frustration earlier, but whether you're leaping through a portal or creating masks of transparent elements in Photoshop, both use cases strive for a moment where you can cleverly and unexpected solve a seemingly impossible problem on your own.
Game designers and application designers might exist in different universes, but there is no reason one universe can't teach the other.
We have a rice cooker – we bought it after the first Cambridge trip, when a rice cooker saved our lives – and last night I’d shown Claire how to make a cup of white rice with a pinch of salt, a glug of olive oil and a cinnamon stick.
There were leftover sausages, which Claire cut up.
Julia made Julia Salad:
A grated carrot
Corn kernels
Torn-up nori
Julia has a glass of milk, Claire is drinking mineral water and I am kicking back with a cold Marlborough sauvignon blanc. It’s a beautiful evening, the door’s open to the terrace, the Daleks are on the telly and all’s right with the world.
by rachel at May 08, 2012 02:15 AM
…is that these days I ride her on the lightest imaginable contact with the lightest imaginable aids, and yet when Sonya says “lengthen!” and I ask invisibly for a lengthened stride, Sonya then says “good!”
I used to haul this mare around like a school horse, and now I hold her in my hands like she is made of spun crystal, and she does not put a single hoof wrong. I sink into the saddle in front of fences and feel her locking on five strides out. “Everyone chill out, I got this,” she says. I soar. I am a hawk.
by rachel at May 07, 2012 08:22 PM
Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk about cats, but when I do, I make it count.
We've used automated cat feeders since 2007 with great success. (My apologies for the picture quality, but it was 2007, and camera phones were awful.)
Feeding your pets using robots might sound impersonal and uncaring. Perhaps it is. But I can't emphasize enough how much of a daily lifestyle improvement it really is to have your pets stop associating you with ritualized, timed feedings. As my wife so aptly explained:I do not miss the days when the cats would come and sit on our heads at 5 AM, wanting their breakfast.
Me neither. I haven't stopped loving our fuzzy buddies, but this was also before we had onetwothree children. We don't have a lot of time for random cat hijinks these days. Anyway, once we set up the automated feeders in 2007, it was a huge relief to outsource pet food obsessions to machines. They reliably delivered a timed feeding at 8am and 8pm like clockwork for the last five years. No issues whatsoever, other than changing the three D batteries about once a year, filling the hopper with kibble about once a month, and an occasional cleaning.
Although they worked, there were still many details of the automated feeders' design that were downright terrible. I put up with these problems because I was so happy to have automatic feeders that worked at all. So when I noticed that the 2012 version of these feeders appeared to be considerably updated, I went ahead and upgraded immediately on faith alone. After all, it had been nearly five years! Surely the company had improved their product a bit since then … right? Well, a man can dream, can't he?
When I ordered the new feeders, I assumed they would be a little better than what I had before.
The two feeders don't look so radically different, do they? But pay attention to the details.
These are, to be sure, a bunch of dumb, nitpicky details. Did the old version feed our cats reliably? Yes, it did. But it was also a pain to clean and maintain, a sort of pain that I endured weekly, for reasons that made no sense to me other than arbitrarily poor design choices. But when I bought the new version of the automated feeder, I was shocked to discover that nearly every single problem I had with the previous generation was addressed. I felt as if the Petmate Corporation™ was actually listening to all the feedback from the people who used their product, and actively refined the product to address our complaints and suggestions.
My point, and I do have one, is that details matter. Details matter, in fact, a hell of a lot. Whether in automatic cat feeders, or software. As my friend Wil Shipley once said:
This is still one of my favorite quotes about software. It's something we internalized heavily when building Stack Overflow. Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.
Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is. I hope for your sake they aren't your competitor.
The details are hard. Everyone screws up the details at first, just like Petmate did with the first version of this automatic feeder. And it's OK to screw up the details initially, provided …
We were maniacal about listening to feedback from avid Stack Overflow users from the earliest days of Stack Overflow in August 2008. Did you know that we didn't even have comments in the first version of Stack Overflow? But it was obvious, based on user feedback and observed usage, that we desperately needed them. There are now, at the time I am writing this, 1,569 completed feature requests; that's more than one per day on average.
Imagine that. Someone who cares about the details just as much as you do.
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Finally! How's that for a great fish? Did you know that orcas can get to be about thirty feet long? I didn't! This is a male, as you can tell by his imposing six-foot dorsal fin. I considered drawing a female, as the sea is given a feminine pronoun, but I figured God would want his very greatest great fish on the job and male orcas get a bit bigger than females.
The big question for anyone who illustrates Jonah is how to draw the fish. Most modern readers imagine it as a whale, though there are a few true fish that present themselves as possible candidates, like the great white shark. Of course God could have custom-made his fish -- the text says he "prepared" it -- so it could be just about anything with fins, and I was tempted to draw an enormous betta, but no, I want to figure this out, what would I send if I were God? Sadly I soon ruled out baleen whales, as despite their great size they have tiny throats because they eat tiny things. A blue whale would choke on a full-grown prophet! But most toothed whales and fish tear their food to pieces. And also we want a species that might have been under the boat Jonah was on.
The killer whale is occasionally found in the Mediterranean, it's easily big enough to hold a grown man, and it sometimes swallows its prey whole. It also sometimes partially beaches itself to grab animals off the shore, such as seal pups or what I have to imagine are very surprised deer, and that will come in handy for the reverse process of "vomit[ing] out Jonah upon the dry land." But the real reason I chose the killer whale is that even in antiquity it was associated with death and the underworld. This is a story in which the symbolic sacrifice and death map so closely to what really happens that it's almost not an allegory at all, it almost really is a story of a man who dies and keeps up a running commentary of what it's like to be dead, and that is clearly how we're meant to understand it. The great fish is Jonah's personal portable sheol, and no existing animal fits that description like Orcinus orca, the creature whose scientific name means "whale of the kingdom of the dead." If you prefer, you can call it a grampus, a word I had only ever heard in the old phrase "blowing like a grampus" and didn't even realize referred to a real creature, but there you are, a grampus is an orca. Or, according to my slang dictionary, a blustering person. They both blow, so take your choice.
Also, you can't see a killer whale's eyes. Presumably they've got eyes, but you can't make them out. Here comes toothy eyeless death, Jonah!
Conferences:
News:
News, 5 May is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.
by Julian Simpson at May 05, 2012 03:20 PM
Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point.
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience — the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. […] When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000.
For reference, the federal poverty level for a family of four is currently $23,050. Once you reach a little over 3 times the poverty level in income, you've achieved peak happiness, as least far as money alone can reasonably get you.
This is something I've seen echoed in a number of studies. Once you have "enough" money to satisfy the basic items at the foot of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid – that is, you no longer have to worry about food, shelter, security, and perhaps having a bit of extra discretionary money for the unknown – stacking even more money up doesn't do much, if anything, to help you scale the top of the pyramid.
But even if you're fortunate enough to have a good income, how you spend your money has a strong influence on how happy – or unhappy – it will make you. And, again, there's science behind this. The relevant research is summarized in If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right (pdf).
Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness — about what brings it and what sustains it — and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.
You may also recognize some of the authors on this paper, in particular Dan Gilbert, who also wrote the excellent book Stumbling on Happiness that touched on many of the same themes.
What is, then, the science of happiness? I'll summarize the basic eight points as best I can, but read the actual paper (pdf) to obtain the citations and details on the underlying studies underpinning each of these principles.
Things get old. Things become ordinary. Things stay the same. Things wear out. Things are difficult to share. But experiences are totally unique; they shine like diamonds in your memory, often more brightly every year, and they can be shared forever. Whenever possible, spend money on experiences such as taking your family to Disney World, rather than things like a new television.
