Iraqi on the corner
Yesterday I hosted some Chinese partners from the Forbidden City in Beijing. They missed the Tibet protest march by one day which surely spared me some awkward questions, but we could not escape the Iraq war anniversary march. As the protesters filed past our restaurant window last night, the translator asked me “Why doesn’t your government stop it?” Which, you will admit, I could plausibly have taken to mean “the protest” given the inability to do such a thing in China — but she meant the war itself. I had to chuckle at the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of that question.
I tried to explain America post-9/11. I tried to explain the difference between urban centers and middle America. I tried to explain my personal beliefs. I did none of these well at all.
Later that night, after I had bid the Chinese 再见, I stopped at our corner store. The owner there is an Iraqi fellow named Amir. He knows my family and we know him. He’s the genial, Jacobsian neighborhood shopkeeper. The kind of guy who always rounds down the amount at the register.
But last night he was irate. He pointed to the television that’s always on, loudly, to an Iraqi satellite station. The coverage was all about an Iraqi cleric who had been murdered, the archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic church, the biggest Christian Iraqi community. Amir is Christian too. He said “They killed him. They are evil.” I asked who “they” was and he spewed “Muslims”. “There are no good Muslims,” he said.
I shook my head and said that there are plenty of good Muslims and quite a few who would agree with his outrage at the murder. But he would have none of it. He told me I only thought that because I knew American Muslims who have moderated their views in public. But he assured me that they too were evil, deep down. I started to explain that in fact most of the Muslims I know are devout and live in Cairo, but I could not get a word in. He was on the verge of tears. I told him I would prefer not to argue, shook his hand, and left.
I was troubled by it all, on this fifth anniversary of invading a country on a weapons-hunt. So I e-mailed an Iraqi colleague of mine, who also happens to be Christian, for her perspective.
Sad to say that even growing up under Saddam Hussein’s regime, I never felt any of this animosity. We were all in the same deep shit, Christians and Muslims alike, both being equal victims of a cruel regime. But at least we were free to practice our religion without any threats or dangers from Muslims. I wish I could say the same today.
There are moderate, loving, peaceful Muslims, but unfortunately their numbers are dwindling and their voices shrinking. What bugged me about the archbishop’s killing is the hypocrisy: can you imagine for a second how the Muslim community would’ve reacted if a senior religious figure was kidnapped by Christians and found dead? So while I don’t agree with Amir’s feelings, I kind of understand why he feels like that. A dangerous catch-22.
It’s all upsetting but maybe the more so because the cleaving of national identity along religious lines is not unique to Iraq. You see it here too.
The media and blogosphere of course is alight with commentary on five years of occupation. Lots of acrimony and analysis. But I return to the thought that there must be many people like Amir on both sides, full of hate, deeply sad, and not giving a damn about the cartographic assemblage known as Iraq.
Soar with turkeys
Flickr’s Paul Hammond made a comment in his panel at SXSW that’s resonating a bit with a colleague or two.
Process is an antidote to working with stupid people.
It is an understandly resonant phrase at a conference like SXSW where the predominant vibe is entrepreneurial and innovative and all about small-scale Getting Real-inspired business models.
Truth is, I couldn’t agree more. When not everyone is at the same skill or knowledge level (i.e., when they are “idiots” compared to you) a common methodology enables collaboration where sheer similarity of perspective can’t.
But the statement has stuck with me and I think now that it might not be as simple as that. I do, of course, work in a gigantic, process-laden company where there are many arguments for following a common process. Quality assurance is one, presenting a unified approach and brand to customers is another. But both of those could legitimately be accomplished with a small team of non-idiots.
The real value of process comes from the inherent inability of small, smart teams to scale. When your team is based solely on shared perspective (whether of educational background, skill set, or job experience) there are only so many people you can add before that perspective will fray. I don’t know what the limit is, but I imagine it can’t be more than maybe 20 people. At this size some sort of common process needs to be implemented if for no other reason than to allow everyone to speak the same language.
Now, many small companies, especially in tech, recognize this and find it to be no limitation at all. They don’t want to scale beyond their current size. And that’s just fine. Note that I’m not referring to the scale of a project that can be undertaken or the scale of customers that can be served. Small teams can do this as effectively as large companies in many instances.
But if you do want to make your company larger — or if you actively seek diversity of perspective — then having some common framework for working is really the only way to do it. For instance when working on international projects, I find that process, in some cases rigid process, is the only way to work together. In the absence of cultural or language understanding it is sometimes the only common platform from which to work.
