Speaking of Reminders Functionality, Ecco Set the Standard

Ecco--a PIM that was around 15 years ago--set the standard for Reminders. You could call up and review Reminders, both set in the future, and, crucially, those that had passed. This was very useful, for the common, and potentially deadly, use case where you realize you may have dismissed a reminder without actually seeing it (can happen for a number of reasons, in particular with "focus-stealing". 

Google Not Updating Their Apps?

Microsoft is notorious for not improving the applications, unless and until competitors light a fire under them. There are features in Access and Outlook that have been flawed for more than a decade. Oh sure, Microsoft releases new versions, but they mostly add new features that nobody wants, without fixing/enhancing the stuff that really needs it. I am getting a little concerned that Google is showing similar signs.

Gmail is pretty good and has gotten some updates. But Contacts is pretty bare-bones, even though it has been around for years. Calendar is more full-featured, but doesn't seem to be improving very quickly. The Calendar feature that started me thinking about this is Reminders--frankly, they are terrible. And Reminder are not a niche feature--they are core to Calendar functionality. People rely on them. At a minimum, Google needs to allow you to snooze reminders an arbitrary amount of time. Almost as important is aggregating the Reminders, like Microsoft started doing in Outlook 2003. So you don't have 12 reminders windows open--you have 1 scrolling window, displaying 12 reminders.

Here is a bonus idea for Google--include the concept of "Travel Time" with appointments. So if you have a 1-2 appt that takes 15 minutes to get to and from, your calendar would sandwich the actual appointment in between 15-minute travel blocks, formatted in a visually obvious way. That way, I would no longer confuse myself, trying to remember "Was the appointment really at 12:45, or did I add 15 minutes for travel time to a 1:00 appointment?".

And here is another one. A great feature of Google Calendars is the virtual, aggregated view, which shows  family member's appointments, each color-coded, superimposed on your own calendar. It is a very common thing to create events that involve those same people. In other words, your events show up on both your calendar, and theirs. Especially if you have a family view that involves more than 2 calendars, this creates A LOT of clutter. So a very obvious feature would be to allow, or visually depict, suppression of the redundant events on your family calendars.

Cell Phone Crapware

...the last couple of Android phones I’ve gotten as demo units from Google: the EVO 4G and the Droid 2, have been loaded up with crapware installed by the carriers (Sprint and Verizon, respectively). Apple would never let this fly on the iPhone, but the openness of Android means Google has basically no say in the matter. Consumers will get the crapware and they’ll like it. Not only that, plenty of this junk can’t even be uninstalled. How’s that for “open”?

Sadly true, and very unfortunate. This is SO parallel to a  key difference in the out-of-box-experience, between PCs and Macs. Except worse--with PCs, you can at least remove the crapware (without rooting).

No More Housing Intervention

NYT: Some economists and analysts urge a dose of shock therapy that would shift benefits to future homeowners from current ones: Let the housing market crash.

I am in favor of this--despite being personally PO'd for being caught in a housing bubble for the second time in my 20-year career as a homeowner.

1. Government intervention is usually undesirable. There were extraordinary circumstances in the fall of 2008, when the Bush administration started intervention, but those are past. Time to eschew economic engineering and take the medicine.
2. Related to point #1--the best way to diminish the chance of repetition of bubble behavior is to make sure the consequences are fully felt.
3. In the biggest of big pictures, this is probably a good thing. Excessively expensive housing cost is a heavy burden. I used to ask people, during the boom, when they were relishing their increase in paper equity, "And where do you think your children are going to be able to afford to live? Wouldn't you like them to have some possibility of living in the same town, and not having to be subject to 50-mile commutes to find something affordable?" Nobody ever had a convincing answer to that hypothetical, of course.
   

Price-Cutting

As a consumer, I am a huge fan of all forms of price-cutting and discounting. As a student of business, however, I often wonder about them. This article about Pizza Hut says that they have cut prices across-the-board, and business is up as much as 10%. But does that really pay?

Net profit margins are typically pretty thin. Gross profits margins are somewhat better, but still, if you look at the math, it is tough to see the payoff. If you have a gross margin of 50%, and you cut prices by 15% (which I think it the minimum to be really noticeable), then business has to increase by over 40% before you break even. (The narrower the gross margin, the more unfavorable the math, of course--because your price cut comes off the top.)

Just to make the picuture bleaker, that is a purely static, purely quantitative analysis. Competitors will almost invariably respond to price cuts. So unless you think you have a strong and sustainable cost advantage, and you think you can permanently claim market share from your competitors (e.g., Wal-Mart), all you are likely to do is incite a price war. From the brand-equity side, any form of discounting and price-cutting tends to sully the brand.