Human beings are intensely social animals. Anything we can do with money to create deeper connections with other human beings tends to tighten our social connections and reinforce positive feelings about ourselves and others. Imagine ways you can spend some part of your money to help others – even in a very small way – and integrate that into your regular spending habits.
Because we adapt so readily to change, the most effective use of your money is to bring frequent change, not just "big bang" changes that you will quickly grow acclimated to. Break up large purchases, when possible, into smaller ones over time so that you can savor the entire experience. When it comes to happiness, frequency is more important than intensity. Embrace the idea that lots of small, pleasurable purchases are actually more effective than a single giant one.
Humans adapt readily to both positive and negative change. Extended warranties and insurance prey on your impulse for loss aversion, but because we are so adaptable, people experience far less regret than they anticipate when their purchases don't work out. Furthermore, having the easy "out" of insurance or a generous return policy can paradoxically lead to even more angst and unhappiness because people deprived themselves of the emotional benefit of full commitment. Thus, avoid buying insurance, and don't seek out generous return policies.
Immediate gratification can lead you to make purchases you can't afford, or may not even truly want. Impulse buying also deprives you of the distance necessary to make reasoned decisions. It eliminates any sense of anticipation, which is a strong source of happiness. For maximum happiness, savor (maybe even prolong!) the uncertainty of deciding whether to buy, what to buy, and the time waiting for the object of your desire to arrive.
We tend to gloss over details when considering future purchases, but research shows that our happiness (or unhappiness) largely lies in exactly those tiny details we aren't thinking about. Before making a major purchase, consider the mechanics and logistics of owning this thing, and where your actual time will be spent once you own it. Try to imagine a typical day in your life, in some detail, hour by hour: how will it be affected by this purchase?
Comparison shopping focuses us on attributes of products that arbitrarily distinguish one product from another, but have nothing to do with how much we'll enjoy the purchase. They emphasize characteristics we care about while shopping, but not necessarily what we'll care about when actually using or consuming what we just bought. In other words, getting a great deal on cheap chocolate for $2 may not matter if it's not pleasurable to eat. Don't get tricked into comparing for the sake of comparison; try to weight only those criteria that actually matter to your enjoyment or the experience.
Don't overestimate your ability to independently predict how much you'll enjoy something. We are, scientifically speaking, very bad at this. But if something reliably makes others happy, it's likely to make you happy, too. Weight other people's opinions and user reviews heavily in your purchasing decisions.
Happiness is a lot harder to come by than money. So when you do spend money, keep these eight lessons in mind to maximize whatever happiness it can buy for you. And remember: it's science!
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This is only a verse and a half. I wanted to get three verses, but I ran out of draw-juice. And it's quite a dramatic place to break off! Those poor sailors, trying to supplicate someone else's god. What can you do in a situation like that? You can only try to reason with him. And this situation is particularly weird because once you are in the awkward position of standing between a foreign god and the object of his wrath, how often does it then happen that you are told to appease that god by killing one of his followers? No wonder the sailors are beseeching God so earnestly in the first verse: this seems like a big setup, and God's going to say HOW DARE YOU HARM ONE OF MY CHOSEN PEOPLE! as soon as Jonah hits the water.
So that probably explains, at least in part, why the sailors are so reluctant to throw Jonah overboard: you don't appease the Hebrew god by killing a Hebrew, do you? That can't be right! But here's a question: why doesn't Jonah jump? He knows that the only answer is for him to go over the side, and that if he doesn't everyone on board will probably die, yet he lets the sailors waste valuable time trying to row to shore. At first I thought this was yet another example of his refusing to do the right thing until there's no other choice, and of his insistence upon seeing himself as the victim when really he is victimizing others. I won't jump, you have to throw me! You're all mean to me, just like God! I hate you!
But there's another explanation that I think might fit better. In considering how Jesus compared his future three-day death with Jonah's three days in the fish, I began to wonder if being sacrificed might be a necessary part of this ritual. Because let's be clear: Jonah is symbolically dead while in that fish. He speaks of himself as being in hell (I assume that's the Hebrew sheol, the grave, the abode of the dead), and emerging from water is a symbol of rebirth that's probably as old as humanity. Like Jesus, Jonah dies and is reborn to save others -- though he complains about it a lot more; is it possible that he is also like Jesus in that he must not only die but be killed?
And then I realized that Jonah is who Jesus would be if he didn't like people. And if the guys who crucified him were really sympathetic. Jonah is Bizarro Jesus!
I've found that a structure that gives obvious "book-ends" around each topic make it easier for the audience to follow.
Most of my talks lately have been either 4-5 small case studies or a Top 10 List. Each case study is a repetition of "who are the players, what happened, what did we learn". The repetition gives the audience a clear understanding of "we're moving to the next topic now" because they see the pattern. In a Top 10 list there is the obvious "book end" of announcing the next number.
I started doing this after seeing too many presentations where the presenter runs topic to topic smeared together with very little separation. Sometimes I get confused because I'm still on the last topic and they've moved on without letting the audience know.
Announcing the number of case studies ahead of time is also useful. You want the audience to be focused on not what you are saying, not subconsciously trying to reverse-engineer the structure you are using.
This is true for writing a paper as well as giving a talk.
by Tom Limoncelli at May 03, 2012 06:30 PM
We reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It's even encoded into Boy Scout Law. It's what adults do, isn't it? But do we? Isn't telling the truth too much and too often a bad life strategy – perhaps even dangerous? Is telling children to always tell the truth even itself the whole truth?
One of the most thought provoking articles on the topic, and one I keep returning to, year after year, is I Think You're Fat. It's about the Radical Honesty movement, which proposes that adults follow their own advice and always tell the truth. No matter what.
The [Radical Honesty] movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough – a world without fibs – but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.
And yet … maybe there's something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren't big lies. They aren't lies like "I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator." Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. "Yes, let's definitely get together soon." "I'd love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu." "No, we can't buy a toy today – the toy store is closed." It's bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.
The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a great writer who has made something of a cottage industry of treating himself like a guinea pig, such as attempting to become the smartest man in the world, spend a year living exactly like the Bible tells us to, and to become the fittest person on Earth. Based on the strength of this article, I bought two of his books; experiments like Radical Honesty are right up his alley.
Radical honesty itself isn't exactly a new concept. It's been parodied in any number of screwball Hollywood comedies such as Liar, Liar (1997) and The Invention of Lying (2009). But there's a big difference between milking this concept for laughs and exploring it as an actual lifestyle among real human beings. Among the ideas raised in the article, which you should go read now, are:
What we often don't acknowledge is that the truth is kind of scary. That's why we have a hard time being honest with ourselves, much less those around us. Reading through all these ambiguous situations that A.J. put himself through, you start to wonder if you understand what truth is, or what it means to decide that something is "true". After summarizing the article in bullet form, I'm surprised there are so many points in favor of honesty, maybe even radical honesty.
But uncompromisingly committing to the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has a darker side.
My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.
"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.
"Well...is there a payoff?"
"F**k you."
It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"
Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."
Rather than embrace the truth, as Radical Honesty would have us do, Adrian Tan advises us to be wary of the truth.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.
I think he's right. But Radical Honesty isn't altogether wrong, either. Let me be clear: Radical Honesty, as a lifestyle, is ridiculous and insane. Advocating telling the truth 100% of the time, no matter what, is harmful extremism. But it's also wonderfully seductive as a concept, because it illustrates how needlessly afraid most of us are of truth – even truths that could potentially help us. Radical Honesty teaches us to be more brave. That is, when it's not destroying our lives and the lives of everyone around us.
Ask yourself: what is the purpose of this truth? What effect will sharing this truth have on the other person, on yourself, on the world? What change will come about, positive or negative, from choosing to voice a particular truth at a particular time?