Too much process, the wrong process, sometimes any process at all can kill creativity. I see it all the time. And, in truth, I’m lucky to have worked with some of the smartest people in my field for the last seven years. I rarely encounter the need for process. But I do recognize the need and can see where it might usefully be applied with nary an idiot in sight.
Southbyline
I’m back from a bunch of great days in Austin at SXSW. As usual I came away excited and ready to quit my day job. But this time it took a lot longer to feel that excitement, whether that was because of the quality of the programming (or my choice of what to attend) or just that I know more than everyone else. To be safe I’ll go with knowing more than everyone else.
Maybe because work pays me to attend that I started by attending panels most relevant to my job and ended up somewhat nonplussed. But as I started to drift into things I was merely interested in — and made an effort to meet people I didn’t know — things got a lot better. I don’t think you ever get over your first SXSW, which for me was a while back. Everything’s new, everyone (mostly) is new and it is just an amazingly heady experience.
But it is fun to see how people change over time. One example. Three years ago standing in a beer line I struck up a conversation with the person behind me, Leslie Chicoine. Just out of design school at Savannah and looking for a job. I had none to offer, but we had a good conversation. Three years later, Leslie’s in the thick of things in the Bay Area working at Get Satisfaction, an incredible company working on an even better idea. She was a panelist this year for the first time talking about OAuth and QR codes. Not much more to it than that, except that I’ve really enjoyed following the career of someone wide-eyed and new to the tech world straight into success. Kinda the whole point of SXSW writ large.
My colleague in IBM Roo Reynolds did (and is still doing) a great job cataloging the highlights of the conference and many of our experiences overlapped, so for the liveblog junkies among you I point you to his site. Good stuff.
Perhaps the entertainment highlight of SXSW was the Jane McGonigal talk on Alternate Reality Games. She’s incredibly articulate and enthusiastic about the role of play in life and work. Made me want to go out and design an ARG right then and there. (I just might, buddy.)
As an aside during her talk Jane mentioned learning the Soulja Boy dance why playing an ARG. Immediately someone from the crowd yelled “do it!” Smartly, she said she would at the end of the presentation — which pretty much kept the entire crowd there whether they were enjoying the talk or not. Sure enough, she did it.
In an effort to offer a flavor of my experience without being verbose I’ll note a few of the panels I attended with the best line (I think) I heard at each. Beware paraphrasing.
The Future of Virtual Worlds and Game Development: Rise of the Indies: “Hi, welcome to my panel. I’m sorry, but I forgot to bring liquor.” — Corey Bridges. Sidenote: Corey made fun of an IBM executive during this panel. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the room who knew who he was talking about and the only one who laughed out loud.
Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson: “The two best shows on TV may represent a real turning point in the form. The Wire may be the last gasp of self-contained, inside-the-box television while Lost may be the first glimmer of new TV, one that exists in a web of ‘trans-media extensions’.” — Henry Jenkins.
A General Theory of Creative Relativity: “There is a variable and a constant and finding the association between those two things is the act, the actual thing [of creativity].” — Jim Coudal.
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts: “Does anyone know what IBM does?” — John Gruber
Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users: “attention offsets” – like a carbon offset, sponsoring something that supports full attention in exchange for building something that takes someone’s partial attention — Kathy Sierra
Keynote: Jane McGonigal: “To imagine the future, always look back at least twice as far as you are looking forward.”
But you know what made it great? Not the panels or keynotes or even the parties. It was a format called Core Conversations where basically a bunch of tables arranged by topic were set up in a room, BarCamp-style. My expectations were low as I had heard a bunch of criticism of them, but it was the end of the last day so what the hell.
I plopped down at Managing Media: Is Your Music Collection About to Become Extinct? and was immediately in music geek heaven talking about file formats, metadata, and genre classification woes. I was so happy to hear an Apple engineer admit that there are “religious wars” in Cupertino over things like whether to separate reggae and dub. It was just perfect, informal, smart discussion and all about what I care about personally. The Songbird team was there as well as a chap from Last.fm.
Well after I had told myself it was time to go drinking I found myself just sliding into the next confab on the Open Media Web. Why can’t open standards be applied to digital media? If the web can do it, why not media? Down with Flash, down with record labels, yay!
Well, that’s it. No great summing statement. There was no darling like Twitter at its coming-out party last year, as far as I can tell (though it was easily the most used form of communication).
I wonder about the future of SXSW Interactive. It is so damn huge now that the lines for parties and toilets are a real drag. A friend put it best when he said that the parties are suffering load balancing and scalability problems this year. And I have to think that if the parties really do begin to suck that much of the appeal of SXSW will fade. After all, meeting new people is really where the learning happens.
See you next year?
Back to basics
Two of my resolutions for this year were to simplify things and to run more. These are, in fact, the same thing.