Like I say, as a consumer, I love this kind of competition. But when I think back to strategy books I have read, such as Michael Porter's stuff, it seems mis-guided. Something I heard in business school has always stuck with me:

 In an extended simulation exercise, CEOs would sacrifice up to half of annual profitability, in order to "win"--with winning defined in terms of market share.

I think Apple would be the ideal counter-example to this behavior.

I have searched for citations of this study, and never been able to find them. So for all I know, this is apocryphal. However, it certainly rings true to me. I have some theories to explain it...in part, I think it is tied to male over-competitiveness (most CEOs being male). I also think is an interesting question as to whether the economy and society, as a whole, are better off or not, for this behavior. Those will have to be blog posts for another day.

USB Chargers

We have 5 cell phones in the family. At times we have had almost that many different chargers. However, over the past year, we have been moving toward all USB-based phones. I thought we were on the cusp of being able to all share the same chargers. This would be especially nice in the car--where it is bad enough to have one messy, USB cable permanently dangling from the dash, let alone multiple varieities.

So I was chagrined to find, when I got my new phone (T-Mobile Vibrant), that is used a different kind of USB connector. A micro, it seems, instead of a mini. I was cursing this fact, but apparently the micro is the future standard. So maybe in another two years, my dream of common chargers will be realized. Sigh.

DropBox: Latest Opportunity for PC Makers to Seek Value-Add

I have occasionally brainstormed about ways that PC manufacturers could add value. Past ideas have included built-in hardware encryption, and built in disk redundancy. I have an update for latter idea. As noted, we recently averted catastrophe thanks to Dropbox. I can't believe that OEMs aren't paying a small fee to bundle Dropbox and selling it as a value-added feature.

Think about it--how much would the average person pay if they were reasonably guaranteed that with the latest HP/Dell/Toshiba technology, all their data* would be automatically backed up to the internet, and accessible from any other internet-connected PC? I bet that would command a $50 premium, easily. The key, I think, would be a clever name that immediately commands consumer mindshare.

An alternative would be to sell it as a pre-installed, but additional-cost, service. I still think that bundling it and building the brand is a great opportunity, though.
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*First 2 Gb free, additional storage can be purchased in convenient, inexpensive increments.

Creeping Bilingualism

During the last election, I noticed that at the Republican town halls, people complained constantly about immigration. But what they complained most about wasn’t the possibility of lost jobs, or crime. It was that when they called their bank, a recorded message told them to press 2 for Spanish.

Gail Brooks is onto something--though I'm not sure she realizes it. Bilingualism can become very divisive--just look at Canada. Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of "average Joe" Americans do resent the creeping intrusion of Spanish. Some of us elites might respond "You know, it is a really good thing, both practically and intellectually, to learn a second (or even third) language" (that is definitely my viewpoint, in principle). But that argument is just not going to resonate with 90% of the population. By-and-large, Americans have never been very interested in learning foreign languages (not necessarily a laudable quality, but a fact), and I don't think feeling they are now being "forced" to learn them, in order to do business in their own country, will change things.

Michael Miller:

The Wired cover story, "The Web is Dead," has driven a lot of discussion in the tech world this week -- probably due more to the provocative title than anything else. In many ways, it's like the conversation earlier in the year sparked by Steve Jobs' comment that the tablet would eventually supplant the PC, and that the PC was dead. Note that PC sales look likely to grow by 20 percent or so this year.

I am so tired of sensational, attention-grabbing headlines. Really, sick unto death of them. Dave Winer writes about this a lot. They are such a waste of time; more often than not, if you actually read the story, it doesn't comport with the headline, and often acknowledges as much. So I don't know, maybe it is the fault of the editors. I don't know why people continue to go for them. To me, it is a cue "do not read".

There is an analogy in radio--at this point, I can't stand to listen to anything but NPR. 98% of  commercial radio is truly unbearable.

Prediction: Sony Will NOT Become a Major Player in Android Handsets

The battle for Android market share should get pretty interesting over the next year or so. SONY Ericsson CEO, Bert Nordberg stated today that the company plans on becoming the world’s biggest supplier of Android powered smartphones. SONY Ericsson’s current Android market share sits at 17% while the leader of the Android segment has 23%. Bert Nordberg did not give a time frame or specify exactly how SE is planning on leapfrogging the competition. 

I'll believe this when I see it. I actually thought this would be a great path for Sony to take, 15 months ago, when Android handsets were (in the U.S.) limited to the G1 and nothing else. But they didn't act on that, and Motorola did.

I have no confidence in Sony. I have thought, for decades, that their products were over-priced. They simply do not seem to have the DNA to compete on price (Sony is raising their e-Reader price while Amazon is making a splash by lowering theirs), and they long since lost the mantle of innovator. They are stuck in no-man's-land of slightly more "luxe" products, with no real innovation, for much higher prices, with poxy proprietary twists (such as the memory stick) occasionally thrown in.