I believe that the true lesson of Radical Honesty is that truth, real truth, is honesty with a purpose. Ideally a noble purpose, but any purpose at all other than "because I could" will suffice. By all means, be brave; embrace the truth. But if your honesty has no purpose, if you can't imagine any positive outcome from this honesty, I suggest you're better off keeping it to yourself.
Or even lying.
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The NJ Chapter of LOPSA is graciously letting me do a dress rehearsal of my Ganeti presentation that will be presented at the PICC Conference next week. http://picconf.org If you can't make it to the conference or just want to be able to attend one of the conflicting sessions, this is a great opportunity for you.
Complete details are on the www.lopsanj.org website.
Topic: Ganeti Virtualization Management:Improving the Utilization of Your Hardware and Your Time
Date: Thursday, May 3, 2012
Time: 7:00pm (social), 7:30pm (discussion)
If you are planning on coming please RSVP so we have the right amount of pizza.
Complete details are on the www.lopsanj.org website.
by Tom Limoncelli at April 30, 2012 07:30 PM
Now I'm just being weird. Dunno if the waves work next to a dark gray surface -- does that make the white between the lines pop and ruin everything forever?
To understand this story, you need to understand that grandchildren are like crack cocaine to grandparents. I'm convinced that if our parents could somehow snort our children up their noses to get a bigger fix, they would. And when your parents live out of state, like ours do, access to the Internet isn't just important. No. It is life threatening.
Like Gator in Jungle Fever, grandparents just gotta get their fix of the grandkids every month. And if they don't, if their Internet is broken for any reason, you're going to get an earful via telegraph and facsimile and registered letter until you fix it.
Either way, they're gonna get high. On your kids.
My mom is no exception. So when her computer suddenly stopped working, and she couldn't get updates on her three grandkids, I got frantic calls. Which is odd, because everything had been working fine for a few years now. Once Henry was born in 2009, I set her up with a netbook that had Skype and Firefox set to auto update and she'd been able to video chat with us regularly, no problem at all, since then. So what happened?
My first thought was to hell with it, I'll just buy her a new iPad online via the Apple Store. I'm a big fan of the retina display, and surely the touchy-feely iPad would be more resistant to whatever problem she was having than a netbook, what with its archaic "operating system" and "updates" and "keyboard" and "mouse".
With some urging from my wife (I married well), cooler heads prevailed. What if her problem had nothing to do with the computer, but her Internet connection in some way? Then I'd just be trading one set of problems for another with the iPad. I have no idea how things are set up over there, thousands of miles away. I needed help. Help from a fellow geek who lives nearby and is willing to drive out and assist my poor mom.
My mom doesn't live near where I grew up any more, so I have no friend network there. All I could think of was Geek Squad. I've seen the trucks in our neighborhood, and they've been around a while, so I checked out their website. Maybe they'd work?
When I can buy my mom a new iPad for $399, the idea of paying $299 just to have someone come out and fix her old stuff starts to feel like a really bad idea. But I suppose it's a preview of our disposable computer future, because it's increasingly cheaper to buy a new one than it is to bother fixing the old one. This is the stuff that my friend and iFixit founder Kyle Wiens' nightmares are made of. I'm sorry, Kyle. But it's coming.
I posted my discontent on Twitter, as I am wont to do, and received an interesting recommendation for a site I'd never heard of – Geekatoo.
I was intrigued, first because the site didn't appear to suck which is more than I can say for about half the links I click on, and second because it appealed to my geek instincts. I could post a plea for help for my mom, and a fellow geek, one of my kind who happened to be local, would be willing to head out and assist. I could send out the geek bat-signal! But I was still skeptical. My mom lives in Charlotte, North Carolina which, while not exactly the sticks, isn't necessarily a big tech hub city, either. I figured I had nothing to lose at this point, so I posted the request titled "Mom Needs Tech Support" with the info I had.
Much to my surprise, I got two great bids within 24 hours, geeks with good credentials, and I picked the first one. The estimate was two hours for $45, and he was on-site helping my mom within 2 days from the time I posted.
It turns out that my wife's intuition was correct: the cable internet installer had inexplicably decided to connect my mother's computer to a neighbor's wireless, instead of setting up a WiFi access point for her. So when that neighbor moved away, calamity ensued.
And the results? Well, I think they speak for themselves.
My mom, as usual, exaggerates about her only son. I am far, far from the best son ever. But any website that can make me look like a hero to my mom, and keep my fellow Super User geeks gainfully employed doing superhero work on my behalf gets a huge thumbs up from me.
Needless to say, strongly recommended. If you need reliable local tech support that won't break the bank, and you want to support both your family and your local geek community at the same time, check out Geekatoo.
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I don’t remember when I first read Maus. I think it was probably the year I lived in Ireland, when I went on my first big graphic novel binge, but it feels like I read it earlier than that because it has become so much a part of me. Did Marie Suchting put it in my hands? Seems like the sort of thing she would do. Bless you, Marie, wherever you are.[1]
Maus is kept in the same area of my memory where I keep Olga Horak, a docent at the Sydney Jewish Museum who told me the story of the blanket in which she was carried out of Auschwitz. Olga’s blanket is made of a mix of animal and human hair.
Olga said to me: “I survived Auschwitz. One day all the survivors will be dead, and then there will be only you: the people who have met a survivor. Now it is your responsibility to remember and to tell the truth about what happened.”
Because I stand in this once-removed relationship with WW2, I am as interested in Art’s story as I am in that of his father. You can’t be a sheltered white Westerner and read history without knowing the terrible price of your peaceful, privileged life.
And of course Adorno was right: no poetry after Auschwitz. You can’t engage with the death camps in any meaningful way and then walk away feeling hopeful about human nature, or God, or life, or anything else at all, really. Ask Primo Levi.
But you can’t despair, either. What you do is you become Schroedinger’s human, both hopeful and hopeless. Everyone is a potential genocidaire; I, too, am a potential genocidaire; therefore I must do my work and be kind to other people and raise my children well. Or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
It’s the human condition. This is what MetaMaus is about. It is the story of the story of Art, and of art. It is the impossible poetry after Auschwitz.
[1] Oh, Marie. I’d been meaning to call. I am so sorry. I hope you knew what you meant to me. You did your work and you were kind to me and raised me well.
by rachel at April 26, 2012 07:23 PM
I don't think I really understood SSH "Agent Forwarding" until I read this in-depth description of what it is and how it works:
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html
In fact, I admit I had been avoiding using this feature because it adds a security risk and it is best not to use something risky without knowing the internals of why it is risky.
Now that I understand it and can use it, I find it saves me a TON of time. Highly recommended (when it is safe to use, of course!)
Tom
by Tom Limoncelli at April 26, 2012 12:32 PM
DING! That's the bell that rings whenever Jonah thinks of someone besides himself. You have not heard it before and will not hear it again.
This is a big chunk of verses, but I wanted this particular series all at once. Look at all that happens here! First, dig how the sailors freak out when they learn just which god's wrath they're experiencing. This guy's a Hebrew! Game over, man! I love that about the Hebrew Bible, how it freely acknowledges that there are other gods and even that those gods have some power. Remember Moses playing any-snake-you-can-conjure-I-can-conjure-better with the Egyptian priests? I'd look up chapter and verse but I'm too tired, I spent about an hour and a half moving that damn dove's eye around to make it look up at Jonah in the last panel. And I'm not sure I succeeded. Anyway, the point is that everyone on that ship has a god, no one expects the sailors to convert to Judaism, a word I think didn't even exist yet, hell they even know how badass the Hebrew god is but until he directly affects their lives there's no call for them to have any truck with him. I like that system. Can we all go back to that system?