The past several years I’ve been doing one or more triathlons a summer. Good fun for sure and a great workout, but logistically complex. I mean, I’m all for gear and equipment — it is, I believe, one of the reasons I wanted children — but needing a place to swim and the multi-hour stretches of time required to bike had become a bit onerous, especially when traveling. So simplifying for me was running: the perfect, low-tech, do-anywhere workout.
But I’m still a sucker for exercise gadgets. (No, not that kind.) I used to run with a Garmin Forerunner GPS. It was bulky and didn’t monitor heart rate, so of course I wore a second watch that did do that. Wearing two watches (and an MP3 player) while running was a level of dorkdom I didn’t think I could achieve, but achieve I did. And playing with GPS allowed me to do nutty things like using the city as a giant Etch-a-Sketch. Unfortunately neither device played well with the Mac so all this wonderful data I was collecting couldn’t be manipulated easily.
Right around this time Nike and Apple introduced the Nike+iPod gadget, basically a wireless pedometer that logs distance and pace to the iPod nano as you run. I ditched the GPS watch (which incidentally don’t work so good in awful weather or in weird places like Lower Wacker). The integration with an online tool and ease of just plugging in your iPod after a workout was a perfect solution, all-Flash interface on the Nike site notwithstanding. (Only real gripe: it is made to work with Nike shoes, which I loathe. But that was easily solved with a knife.)
So, it seems that Nike/Apple are rolling out an upgrade to the service. There doesn’t seem to be a hardware change, but they’re branching out from just running. Apparently Nike is “in talks” with gyms and equipment manufacturers to allow the nano to plug directly into treadmills, ellipticals, stair climbers, and stationary bikes. So, basically, the piezo sensor in the shoe is bypassed and data from the workout is sent directly from the machine to the nano. That’s fine, except that in the past when I have run on a treadmill with the current kit I find that the pedometer does not agree with the treadmill distance. (After an 8 mile run the treadmill was off by nearly 3/4 of a mile.) Clearly there will be discrepancies for people who run both outside and inside.
The strangest thing about the announcement is that Nike has developed a new, common workout “unit” called a CardioMile. My guess is that this enables users to “compete” against each other regardless of their preferred machine. But it does seem odd. I mean, mileage is mileage. If you and I are in a competition the person who runs furtherest (or fastest) first wins. But if I use the elliptical for 45 minutes have I “beaten” a person who was on the treadmill for 30? Kinda bizarre.
How it will actually work is another matter entirely. Will it be a retrofit for existing exercise equipment or brand new machines? If the latter that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to replace because a few geeks want to plug in their iPods. Will the headphone connectors commonplace on workout equipment today now route audio from your iPod? Does the gym have to provide tech support?
Early this year I looked at a new gym right by my work. They had spanking new treadmills that did allow iPod hookups. Not for workout data, of course, but it seemed promising since there was a large screen embedded in the treadmill too. Excellent, I can watch video straight from my iPod! But … no. Not only were video functions inoperable, but all it really did was replace your iPod controls with a touchscreen interface for the same controls. Essentially useless. Or rather, no functionality beyond what you could get without hooking your iPod up. (One wonders if the treadmill is the new office desk.)
More promising was a USB port on the treadmill display. OK, now we’re talking! Save your workout data (generated from the treadmill) straight to the memory stick. Well, it didn’t work. I tried multiple USB keys, multiple treadmills over many days. Never did work. Inquiries to staff were met with blank stares and general dumbfoundity. It went something like this.
“Hi there. Really loving the new treadmills, thanks. I was wondering if you could help me figure out how to use the USB saving function.”
” … “
“You know, the new thing … where you can plug in this [waves USB key] and save your run data?”
” … “
“OK, do you have a manual maybe? Something I can look at?”
“Did you want to sign up for pilates?”
And this is why I think the whole Nike+iPod machine integration thing might be doomed. Gyms will need tech support. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of fitness-obsessed geeks or tech-savvy meatheads, but the Venn diagram of hardware debugger vs. personal trainer for your typical club probably has a very tiny circle at its center. I just don’t see this sort of thing taking off. Which may be why the press release is on Nike’s site, not Apple’s.
So, I go basic. Or as basic as I can still swaddled in the loving embrace of technology. Just running, just outside. We’ve quit our club. The city is now our gym. I’m signed up for a beautiful 10 mile race in April — my first in many years (and with my wife, who can run further than I can these days). And I’m considering a multi-leg 200 mile relay from Madison to Chicago. Not sure I can take the on-again, off-again but the prospect of running in the dead of night does hold a certain perverse charm.
By the way, I’m still looking for a unified, standardized format for workout data. Microformats anyone?