I bet Sony will be acquired within 5 years. Maybe a smart innovator will buy them up just for their name, the way Cingular did with AT&T.

Kindle: Still Hard to Beat Free (as in Library)

NYT: Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.

“She talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium. He added, sounding mildly piqued, “She uses the word ‘real.’ ”

It's very ironic, since college days (c. 1985) I felt sure that one day reading and research would be conducted primarily via computer. People used to argue with me that they would never want to curl up with a computer, and I said that the technology would eventually evolve to the point where it was a good facsimile for a book.[1] Now that day has arrived, and I am still a holdout.

My reason for being a holdout has nothing to do with the technology. I have experimented with a Kindle, it seems good.  But I am very much in the cheapskate, "informatiion wants to be free" camp. A $10, or even $8, book on the Kindle simply can't compete with the library, where books are really, truly free.

The Kindle does have some intrinsic advantages, so it might be able to beat free, but for me, I think the price would have to be $5 or less. One of those advantages, as the article later notes, the eReader offers the ability to change the font size, which wasn't even on my young mind in 1985, but I now realize is a major plus. Searchability is another one. Also, I hate book clutter, so the ability to have books but not have them take up any space is also nice. Although the main reason for hanging onto books is to lend them to someone else, and you can't do that with the Kindle, so maybe it is not such a big advantage.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

I don't know if Reich is right about the cause, but I do agree with his three-phase analysis of why the problem has been submerged. You don't see this discussed so often--the enormous increase in GDP from two-income families.

Another step: workers who lose their jobs and have to settle for positions that pay less could qualify for “earnings insurance” that would pay half the salary difference for two years; such a program would probably prove less expensive than extended unemployment benefits.

This is also a very thoughtful idea. I think there is a pretty well-established conclusion that a strong side-effect of unemployment benefits is that people resist--right up until their benefits run out--making career changes that involve lower pay. Even if such a change is all-but-inevitable. This alternative approach might improve that "structural" problem.

Dropbox Saved the Bacon

Beth's new laptop experienced a catasrophic video failure. By catastrophic, I mean the screen displayed nothing, and output to an external monitor did not work, either. My recent investment of effort in setting up Dropbox paid huge dividends, as Dropbox worked flawlessly, allowing Beth to platoon between shaky backup laptop, and desktop, while waiting for the 2-week turn-around for the warranty repair..

$329 Laptop - Did I Get What I Paid For?

I was very happy with the out-of-box experience with our $329 Toshiba laptop. But then the video display went bust 8 weeks later--under warranty, fortunately, but we are without the machine for 2 weeks. Of course we are also left wondering about its overall quality. After all, the previous cheap laptop I bought experienced a motherboard failure at 6 months, and went on to be a big disappointment: overheating--due to poor fan placement I think; losing keycaps; and experiencing a hinge crack (for no obvious reason).

My philosophy has been that, with the occasional exception of very off-brands, the durability of laptops is not correlated to the price. I know, though, others of the "you always get what you pay for" school of thought feel differently. Now I have to wonder a little bit...

...Apple TV’s second remote control is the Apple-made mobile device that Apple TV customers probably already own...Seriously — what are the chances of someone buying Apple TV who doesn’t have an iPod, iPad or iPhone?...

I have been hoping for this for a while. Now we just have to move from it being an Apple-exclusive thing, to becoming standard in consumer electronics. I really think smartphone as remote, if taken to "the next level", by also providing superior guide-search and DVR programming capabilities (it wouldn't be hard to improve on them)

Net Neutrality Is Important, and Pay-Per-View is NOT Analagous

The complications notwithstanding, net neutrality, broadly speaking, is what exists now. Among the many benefits net neutrality brings is that it fosters innovation. The great fear of the net neutrality purists, however, is that without federal rules, the Internet providers will begin cutting deals with content providers to give certain traffic priority over other traffic. For instance, Verizon could cut a deal with YouTube that allowed its videos to stream faster than, say, a Hulu video. Or it could even block Hulu. Or it could begin charging consumers extra for Netflix movies that were of better quality than ordinary streaming. As Harold Feld, Public Knowledge’s legal director, puts it: “Companies do what companies do.”

(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren’t an example of placing some content over other content, I don’t know what is. Yet because it is merely television, and not the sacred Internet, nobody seems to view this practice as a crime against humanity. But I digress.) [my italics]

The first paragraph is a good explanation of net neutrality, but the immediate following aside is completely irrelevant. The huge flaw in the second paragraph is that it confuses arrangements between content provider and consumer with the role of the traffic carrier in the middle. Nobody is saying YouTube can't charge more for streaming high-definition content, for example. The point is that it is not the business of the man-in-the-middle, the internet carrier, to get involved in that (or any other arrangement). Packets are packets; if you want to charge more for the volume of packets, that's fine, but make no distinctions about the content of a packet.