Once again the sailors show admirable sangfroid, despite their terror. (I guess you don't go into sailing as a career if you can't keep it together during a storm.) They figure out Jonah is the problem; then they ask him which god they've pissed off; then they ask him how to appease that god. And then, mirabile visu! Jonah, faced with a choice between everyone probably dying and only him probably dying, tells the sailors to throw him overboard. It's not much of an act of altruism, but I think it counts.
And this verse is remarkable for another reason: it marks the first time in the book that Jonah actually makes a prediction. Isn't that nice, that he signals his willingness to prophesy by starting immediately? You win, God. See? I'm predicting the future. I'm predicting the hell out of the future. Now will you stop killing everyone?
Guys, only five more verses until the fish shows up. I'm so excited for the fish.
Imagine if you mashed up Hurry Down Sunshine with Mountains beyond Mountains and, oh, a liberal (haha) dash of Atul Gawande or Siddhartha Mukherjee. You’d get this book: a gorgeous wrenching memoir of someone who had three psychotic breaks, went to Harvard Medical School and became a pediatrician, and then had another psychotic break. It’s incandescent.
If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.
It’s a good enough book that you should read it for its own sake. I feel bad even bringing this up. But yes, his father is who you think he is.
When Kurt tried to sell Saabs, he usually did the test drive with the prospective customer in the passenger seat. I tried to tell him to not go around corners so fast, especially if the customers were middle-aged or older, but he thought it was the best way to explain front-wheel drive. Some of them were shaken and green. He didn’t sell a lot of cars.
“Maybe you should just let them drive,” I suggested.
by rachel at April 26, 2012 02:35 AM
by Tom Limoncelli at April 24, 2012 11:07 AM
I've been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and everything to customers. If you're looking for strange or obscure items, things almost nobody sells new any more, or grey market items for cheap, eBay is still not a bad place to look.
At least for me, eBay still basically works, after all these years. But one thing hasn't changed: the eBay website has always been difficult to use and navigate. They've updated the website recently to remove some of the more egregious cruft, but it's still way too complicated. I guess I had kind of accepted old, complex websites as the status quo, because I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I compared the experience on the eBay website with the experience of the eBay apps for mobile and tablet.
Unless you're some kind of super advanced eBay user, you should probably avoid the website. The tablet and mobile eBay apps are just plain simpler, easier, and faster to use than the eBay website itself. I know this intuitively from using eBay on my devices and computers, but there's also usability studies with data to prove it, too. To be fair, eBay is struggling under the massive accumulated design debt of a website originally conceived in the late 90s, whereas their mobile and tablet app experiences are recent inventions. It's not so much that the eBay apps are great, but that the eBay website is so very, very bad.
The implied lesson here is to embrace constraints. Having a limited, fixed palette of UI controls and screen space is a strength. A strength we used to have in early Mac and Windows apps, but seem to have lost somewhere along the way as applications got more powerful and complicated. And it's endemic on the web as well, where the eBay website has been slowly accreting more and more functionality since 1999. The nearly unlimited freedom that you get in a modern web browser to build whatever UI you can dream up, and assume as large or as small a page as you like, often ends up being harmful to users. It certainly is in the case of eBay.
If you're starting from scratch, you should always design the UI first, but now that we have such great mobile and tablet device options, consider designing your site for the devices that have the strictest constraints first, too. This is the thinking that led to mobile first design strategy. It helps you stay focused on a simple and uncluttered UI that you can scale up to bigger and beefier devices. Maybe eBay is just going in the wrong direction here; design simple things that scale up; not complicated things you need to scale down.
Above all else, simplify! But why stop there? If building the mobile and tablet apps first for a web property produces a better user experience – why do we need the website, again? Do great tablet and phone applications make websites obsolete?
I don't think there's a clear winner, only pros and cons. But apps will always need websites, if for nothing else other than a source of data, as a mothership to phone home to, and a place to host the application downloads for various devices.
And if you're obliged to build a website, why not build it out so it offers a reasonable experience on a mobile or tablet web browser, too? I have nothing against a premium experience optimized to a particular device, but shouldn't all your users have a premium experience? eBay's problem here isn't mobile or tablets per se, but that they've let their core web experience atrophy so badly. I understand that there's a lot of inertia around legacy eBay tools and long time users, so it's easy for me to propose radical changes to the website here on the outside. Maybe the only way eBay can redesign at all is on new platforms.
Will mobile and tablet apps kill websites? A few, certainly. But only the websites stupid enough to let them.
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I'm not as enthusiastic about this one as about the previous two, though I do like the groomy dove. I may redo it. Let me know how you think it works.
I find this casting-of-lots thing interesting. Deuteronomy 18 forbids "divination," and casting lots sounds like divination to me, so that the sailors propose it seems to emphasize their non-Hebrewness and that Jonah agrees to it seems to emphasize (once again) that he is a pretty lousy Hebrew. He just won't do what God wants unless he has no other option. God's patience with him throughout this book may be unparalleled in the Bible.
Puppet is amazing. It changed my career (thanks to Luke , and before him Mark). However, I have some itches. I have attempted to write about these before, but haven’t felt like pushing the ‘publish’ button.
I’ve been running Puppet in a atypical way for some time now.
The only thing I feel I need to expand on is the last: testing. Obviously if you write Ruby code, you should rspec the hell out of it. But should you test Puppet code? It’s mostly a declarative language. If you’re properly declaring the outcomes that you want, then it can be easy. If too much logic creeps in, you’re doing it wrong or you should write a function or type – and you should rspec the hell out of that. This approach has served me for years with decalarative build tools*.
I have no desire to go verify that Puppet does what I tell it. But I do care about the outcome. Also, I need to know that it runs on the target platform, as I use a MacBook.
So I wrote Skewer. Skewer’s only job is to:
That scratches my itch. Skewer probably won’t scratch your itch if you run lots of nodes. It works on Ubuntu, though adding support for other operating systems wouldn’t be too hard. You may also like the Puppet Cloud Provisioner.
Skewer evolved from a Rakefile that I used to test my puppet code. I set out to rewrite it over the Christmas period, and got the last feature passing on Friday. Like my other open source project, I learned a lot while doing it. Skewer has some wrinkles, but I use it in my day job, and I’ve managed to keep that so far.
https://github.com/builddoctor/skewer
http://rubygems.org/gems/skewer
* Okay, I actually do a little bit more. I use Rake to run puppet parser validate on every .pp file in my project, and I use puppet-lint to catch howlers.
Skewer – a tool for provisioning cloud nodes with Puppet is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.
by Julian Simpson at April 23, 2012 04:00 PM
I'll be speaking at LOPSA-NJ's May meeting about Ganeti, the open source project I'm involved in. The title is "Ganeti Virtualization Management: Improving the Utilization of Your Hardware and Your Time".
For more information check out the LOPSA NJ web site.
by Tom Limoncelli at April 23, 2012 12:26 AM
April 2012 represents the 10th anniversary of Rands in Repose. I don't normally celebrate these occasions, but serendipity has given me something to talk about.
As you might have noticed, I've recently made a few design changes to the site. I'm honored to participate in Hoefler & Frere-Jones private beta for their forthcoming web fonts offering.
Frequent readers will appreciate and understand the use of my beloved Sentinel for headlines as well as the revised header, but I believe the bigger impact is where I hope you spend most of your time - the body typeface. H&FJ's screen version of Ideal Sans, for me, is a joy to read especially on the iPad's Retina display. I can't get enough of the whimsy of the numbers (1234567890) or the calm clarity of the small caps.
If you see anything wrong, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.
10 years. 451 entries with 6500+ comments. I'd like to thank the readers of this now typographically-enhanced corner of the Internet. The only reason I'm here is because you keep coming back. Thank you.