Leapt
Today we humans confront the arbitrariness of our method of telling time. It is Leap Day.
It is also my little brother’s birthday. He celebrates his seventh real birthday today, roughly twenty-eight revolutions around the sun.
Here he is in a similarly celebratory mood from a while back. Happy Birthday, Joey.
Lastly, it is Friday and that means cocktails. I’m tending bar for Friday Drink Links over at Coudal’s Fresh Signals. Cheers.
Shattered lakefront
A fractured floe along the shore of Northerly Island in Chicago. Obviously the scene of much upheaval, but it was completely still the whole time I was there. My son asked if the waves themselves just froze in place.
Does anyone know what process causes this? Is the west coast of Lake Michigan where Mother Nature tries to sweep the shards of winter under the rug?
Ninja
Yesterday morning I killed a man ninja-style for leaving poop on my property.
6:30AM. It is freezing outside with a windchill 20 degrees below zero. Rain had pooled everywhere and then froze on Tuesday afternoon into deadly flat, black ice. Then Tuesday night it snowed very lightly, just a sprinkling, enough to veil any distinction between ice and safe ground.
I was bundling up tighter than I ever have to go for a run. I was clad entirely in black, head to toe, only my eyes showing. I was a ninja. I had real ultimate power.
Preparing in my foyer I peered out to see a fellow walking his dog on the sidewalk. He was in shorts and slippers, clearly just out of bed. OK, fine. His hypothermia, not mine. Then his dog shat on my lawn. I waited for the guy to pick up his doggy doo-doo (as the city ordinance requires) but he did not. Perhaps he was too cold to think, wearing shorts when it was 3° out, this genius among men. Whatever the reason, he trotted off.
Photo by Dunechaser
So I emerged from the house, silently, as ninjas do. I caught his attention, pointed wordlessly to the crap on the snow in my lawn — and clearly scared the hell out of the guy simply by staring at him, as ninjas do.
This is where the exact sequence of events gets blurry for, as you probably know, ninjas move with such speed and dexterity that they can hardly be caught on film or remembered. I believe I performed a double backflip off my porch and smote the shorts-wearing poop-leaver dead in his tracks. (See image above.) Or, equally possible, he may have just slipped on the black ice at that moment and hurt himself quite badly.*
Either way he was taught a valuable lesson: ninjas dislike fecal vandalism.
* My son later noted, “Dad, you’re not a ninja. Of course he slipped. He was wearing slippers.”
Space opera
Lots of things happening heavenward today.
An astronaut whose mother was killed by a train while he was on the International Space Station for 120 days will return to Earth on the Shuttle.
The US Navy will attempt to hit a satellite moving at 22,783 MPH with a warhead-less missile launched from a ship in the Pacific. (Note to military: ever considered a self-destruct button on our spy sats? Or just telling the world we’re testing a new weapons plaftorm? That would work too.)
A total lunar eclipse will occur at 10:01 PM ET tonight.
A shape that resembles music
For the few of you who saw the 1998 electronica documentary Modulations* and the fewer of you who remember Autechre’s brief, perplexing interview, you may be surprised to learn that they can be remarkably insightful. Or at least the Rob Brown half of the duo was in a recent interview with Pitchfork.
Pitchfork: Do you ever feel limited by technology? Where you have ideas or songs that you’re imagining or certain arrangements that, because of the tools you have, can’t be realized?
Rob Brown: … The gear can guide you — you can choose one bit of gear and it’s obviously got its restrictions and its limitations, but at the same time, you’ve got to exploit what it’s capable of and what it’s best used for. Sometimes you try not to be too overly analytical, trying to let it flow for a bit first and see where it’s leading you and then see what sticks to it, see what it implies. A lot of it is implications. Some of our earlier albums, like Confield, are almost all implied music. But it’s cohesive because we spent long enough fashioning the idea down — to a shape, if you like — that actually resembles music.
Implied music, wow. And he’s not talking John Gage-y silence-type conceptual music. That idea — of a music that peripherally or fragmentedly suggests the music that informed it — really does make Autechre’s “difficult period” (Confield, Draft 7.30, Untilted) click for me. Go back and have a listen. But first read the whole interview. Oh and also, pick up the new one Quaristice. It’s a new direction that, well, implies older directions. Really digging it.
* Easily one of my top three favorite movie posters of all time.
Danger! Animated GIF from the early web!
Heed little Sisyphus shoveling the mound that never gets any smaller.
Ascent Stage is being upgraded. I’m bound to screw something up. Gloriously.
(If you need something to do in the meanwhile flip through Stick Figures in Peril at Flickr. Always good for a laugh.)
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
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