I have always been a free-market, low-regulation kind of guy (you might call that a traditional regulatory conservative) . But traditional conservatives would  generally recognize the need for a level of regulation in natural monopolies, and most particularly in utilities. The internet backbone is very much a utility--it carries a commodity that most people use on a daily basis. It is very appropriate that is be subjected to a minimal level of regulation

All the more so in the case of the internet, where most of the development costs were borne by the DoD and universities, not by the private carriers that now benefit from this wonderful invention of the "commons".

It's frustrating that elite professional journalists, and their editors (New York Times) could make such elementary mistakes.

Student Debt Insanity

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.

Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.

Sad, but probably a sign of the times. Another example of the craziness of sky-high college costs, the folly of expecting 18-year olds to make judicious decisions about their future debt-load, and the overall insidious effect of the educational-financial complex.

Citizen Journalism

There is a lot of talk about the future of journalism, weblogs and citizen journalism. In reading today's Pioneer Press, I came across two opinion pieces that to me exemplify how much better citizen experts can be, than the pros.

The first was by a retired local economics professor, Edward Lotterman. He gave what is really a pretty simple lesson, explaining the difference between cyclical economic problems, versus structural economic downturns. He went on to describe how our current situation is structural, and discussed the fact that solving it: 1) Has political implications; 2) Would be expected to take 6-8 years; 3) Absent political will (and intelligence) is not guaranteed. It wasn't overly long or detailed, but this kind of grown-up explanation is generally absent in the work of mainstream professional journalists, who seem much more caught up in reporting day-to-day things--some newly released statistic, some attention-grabbing claim, or random anecdotal happenings.

The second was by Amy Lindgren, a local job-search counselor. She took issue with various articles of conventional wisdom:

• The consequences of extending unemployment benefits
• Whether job-seeking is a full-time job
• Job prospects for older workers
• How to assess the "discouraged worker" statistics

Like Lotterman's article, it wasn't overly long or technical, but it took time to examine the conventional wisdom, instead of mindlessly propounding it.

Android Lock Screen Alternative Wanted

Even before I saw the below analysis of "smudge attacks" on Bruce Schneier's site, I have wanted an alternative to the stock, dot-pattern-based Android screen lock component. What I have in mind is using the Dialpad for entering your PIN. Then, when you succeed, the Dialpad is right there for quick phone calls. Of course, the driving "use case" for this is phone-call-centric, which immediately places me in a minority of smartphone users.

Another key feature would be automatically assigning speed dial numbers. My phone of 5 years ago did this. It was really convenient for every entry to have a speed dial. The assignment occurred as the contact was entered. The invocation occurred by long-pressing the last digit. So if you were calling contact 163, you dial 1-6-long-press-3.

I can already hear people saying "but I can barely remember 10 speed dials, let alone hundreds". That's not exactly the point. Your top 10 speed dials are pretty constant, but others can be very episodic. I don't call my insurance company often, for example, except when I have a claim, and then I may call them several times a day for a week.

The smudge attack suggests an additional feature--the keypad numbers should be randomly scrambled each time presented.

UPDATE: I just implemented the most basic part of this, the Auto-Load, in Tasker.

Abstract
Touch screens are an increasingly common feature on
personal computing devices, especially smartphones,
where size and user interface advantages accrue from
consolidating multiple hardware components (keyboard,
number pad, etc.) into a single software definable user
interface. Oily residues, or smudges, on the touch screen
surface, are one side effect of touches from which frequently
used patterns such as a graphical password might
be inferred.
In this paper we examine the feasibility of such smudge
attacks on touch screens for smartphones, and focus our
analysis on the Android password pattern.

A Better "Genius" Button

The MT3G Slide has a "genius" button, but it seems to get lackluster reviews (perhaps another example that having a really slick name is half the battle in marketing). I have an idea for Genius Button 2.0. Every smartphone should have at least one, configurable, hard button. The specific configurations would be user-settable by app context, but a good starting set of defaults would include:

Camera: shutter button.
Stopwatch: start/stop button (soft buttons are particularly ill-suited for this application)
Reader, browser: Page Down[1]
Home screen: this will vary, but for me it would be to bring up the dialer.
Phone conversation: Mute toggle

 Of course, this button should be placed where it is very easy to activate while holding the phone one-handed. 
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[1] Of course an even better implementation for PageUp/PageDown would be the volume rocker, but that is out of scope for a single button. PageDown would be at least 75% better.