The PICC committee is excited to announce our opening keynote speaker:
Bill Cheswick, Security guru and co-author of "Firewalls and Internet Security"
Topic: Rethinking Passwords "We've known that passwords have been inadequate for over thirty years and they have only gotten worse. Can we escape the varying 'eye-of-newt' password rules that plague everyone's online lives? Can we get grandma safely to the other side of the authentication street? I will review some of the many research ideas that have been proposed, and offer some suggestions toward getting us out of this thicket."
DINNER will be provided to all attendees on Friday at 6pm; Bill's talk will begin after dinner (8pm).
We're very excited to have Bill speak at PICC. He is a NJ local, a fantastic speaker, and was unavailable the last few years. We finally got him!
Register for PICC here: http://www.picconf.org/registration/#event
(NOTE: Tutorial seats are running out! Register NOW!)
by Tom Limoncelli at April 22, 2012 03:45 PM
[first draft]
Someone asked me about "The Internet Needs a New Pair of Pants" and I thought it would be a good chance to post some thoughts I've had.
For the most part he's asking the wrong questions. Only #10 and #11 really matter.
But first a quick tangent...
We don't "store data" on the internet. You can 'store data' by putting it on a hard drive and then powering it off. That's easy. Anyone can do that. What you do on the internet (or "in the cloud") is you make data available (either to everyone, a restricted group, or just yourself). To make it available it uses a constant amount of power, upkeep, maintenance, backups, etc. Backups is often 9x the cost of hard drive you bought to store the data.
That said...
In the future we will store more and more of our information on other people's computers simply because it is cheaper. Energy is very expensive and typical data centers are built where power is cheap. There are efficiencies of scale to power one big data center rather than a million hard drives, each in that person's home. The power in data centers will always be greener than what you get in the home not because cloud providers are pollution-hating hippies but because when you do things at big scale it becomes cheaper to do things green. Lastly, at big scale things like backups, upkeep, maintenance, etc. all become much cheaper. The cost of a huge robotic tape backup system may be millions of dollars, but the cost of millions of homes each doing backups is hundreds of millions. More and more of our data is being stored in the cloud not just because it is easier that setting up a home system to do it for us but because we can't afford to do it any other way.
That said...
If we are going to put more and more of our data in the hands of other people, we need a "bill of rights" that protects us and the providers:
Users should:
Providers should:
That list is just a start.
As system administrators we are probably the most aware of these issues. Sadly these decisions are generally made at the CEO level where we have very little influence, or in smokey, dark rooms where political decisions are made (and we have even less influence).
The problem is that the current laws are insufficient, new laws tend to be written by people that are against the things listed above, and nobody knows how to deal with data in one country being stored by a person in another county that breaks the laws of yet another country.
I've linked to services that do the things I talk about. I'll gladly add links to other services that have these features (email me or post a comment). I think everyone should go to their providers and ask (demand) all of the above, and we should ask (demand) our elected officials create laws that make these things possible, if not required.
But who has time for that, right? I mean... we're sysadmins! We're too busy to get political.
by Tom Limoncelli at April 20, 2012 04:33 PM
Usenix is sponsoring the first Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Summit to run during Federated Conferences Week in Boston. WiAC will be all day June 12th, 2012.
Carolyn Rowland and Nicole Forsgren Velasquez are co-chairs. Carolyn recently posted on G+ a request for ideas: What would make this a must-attend event? What topics should we cover in order to appeal to women of varying professions and backgrounds: researchers, to developers, sysadmins, IT managers, etc.?
Carolyn wrote "We'd like this year to be the start of a recurring Usenix event that allows people who believe we need to support women in the computing professions to come together to share ideas, meet new people and get inspired."
For more information please visit: https://www.usenix.org/conference/wiac12
You can reach Carolyn and Nicole at wiac12chairs@usenix.org
by Tom Limoncelli at April 20, 2012 11:55 AM
The mister is off building a robot thunderdome with the downstairs neighbor, so I called the wife and invited her and our boys over for dinner. While she was here her phone rang and the ringtone was Weezer’s “My Best Friend.”
Me: sharp intake of breath. “That’s MY ringtone. You have ANOTHER best friend???”
Salome: “I am totally busted. It’s my default ringtone.”
“YOU TOLD ME IT WAS SPECIAL FOR ME. I GOT ALL TEARY.”
We had BBQ chicken from a place on 24th Street with arugula and avocado salad and broccolini and brown rice. I made a compote out of leftover strawberries and we had that with cream for dessert. Salome and I got a little tipsy on limoncello from Lucca’s deli.
This is what my life is like now. Yesterday I was weeding our little front flowerbed and Colin the carpenter stopped by and we chatted about the shelf he is making for Claire’s yarn, because Claire took up crochet after Rose taught her how. Then Kathy came by on her way to pick up Julia and Martha from the math circle Vali runs in the place on the corner. It’s been difficult to blog these past few months because happiness writes white and I have never been so happy before in my life.
I showed the wife pictures of the house I grew up in.
“But it’s beautiful,” she said.
“I see that now. It’s a jewel of mid-century modern, and it was full of teak and Hans Wegner originals. My mother had flawless taste.”
“I pictured you growing up in a place with no light! Like, a dungeon!”
“But that’s what it felt like. I look at it now and all I can think about is how miserable I was back then. When I was a teenager I could not put together a simple declarative sentence about my internal state to save my life.”
“You were a bit like that when I met you.”
One of my catchphrases nowadays is that closure is bullshit. Scar tissue is what it is. I still feel the cold where the broken bones in my ankle fused back together. But the other California cliche, validation, is not so much bullshit. Having a third party acknowledge the you that has spent the last umpty years tunneling out from underneath all your own garbage: well, that’s not nothing, as we say. It’s a thing, as we say.
It’s even possible I will forgive her for her lies about the ringtone.
by rachel at April 20, 2012 06:01 AM
Today's Phoenician galley question: what kind of ladders do you suppose they had leading down into "the sides of the ship"? They had rope ladders between the deck and the mast, but that's probably the only kind of ladder you can have for that purpose. Rope ladders are harder to climb, and you wouldn't ever need to move the ladder between the deck and the hold, so probably that would be a wooden ladder, don't you think? The bonus of a rope ladder is that I could make it the kind with wooden rungs: a Jacob's ladder!
Previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006
2011 was a stressful year, in many ways, and so for large parts of it I did not really read. Instead, I tracked how many books I started and how many pages I got through each, for a total of 112 books started, 70 finished, and over 20,000 pages read. Not up to my usual standards. Nonetheless…
Key: Books in bold are those that were so great my heart leaps at the chance to tell you about them even now. If you only have time to read some of this, read those.
The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov
Surprisingly well-written and well-researched.
Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker
The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig
Last year, I recommended Good to Great, calling it “actual science”. Dave Bridgeland quickly corrected me and recommended this book, which is vastly better. Not only does it systematically debunk the pretensions to science in Good to Great and the other management bestsellers in an absolutely delightful manner, it provides a short but very thought-provoking discussion of strategy in its own right.
You can mock the banality of its recommendations, but there’s no question: this book is well worth it just for the way it encourages habits of genuine scientific thought. I knew I never should have fallen so low as to trust a business book!
The Farnsworth Invention by Aaron Sorkin
Clearly not Sorkin’s best, but short and fun. Also interesting to see how Sorkin plays with the fourth wall in a play format.
The Trial by Franz Kafka (translated by Breon Mitchell)
A deep and magnificent work. I’d not really read much Kafka before and had grown up led to believe that it was a paranoid and hyperbolic work, dystopian fiction in the style of George Orwell. Yet I read it and found it was precisely accurate — every single detail perfectly mirrored my own experience. This isn’t fiction, but documentary.
Spoilers follow.
The bulk of the book is about K trying to find someone to fight his case for him, and failing miserably. As an individual in a world of bureaucracies, he concludes there’s no substitute but to do the work himself.
This is set against the backdrop of his “day job” at the bank — about as characteristic a bureaucracy as you can imagine. The bank, by contrast, has no difficulty finding people to do its work for it. Even when K slacks off or gets distracted, the bank continues chugging along just fine — as seen in the vice president who leaps to take K’s work from him. (Compare: The independent lawyer is under no such pressure to actually get K’s work done.)
A vivid illustration that bureaucracies, once they get started, continue doing whatever mindless thing they’ve been set up to do, regardless of whether the people in them particularly want to do it or whether it’s even a good idea. At the same time, individual people have an incredibly hard time executing long-term or large-scale tasks on their own, even when they’re quite motivated.
But what of the priest? The priest tells K a story about how as an individual in a bureaucracy, it’s a losing game to try to ask permission. You have to persuade your boss, your boss’s boss, and your boss’s boss’s boss (so terribly powerful that your boss can’t even bear to look at him). If you wait for your request to be approved by the chain of command, it won’t happen at all.
K argues with the priest about how horribly unfair this is: isn’t your boss (the individual) doing the wrong thing somehow? The priest maintains there are many different theories about this question of individual responsibility. But K is missing the larger point: this is just how bureaucracy works.
K takes the lesson to heart and decides to stop fighting the system and just live his life without asking for permission. It goes well…for a while. But it still seems a better option than the alternatives.
The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
A dreadful little book, which boils down to nothing more than a vast tract of economic illiteracy. Take just the insanity that is chapter 2. Cowen takes as his dictum:
The larger the role of government in the economy, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating improvements in our living standard.
For example, as government-insured health care takes up a larger proportion of our country’s spending, we can’t accurately measure how our living standards are improving since it’s paid for at set rates by government instead of through a competitive market process to set accurate prices.
But, as any economist should realize, our standard of living is never appropriately measured through prices, because of consumer surplus. The whole point of a competitive economy is to create this disconnect. Let’s say a chair greatly improves my standard of living and I would pay $10,000 for one. In a competitive market, different chair providers compete for my money by offering a lower price, eventually driving the price of the chair down to the cost of production.
Has my ‘living standard’ [sic] thereby decreased? Of course not! In fact, it has increased since I can buy several chairs (while still getting thousands of dollars in consumer surplus!). It’s insane to blame this on government.
Cowen’s other arguments are similarly ignorant. For example, he tries to claim that the reason we’re in a recession, “not filling government coffers or supporting many families”, is because “our major innovations are sprining up in sectors where a lot of work is done by machines, not by human beings. … That is one reason why we have been seeing a ‘jobless recovery.’” (L503)
Nonsense on stilts. The Federal Reserve decides how many people will have jobs, iPads have nothing to do with it.
This book’s popularity is a sad sign of how ignorance triumphs when it benefits the powerful.
A fast, fun real-life heist story.
Getting Things Done by David Allen [reread]
Still good, though not worth starting a cult over. Its insights are more psychological than anything else.
Private Firms Working in the Public Interest by Abigail Bugbee Brown
Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Olympus — why is there so much accounting fraud? Why isn’t this stuff caught? In this serious but briskly-written work, Abigail Brown explains the incredible story of how accounting firms actually work. Paid by the people they’re supposed to be auditing, accounting firms have developed an elaborate culture of corruption, letting them aid and abet the most egregious forms of dishonesty.
(Disclosure: Ms. Brown and I were lab fellows together at the Harvard Center for Ethics.)
QED by Peter Parnell
Not bad, by any stretch, but on the page, for anyone who’s familiar with Feynman’s actual writings, this can’t help but feel thin.
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself with David Foster Wallace
After a great artist dies, there comes a point where the barrel of work that can be published posthumously seems like it’s running dry (Elliot Smith’s New Moon, Kafka’s Office Papers). Publishing the transcript of a rambling conversation with DFW as a book would seem to be similarly stretching.
But, like the others, it turns out to be appreciated all the same. DFW is delightful and witty and it’s fascinating to see how much of his linguistic creativity and charm wasn’t the result of any special effort but simply his natural form to speech. He must have been such a delight to spend time with.
The problem is that the editor of this volume, David Lipsky, is apparently a dreadful writer who is deluded into thinking he’s a great one. Taking DFW’s polite words of support as deep praise, he is not shy about sharing his ‘gifts’ via overwrought introductions and interpolations. The result is an infuriating combination of glorious rants from DFW cut with ignorant and ill-written speculation by someone desperate to show off. (Though I don’t recall Lipsky’s recent piece about DFW being so bad, so maybe he merely needed an editor…or was told to pad the book out with random asides.)
Inside WikiLeaks by Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Brainiac by Ken Jennings
Who knew Ken Jennings was so funny? A witty and delightful book, though obviously not one that’s anything more than trivial.
From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp
A short but impressive guide to how to run a democratic revolution. Reportedly rather influential and certainly provides an interesting structure for thought.
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen
A fun and intriguing book. Poulsen writes in a restrained style, but the pace is fast and the images are vivid and the technology seems pretty right-on.
(Disclosure: Kevin Poulsen and I worked together at Wired.)
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager and Keith Gessen (with n+1)
An annotated transcript of a series of interviews between the brilliant literary writer Keith Gessen and a sympathetic and polymathic hedge fund manager. The hedge fund manager tries to provide some insight into what his world is like, in real time as it’s collapsing, but Gessen’s questioning typically isn’t detailed enough to get a very vivid picture. HFM’s stories were thrilling as things happened but with distance they seem somewhat blurred; it’s harder to fit them in now that we think we understand what happened. They’re both delightful characters, though, enough to still make the book a decent read.
The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen by Jonathan Littman
Whatever ese you want to say about Kevin Poulsen, he was certainly funny. Littman provides a vivid retelling of his strange story. I’m told Poulsen denies most of what’s in this book, so it may not have much value as documentary, but as entertainment it’s pretty good.
Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen
Carl Hiassen writes murder mysteries with a political bent. They’re fun airport reading but it’s hard to justify them as much more than that.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
This book, the source of the name The Daily Beast, is a vicious satire of journalism. It has some quite witty and biting moments, including some I’ve found myself referring back to, but I’m not sure it holds together as literature.
The Age of WikiLeaks by Greg Mitchell
An good, well-written summary of the story so far, but nothing more than that.
JSTOR: A History by Roger C. Schonfeld
Team Rodent by Carl Hiassen
A very short book packed full of muck about the Disney Corporation. Fun stuff, but it comes off as very light — basically just a list of stories Hiassen seems to have picked up in his years of living nearby.
Shots by David Fenton
The Honor Code by K. Anthony Appiah
A collection of interesting stories about how social revolutions have happened. Appiah tries to tie them together with a story about honor, but I think that’s ultimately less interesting and persuasive than just reading the stories themselves.
The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Stories by Peter Suber
The Story of Colors by Subcomandante Marcos
Absurdly, a children’s book by Subcomandante Marcos. As weird as you’d expect, but not as good as you’d hope.
The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit’s Long Struggle for Survival by Kevin Guthrie
A compellingly-written and fascinatingly-told story of how the New-York Historical Society, a grand old museum housing countless invaluable treasures, was so consistently financially mismanaged that despite its greatness it found itself constantly on the verge of financial ruin. Clearly written as a cautionary tale for those who would run a non-profit.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
In his notes, David Foster Wallace described this unfinished book about boredom as one where “something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen”. As a result, it’s probably less unfinished than it feels. It has the usual DFW virtuosity with language (including some truly poetic sections) and a tax-related premise that somehow captures the entirety of this political moment the same way Infinite Jest captured the cultural one, but there’s certainly nothing in the way of a plot the way there was in Infinite Jest.