Google Calendar Feature: Visually Merge Duplicate Shared Events

Virtual merged calendars is great. But when you are viewing your merged calendards for a family of 5, and you all have "Family Movie Night" Friday at 9, it becomes a bit distracting, because that appointment is replicated 5 times. It would be nice if the visual representation could, in some way, visually (not physically) merge those redundant instances of the same event.

Android-Pad by New Year's

I am WAY too frugal to splurge on an iPad. My primary use case for a tablet would be online reading, but from comfortable spots of my own choosing--deck, front porch, bed, comfy chair. I think a modest Android-based tablet would do just fine. As a bonus, there is a Kindle reader for Android, so books would not be out of the question (I know, the Kindle reader with e-ink is much easier on the eyes).

Scott McNealy: “We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”

This is a great idea. One modest step in bringing down the cost of education. Go Scott!

Controlling Cell Phone Bills

A couple of years ago some of the cell phone companies came out with some rudimentary "parental controls". One example was T-Mobile's Family Allowances. They have not been marketed, and do not seem to have caught on.

Now I am seeing more and more kids with Android phones, and soon the Android marketplace will allow charging to your phone bill (instead of Google Checkout). More and more kids are getting Android phones, so this brings back the old concern about your kids running up the family mobile bill. I imagine there may be some, highly un-publicized way to shut off the ability to charge apps, if you take the initiative to call T-Mobile customer service. I hope I am wrong, and they build this right in. They really should. People need reasonable protections against excessive, unexpected charges.

On that note, I hate the idea of being able to spend (often, donate) money by texting a special number. I know the causes are often good, but I just do not like money flowing automagically out of my account, just by pressing a few buttons. It actually seems RIPE for a phishing scam.

Huge Missing Feature in Google Calendar: Snooze

There appears to be no snooze whatsoever in the browser. There is a rudimentary snooze in Android, but it has all the functionality of an $8 alarm clock (hard-coded 5 minutes). This is really a big miss.

Lawyers and "Confidentiality"

Another good "(many) lawyers are evil" (my interpretation) article.

Lawyers, in short, have carved out a role for themselves as the privileged keepers of much information that is important to the public interest. Historically, lawyers have liked to think of themselves as defenders of individual liberty against an overbearing state, primarily through traditional advocacy—that is, persuasively asserting a client's rights. Today, however, lawyers' typical efforts to mediate between clients and the state rely less on advocacy and more on information control. This is a disturbing development; lawyers have brought to their new role as information guardians a powerful predisposition toward needless secrecy that suppresses and distorts information about many matters of public importance.

In a world that increasingly seeks transparency in government and business, the legal profession stands out for its frankly uncompromising commitment to opacity.  Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's principle that "sunlight" is the "best of disinfectants" is a major influence on contemporary public policy nearly everywhere except in his own profession.

Lawyers can give clients something that other professionals, with the exception of doctors and priests, cannot: strong confidentiality rights. Although the legal system routinely requires accountants, bankers, and business consultants to disclose ostensibly private communications with their clients, attorney-client privilege protects most communication between lawyers and their clients from involuntary revelation.

Teach Confirmation Bias

In this age of internet memes and cable news, is there any more important concept that should be taught in the schools than confirmation bias?

Review of Rental Cottage at 671 Bosma, Holland, Michigan

We just got back from a great week at the Atlantic Ocean of the midwest, Lake Michigan. It is a jewel of "flyover" country. With temperate summer waters, white sandy beaches and water as far as the eye can see, it is every bit as good as the ocean. The cottage we stayed in was terrific, here is a short review:

The very short review is that everything about the cottage exceeded expectations. It is newly and delightfully decorated. The proximity is superb--less than 10 minutes for a very pleasant walk to an un-crowded, private beach. The physical location is great, too--in a cute little neighborhood, just north of Lake Macatawa and east of Lake Michigan. The yard is spacious, and there is good privacy on the lovely patio. The cottage is really a recently re-modeled, very-well-kept and well-decorated house. It has everything you would want, including extended cable, wi-fi, laundry, air-conditioning, a gas grill, and a handy outdoor shower for rinsing off the sand. Everything, without exception, was in excellent working order.

The cottage is advertised as sleeping 8, but we asked the owner, Mike, if two families totaling 9 persons would be okay. He candidly replied that the sleeping arrangements would work fine, but we should be aware that there is only one bathroom. We said we could make that work, and it was not a problem at all. As to sleeping, there are 3 spacious bedrooms. Two equipped with double beds, and one with 2 pairs of bunks. So if you, like us, are vacationing with another family, you can turn a good deal into a great deal, by splitting the cost, very easily and very comfortably.. The rooms of the cottage are also very large, so there is plenty of room for 8-9 people, even on an unlucky rainy day.

The greater Holland location was also very good. There are all kinds of stores and restaurants within an easy 10 minutes' drive, if you want them. As for us, we hardly go in the car at all. Kayak rental is a 3-minute walk. Boat rentals on Lake Macatawah are just 1 mile down the road. There was just hardly any reason at all to leave the immediate vicinity. Bottom line--this is a great cottage rental, and at unbeatable price.

Chrome-to-Phone (Android)

...One Froyo benfit that has been somewhat overlooked is the Chrome to Phone application and Chrome extension. Chrome to Phone  is one of the most useful Android features I have come across, and it’s a really simple idea that provides the ability to have a continuous stream of information no matter where we happen to go.

Chrome to Phone is a simple combination of a Chrome extension and Android application that allows you to click one button in your browser, and sync what you were viewing right to your Android phone to be check out at a later time.

Reading a news article but need to head out the door to drive to work? Simply click the Chrome to Phone button on your Chrome browser, launch the Chrome to Phone application on your Android device at work, and it immediately takes you to the webpage you were viewing at home so you can pick up right where you left off.

This sounds good. In keeping with my desire to do as little inputting on the phone as possible.

Kindle for Android

I downloaded Kindle for Android a week ago, and have been dabbling with it. My first impression is about what I expected--a nice option, but the phone is really not a very pleasant platform for reading a book! High points:

1. Works very well, and is pretty quick.
2. Well-integrated with the Amazon website--allows my preferred smartphone paradigm of doing as little data-entry as possible on the phone.
3. Has a very broad selection of font sizes.

The single biggest disappointment? Does not enable one-handed reading by providing a good Page Down option. The Dolphin browser remains the only Android app I have found that implements this very obvious feature, which provides parity with the Palm Pilot c. 2000!

I Like Dropbox

I have known about Dropbox for over a year, but haven't gotten around to trying it until we bought a new laptop. Part of the reason I hadn't tried Dropbox was I didn't see a real need for it in my own computing life. My work computing of course is taken care of by the corporate infrastructure, including nightly backup. I use a Shared Drive to store ALL my work, so everything gets backed up regularly. (I am a big fan off Windows Offline Files, which, come to think of it, is very comparable to Dropbox functionality, within the context of corporate-managed IT assets.) For personal use, I have become enamored of Google Docs and cloud computing, so I just don't generate many local files to worry about.

However, this laptop will be my wife's primary computer, in her role as an independent contractor. And in my role as her Tier 1, 2 and 3 tech support person, I worry a lot about the reliability of her data. So, I thought it was time to fire up Dropbox, and so far I have not been disappointed. A secondary benefit will be the kids, who also insist on using M$ Office, even though I beg them to go the Google Docs route, so that if they have some kind of emergency (forgetting a printed paper, for instance), they can access their docs from schol.

Toshiba Satellite L455-5000, First Impression: Worth Every Penny of $329

As noted, last week I purchased Beth a Toshiba Satellite L455-5000 laptop, running Windows 7.0 Hope Premium, for the shockingly cheap price of $329. Early impressions are extremely favorable. For starters, there was no crapware to remove. I think it was all rolled into the Best Buy Software Installer, which I simply removed.

It is an utterly un-sexy machine, but it seems very solid. Keyboard is not bad, at all. Performance out-of-box seems excellent. We haven't experimented deeply yet, but it seems capable of supporting at least 3 simultaneously-logged-in users. Startup, logoff and user-switching all seem very snappy. All the infrastructure stuff, such as logging into the home network, and mapping to the shared printers, went well.

A Shock - Best Buy Price Beats Amazon

I have just about written off Best Buy for consumer electronics purchases. Their price if usually not even close to the online price. So I was quite surprised when I went to price a new, super-cheap laptop for Beth. Best Buy had the lowest prices, by a wide margin. I wound up getting a Toshiba Satellite L455-5000 for the shockingly low price of $329. The best price on Amazon was $385 (a partner price, not Amazon's, so also no option for free Super-Saver shipping).

As is often the case, in retrospect I have a theory. I think the laptop is a loss-leader. I think Best Buy hopes to sell you highly profitable extras, such as Extended Warranty coverage, ridiculously over-priced cables, and outrageous services such as crapware-removal, to make their profit. Needless to say, they get no such business from me.

Major Facebook Fail: Logging on from Unfamiliar Location

I don't use Facebook often. Maybe 1-2 times/month. While on vacation tonight, I thought I would do a quick status update. After entering my correct User ID and Password, I was dumbfounded to be greeted with a message that said I was logging on from an unfamiliar location, and I had to answer a bunch of questions to authenticate myself. That was bad. Worse, were the questions--they pertained to a bunch of photos of people I didn't recognize. They seemed to be photos of random of my "friends", some of whom are high school people I haven't seen in 25 years, others of which were children of passing acquaintances. I literally couldn't answer ANY of the 7 photo-identification questions.