Bossypants by Tina Fey
This book is like a literary cupcake: a small bombshell of sugar without very much in the way of substance. I believe I read the whole thing while sitting in an airport terminal and while I enjoyed it and laughed, it’s hard to claim I took anything away from the experience.
Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
God, what a book! Poor Economics is a series of tales of foreigners trying to save the far-flung poor, while failing to realize not only that their developed-country ideas are terrible disasters in practice, but also that everything they’ve learned to think of as solid — even something as simple as measuring distance — is far more fraught, and complex, and political than they ever could have imagined. It’s a stunning feeling to have the basic building blocks of your world questioned and crumbled before you — and a powerful lesson in the value of self-skepticism for everyone who’s trying to do something.
The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Another fun puff pastry of a book.
Empire State by Jason Shiga
Reads a bit like Shiga trying to do his own version of Shortcomings. Not a bad book, by any means, but it has none of the Jason Shiga magic.
Bookhunter by Jason Shiga
Words won’t do it justice: an action-movie-thriller of a book, a hilarious adrenaline-fueled ride that’s impossible to put down. I’ve never had this much fun with a piece of entertainment. Just sheer delight.
Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
Not his best, but still entrancing and strange and very, very good.
He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
This is a book whose title still makes me laugh and yet it may just turn out to be one of the greatest books ever written. The writing is shockingly good, the plotting is some of the best in all of literature, and the stories are simply pure genius. I fear this book may never get the accolades it deserves, because it’s too hard to look past the silly name and publishing model, but I hope you, dear reader, are wiser than that! A must-read.
As it says at the beginning, you really need to give it a couple chapters to get started before passing judgment — the first bunch are quite silly and it doesn’t seem worth sticking with until you’ve gotten past them.
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
Levy again does what he does so well: make an alien culture visible and comprehensible. A great guide to Google.
(Disclosure: Levy once included me in an essay collection he edited.)
How to Count by Steven Frank
The first volume into what will surely be a wonderful introduction to programming. Certainly the best book on counting that I’ve read.
The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
This book touched me deeply and made me rethink the entire way I approached life; it’s about vastly more than just tennis. I can’t really describe it, but I can recommend this video with Alan Kay and the author that will blow your mind.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
This book does not live up to its title — it has very little practical advice on how to create a learning organization — but still, it’s an important topic and I don’t know of anything better. It’s full of fascinating stories and provocations that will change how you think about business.
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
I’m not normally one for filthy books, but Baker’s writing is so good that he somehow manages to make this one just utterly compelling despite the smut. I started reading and I couldn’t stop, he just draws you into his world of pure insanity.
Rick Perry and his Eggheads by Sasha Issenberg
Sasha Issenberg is a miracle-worker. This book (really an excerpt from his forthcoming book) is so very, very good that it just blows me away. Issenberg tells the tale of everything I’ve been trying to say to everyone in politics, but he does it in a real-life three-act morality play that’s so good it could be a model on how to tell a story.
Haiti: After the Quake by Paul Farmer
Farmer’s gripping personal story of returning to Haiti after the earthquake and seeing the devastation it had left, both physically and politically. It’s a personal narrative, not a work of investigative journalism, but it still provides powerful insight into what happened.
Confessions of a “Rape Cop” Juror by Patrick Kirkland
When I first heard that the “rape cop” had been acquitted, I took it as yet another instance of a “rape culture” in which crimes against women go unpunished. This book persuaded me that we were all wrong. It’s a fascinating real-life story of what it’s like inside a jury room and what it really means to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The End of Loser Liberalism by Dean Baker
Dean Baker knocks it out of the park again — a must-read for anyone who cares about economic policy.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Ries presents a translation of the Toyota Production System to startups — and it’s so clearly the right way to run a startup that it’s hard to imagine how we got along before it. Unfortunately, the book has become so trendy that I find many people claiming to swear allegiance to it who clearly missed the point entirely. Read it with an open mind and let it challenge you, so you can start to understand how transformative it really is.
The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man by Michael Chabon, illustrated by Jake Parker
A short children’s book with absolutely gorgeous illustrations by Parker and a cute little story by Chabon.
Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (Book 1) by J. K. Rowling
Flat Earth News by Nick Davies
I’ve read a lot of books of media criticism and they all tend to trod similar ground: sensationalism, political bias, etc., etc. Nick Davies has written what is, in many ways, the same book — except he write it as an insider, not an outsider. As a result, he explains how the media gets to be this way, why it is as bad as it is — and he tells lots of delicious insider stories of incredible things he discovered that got cut or buried or distorted beyond all recognition. Davies is now famous for bringing down the Murdoch empire, but if more people read this book, perhaps he will bring down the rest of corrupt journalism as well.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Siracusa is right: they got the wrong guy. The book is compelling and readable, there’s no doubt about that, but it tells a story that’s basically already been told. Isaacson is so clueless and uncurious that pretty much all of his “exclusive interviews” were wasted; there’s no insight in any of this, just weird lapses into authorial judgment.
Robert Caro has said there’s one more biography he wants to write after he finishes LBJ. I dearly hope that it’s Steve Jobs.
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
I constantly find myself loving Derek Sivers’ blog posts, and while they feel eerily insubstantial collected together here, they’re still full of enough insight and good humor to make them well worth reading.
CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
A magnificent achievement. Charles Petzold starts with the story of two kids across the street who wish to communicate with each other and, from this simple beginning, builds up an entire computer without ever making it seem like something that should be over your head. I never really felt I understood the computer until I read this book.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) by J. K. Rowling
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald (edited by John Summers), with an introduction by Louis Menand
Dwight Macdonald is one of those delightful cranks that you can’t help but love watching. Summers has collected a magnificent listing of things to watch — plus included an introduction that’s the incredible Menand at his best.
The Ghost [Writer] by Robert Harris
It’s hard to shake the feeling that a big part of the appeal of this book is watching Tony Blair get arrested for war crimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a first-rate political thriler.
What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer
Were this just the story of how George H. W. Bush got elected, it’d be one of the few biographies that belonged in the same league as Robert Caro. But it’s so much more than that: Richard Ben Cramer gives the same treatment to dozens of candidates in the 1988 presidential election: Gary Hart, Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt, and on and on. Even if you didn’t care about politics, this book would be worth reading simply because the writing is so good. But if you do, there’s never been a better exposition of what drives these men who wish to be our leaders and what they have to go through to get there.
Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion by Sara Davidson
It’s hard to shake the feeling that this book is merely the author attempting to cash in on their minor friendship with Joan Didion, but I love Didion so much that I’m just grateful for the stories.
How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding by Keith Gessen
Gessen is an incredible writer and here he has the gift of getting to observe, first-hand, a heartwarming tale. A good story and a great introduction to the modern book business.
I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards
There were many, many times in this book that I couldn’t help but wonder: How did he get away with writing this? Google apparently approved of the project and had chaperones in all his interviews, but nonetheless the book is just full of revelations and shockers that it’s hard to imagine Google would ever want to see the light of day.
There are a lot of books written about Google, but this has got to be one of the best. Edwards is uniquely suited to the task: his talents as a writer allow him to craft a compelling read, his insider’s view of the very early days give him a detailed knowledge from which to tell his story, but his total lack of cultural chemistry with the rest of the Googlers allows him to find mysterious all the crazy things which they all take for granted. A fantastic read.
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens
Mother Teresa is a byword for saintliness, but have you ever stopped to ask why? Christopher Hitchens makes a convincing case that she’s something closer to a monster. Everyone I’ve told about this book is shocked by the concept, but it’s a short book with a pretty compelling argument.
The Gated City by Ryan Avent
Books I Did Not Read This Year: An Ebook by Kieran Healy
Healy is hilarious; this collection of blog posts was a delight.