I am surprised I have not read about this phenomenon. It is unlike anything else I have encountered. I did a little research. Maybe my search-savvy was not tuned in, but this is the only first-30 result I found that was somewhat useful--but no comments or follow-up.

What gives, FB?

Soccer Improvement Idea: Deter Exaggerated Falls

The theatrics surrounding faked and grossly exaggerated fouls in soccer has been a topic of significant discussion during this year's World Cup. Occasionally, the referee will penalize the actor, and instead give them a yellow card. But it doesn't happen often.

I have an idea. Why not use replay to assign those exaggeration yellows, after-the-fact? They wouldn't necessarily have to affect the current game at all--the deterrence factor would come in with the fact that a player receiving 2 yellow cards in a stage must sit out the next game.

The beauty of this approach is that it would leverage the power of replay, without disrupting the prized flow of the game. And it does seem like it would have a lot of deterrent power. When all the Actor has to worry about is the position of the on-field ref, they can make a calculation that their exaggeration will be undetectable. But with TV cameras at all angles, there is no calculating that you can get away with it.

Office 2007 UI - Capricious Changes

I have used MS-Word for Windows since the pre-Win 3.0 days, going back to 1989. For all that time, the icon to "reveal formatting" has been the paragraph marker. I could find it in my sleep. A couple of months ago, my daughter was having formattting problems with Office 2007. I told her to turn on formatting marks. She responded "Huh?" I told her "Click the Paragraph Marker". "I don't see one". I came over, searched high and low and didn't find it. I finally gave up, and went to the dialog box to accomplish my purpose, of turning on the formatting marks.

Just now, I stumbled.across the "new and improved" icon. To me, it doesn't at all suggest what the function is, if anything, it looks like a font-size or color picker. Argh!

DropBox and My Documents

I've spent a big chunk of the day setting up a new Windows 7 laptop. Primarily to be used by my wife, Beth, but needing also to be accessible by me and our 3 kids. I thought I would take time to set up Dropbox, something I have read about but never actually used. I think I have it up and running, but there was a key modification I had to make. I really want Dropbox to be the default, like MyDocuments. But for the most part, Dropbox acts just like a folder in the file system; the key is that any file or folder placed within it will be synched to the cloud.

So what I really wanted to do was replace "My Documents" with "My Dropbox". Fortunately, in Windows "My Documents" is really just a label, that is applied by default to a folder User/Documents. So if you go into the Users list in Windows Explorer, and right-click on My Documents, you get a dialog which includes a Location tab. Within that Location tab, you can specify any arbitrary folder you want. So, change it to User/My Dropbox, and you are all set. (Note: This also requires not letting Dropbox default the location of My Dropbox--you have to tell it to put it as an immediate child of User.)

08/25/13 UPDATE: Unfortunately, this seems to break the built-in 1Password-Dropbox integration. 1Password is essentially "hard-coded" to expect Dropbox to be in the default location. Or at least it did a few months ago--I haven't checked since then.

Software and Consulting Vendors Are All the Same

They start by telling you about their company origin, its core values, its locations. Like I care. I know what they are doing. They are following the rule that the first and last things in a presentation tend to be what people remember. So, naturally, they want their commercial to be first. The problem is, they put the commercial before the content. The result is that people just tune out, right from the beginning. This is even worse with webinars, where people can multi-task at will.

Google TV

I am not paying much attention to Google TV announcements at the moment. However, given Directv's wretched useability and search, I would advise them to watch out. Ignoring the basics in those areas was the opening that M$, Yahoo and others gave to Google in the first place.

The Student Debt Trap

Good article in this subject. To me this is a sad commentary on the decay of institutional ethics. Viewed in this light, colleges look no better than any profit-hungry, self-interested enterprise, and worse than many.

She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies...She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.

Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” she said. “It feels wrong to me.”

I think this phenomenon will likely have some significant reverberations. People will have fewer kids, and people will have kids later in life. The latter is not such a great trend, in my opinion.

(Aside--the article didn't even comment on the dubious degree choice--religious and women's studies?!)

Grabber/Dragger Functionality

Canonical example is the "hand" cursor in PDF fiiles. Why isn't this universal in apps where you use more than the full screen? And why aren't there more ways to change w/o accessing the menu? e.g., CTRL-Click, ALT-Click.