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann
Grann is a masterful nonfiction writer; this is a collection of his pieces.
Last weekend, Robert came home with cool news: This Friday is the Science Olympiad. I don't yet know the parameters of this hootenanny, but it's not at his school, so there are probably a bunch of schools involved. And my...
by Doug French at April 19, 2012 02:52 PM
It's only a matter of time until your email gets hacked. Don't believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale.
When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings—including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again.
…
The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else’s presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use. At some point over the past six years, our [email] correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us – credit card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine.
Now get everyone you know to read it, too. Please. It's for their own good.
Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity. When you lose control of your email to a hacker – not if, but when you lose control of your email to a hacker – the situation is dire. Email is a one stop shop for online identity theft. You should start thinking of security for your email as roughly equivalent to the sort of security you'd want on your bank account. It's exceedingly close to that in practice.
The good news, at least if you use GMail, is that you can make your email virtually hacker-proof today, provided you own a cell phone. The fancy geek technical term for this is two factor authentication, but that doesn't matter right now. What matters is that until you turn this on, your email is vulnerable. So let's get started. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right. Freaking. Now.
Make sure you're logged in. Expand the little drop-down user info panel at the top right of most Google pages. From here, click "Account" to view your account settings.
On the account settings page, click "edit" next to 2-step verification and turn it on.
GMail will walk you through the next few steps. You just need a telephone that can receive SMS text messages. Enter the numeric code sent through the text message to proceed.
Now your password alone is no longer enough to access your email.
Once this is enabled, accessing your email always requires the password, and a code delivered via your cell phone. (You can check the "remember me for 30 days on this device" checkbox so you don't have to do this every time.) With this in place, even if they discover your super sekrit email password, would-be hackers can't do anything useful with it! To access your email, they'd need to somehow gain control of your cell phone, too. I can't see that happening unless you're in some sort of hostage situation, and at that point I think email security is the least of your problems.
Your cell phone isn't the only way to get the secondary PIN you need to access your email. On the account page there are multiple ways to generate verification codes, including adding a secondary backup phone number, and downloading mobile applications that can generate verification codes without a text message (but that requires a smart phone, naturally).
Applications or websites that access your email, and thus necessarily store your email address and password, are also affected. They have no idea that they now need to enter a PIN, too, so they'll all be broken. You'll need to generate app-specific passwords for your email. To do that, visit the accounts page.
Click on authorizing applications & sites, then enter a name for the application and click the Generate Password button.
Let me be clear about this, because it can be confusing: enter that specially generated password in the application, not your master email password.
This effectively creates a list of passwords specific to each application. So you can see the date each one was last used, and revoke each app's permission to touch your email individually as necessary without ever revealing your primary email password to any application, ever. See, I told you, there is a method to the apparent madness.
Either nag your email provider to provide two-factor authentication, or switch over. Email security is critically important these days, and switching is easy(ish). GMail has had fully secure connections for quite a while now, and once you add two-factor authentication to the mix, that's about as much online email safety as you can reasonably hope to achieve short of going back to snail mail.
I know what you're thinking. Yes, this is a pain in the ass. I'll fully acknowledge that. But you know what's an even bigger pain in the ass? Having your entire online identity stolen and trashed by a hacker who happens to obtain your email password one day. Remember that article I exhorted you to read at the beginning? Oh, you didn't read it? Go freaking read it now!
Permit me to channel Jamie Zawinski one last time: "OMG, entering these email codes on every device I access email would be a lot of work! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.
I've been living with this scheme for a few months now, and I've convinced my wife to as well. I won't lie to you; it hasn't all been wine and roses for us either. But it is inconvenient in the same way that bank vaults and door locks are. The upside is that once you enable this, your email becomes extremely secure, to the point that you can (and I regularly do) email yourself highly sensitive data like passwords and logins to other sites you visit so you can easily retrieve them later.
If you choose not to do this, well, at least you've educated yourself about the risks. And I hope you're extremely careful with your email password and change it regularly to something complex. You're making life all too easy for the hackers who make a fabulous living from stealing and permanently defacing online identities just like yours.
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The folks over at UserVoice are using Trello quite extensively throughout their development process.
Founder Richard White describes it all in detail.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
by Joel Spolsky at April 17, 2012 07:57 PM
In the calculus of communication, writing coherent paragraphs that your fellow human beings can comprehend and understand is far more difficult than tapping out a few lines of software code that the interpreter or compiler won't barf on.
That's why, when it comes to code, all the documentation probably sucks. And because writing for people is way harder than writing for machines, the documentation will continue to suck for the forseeable future. There's very little you can do about it.
Except for one thing.
You can learn to read the source, Luke.
The transformative power of "source always included" in JavaScript is a major reason why I coined – and continue to believe in – Atwood's Law. Even if "view source" isn't built in (but it totally should be), you should demand access to the underlying source code for your stack. No matter what the documentation says, the source code is the ultimate truth, the best and most definitive and up-to-date documentation you're likely to find. This will be true forever, so the sooner you come to terms with this, the better off you'll be as a software developer.
I had a whole entry I was going to write about this, and then I discovered Brandon Bloom's brilliant post on the topic at Hacker News. Read closely, because he explains the virtue of reading source, and in what context you need to read the source, far better than I could:
I started working with Microsoft platforms professionally at age 15 or so. I worked for Microsoft as a software developer doing integration work on Visual Studio. More than ten years after I first wrote a line of Visual Basic, I wish I could never link against a closed library ever again.
Using software is different than building software. When you're using most software for its primary function, it's a well worn path. Others have encountered the problems and enough people have spoken up to prompt the core contributors to correct the issue. But when you're building software, you're doing something new. And there are so many ways to do it, you'll encounter unused bits, rusty corners, and unfinished experimental code paths. You'll encounter edge cases that have been known to be broken, but were worked around.
Sometimes, the documentation isn't complete. Sometimes, it's wrong. The source code never lies. For an experienced developer, reading the source can often be faster… especially if you're already familiar with the package's architecture. I'm in a medium-sized co-working space with several startups. A lot of the other CTOs and engineers come to our team for guidance and advice on occasion. When people report a problem with their stack, the first question I ask them is: "Well, did you read the source code?"
I encourage developers to git clone anything and everything they depend on. Initially, they are all afraid. "That project is too big, I'll never find it!" or "I'm not smart enough to understand it" or "That code is so ugly! I can't stand to look at it". But you don't have to search the whole thing, you just need to follow the trail. And if you can't understand the platform below you, how can you understand your own software? And most of the time, what inexperienced developers consider beautiful is superficial, and what they consider ugly, is battle-hardened production-ready code from master hackers. Now, a year or two later, I've had a couple of developers come up to me and thank me for forcing them to sink or swim in other people's code bases. They are better at their craft and they wonder how they ever got anything done without the source code in the past.
When you run a business, if your software has a bug, your customers don't care if it is your fault or Linus' or some random Rails developer's. They care that your software is bugged. Everyone's software becomes my software because all of their bugs are my bugs. When something goes wrong, you need to seek out what is broken, and you need to fix it. You fix it at the right spot in the stack to minimize risks, maintenance costs, and turnaround time. Sometimes, a quick workaround is best. Other times, you'll need to recompile your compiler. Often, you can ask someone else to fix it upstream, but just as often, you'll need to fix it yourself.
- Closed-software shops have two choices: beg for generosity, or work around it.
- Open source shops with weaker developers tend to act the same as closed-software shops.
- Older shops tend to slowly build the muscles required to maintain their own forks and patches and whatnot.
True hackers have come to terms with a simple fact: If it runs on my machine, it's my software. I'm responsible for it. I must understand it. Building from source is the rule and not an exception. I must control my environment and I must control my dependencies.
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Last updated: May 20, 2012 11:01 AM