Readability Bookmarklet

I just installed the Readability Bookmarklet. Quick review--I like it. Now how about an Android version? :)

Tool Needed to Diagnose Android Apps Causing Laggy-ness

For the most part I like my MT3G Android phone, but I have occasionally experienced some problems with laggy-ness. After months of no major problems, it cropped up big-time recently. Really big-time--so much that even a re-boot only cured it for a few minutes. I could not think ot any obvious cause, but I figured it must correlate it to an app installation event--either a new app, or perhaps an update. The problem was, I couldn't think of any likely suspects.

This persisted for several days. I was very, very close to doing a master re-set, out of desperation. But then I had some time on my hands today, and I was poking around with Wing Tseng's terriffic Task Manager app, and I think I may have found the offending application (no naming names, at least not yet, because I'm not sure).

So anyway, that got me thinking...it is really a showstopper when your phone gets hit with that degree of lagginess. We really need a tool to help troubleshoot where the lag may be coming from. This is what I have in mind--an app that:

1. Keeps a log of date/time for all installs and updates of apps.
2. Tool also monitors CPU usage, and reports by date/time.

These 2 pieces of information could be very helpful in diagnosing the likely offending application. Extra credit if the app itself provides suggestions.

Benefits of Exercise: Exercise Correlates with Higher GPA

researchers at Saginaw State University in Michigan tracked the grades and exercise habits of 266 undergraduates. They found that students who regularly participated in vigorous physical activity had higher G.P.A.’s.

Yet another example of the many-fold benefits of exercise. Note the emphasis on vigorous.

Better Keyboard

After months of using the TouchPal keyboard for Android, I have recently downloaded Better keyboard. I really like most of TouchPal's functionality, but it is just too laggy. Better is much crisper, but missing some good TouchPal features. I am sure there is an ideal virtual keyboard out there, which blends the best of all of them. Which brings me back to a key suggestion for Android...the keyboard experience is SO vital to the consumer's impression and experience of the phone...I really think Google should do more to ensure that the built in keyboard is world-class.

Clue 1 for Email Marketing

For years I have had a separate email address to give out to retail operations. I check it about once a week, or  when I have a reason. It is amazing to see how many emails even legitimate brick-and-mortar operations send out. Sign up for something on Tuesday, receive marketing emails on Wednesday and Thursday! If marketers weren't so abusively over-eager to send marketing emails, they might actually get better results.

Here is Clue 1 for email marketing--don't send messages any more often than weekly!

How IT Got Boring (It's All About De-Commissioning)

I have been in and around big-corporation IT[1] for 20+ years. I started my career in 1987, fairly early in the PC era. I was attracted to computers in general for the technical and micro-scale problem-solving challenges. I was attracted to corporate IT for the opportunity to build systems which solve problems, deliver efficiency and enable innovation.

For the first 10+ years of my career, that worked out pretty well. The technology improved quickly, and there were numerous opportunities to apply technology and make a big impact quickly. Automating a manual process for the first time is usually a sure winner.

But something subtle started happening. It became apparent to me personally in the post-Y2K, post-dot-com era. The fact was that corporate IT was no longer a fast-moving, innovative, technology-driven profession. IT has reached "maturity". This maturity is manifest both in the technology, and in the projects.

Regarding the Technology
In the 80s and well into the 90s, it was conventional wisdom that keeping up with technology was an exhausting rat-race. If you weren't careful, and allowed yourself to work in the same "old" technology for 5 years, you would fall hopelessly behind. For corporate IT, that has long-since ceased to be true. The pace of technology turnover is way slower now. Information technology tools may develop and improve steadily, but they don't go through wholesale, next-generation replacement very fast at all. The web was probably the last pervasive new technology to break over corporate IT--and that wave hit 15 years ago. If you were at the top of your game 5 years ago, and sat out of the workforce for 5 years and came back, I think you would have no trouble picking up where you left off.

Regarding the Projects
At some point around the year 2000, everything that could be automated, had been automated. At least once, sometimes more than once. Somewhere along the line, in the rush to automate stuff and gain all those efficiencies, we didn't really think too much about maintenance[2]. We just built a bunch of systems. But we discovered that the care and feeding of those systems was becoming a crushing burden. As companies acquired other companies, or created new product lines, or just generally modified business processes, they found that it was getting harder and harder to alter computer systems to keep up. Ironically, the software became the most rigid ingredient in business processes and capabilities.

This fact in turn led to behaviors which ultimately compounded the problem. Since it was already hard for the systems to keep up with business changes, there was an inevitable tendency to take shortcuts. In particular, older (aka, "legacy") systems, when being superseded, were often not completely de-commissioned, but were left in place, performing some vestigal functions that the new system did not provide.

Other trends have only compounded this problem. SOX separation of duties requirements--while generally appropriate--slow down the pace at which small changes can be introduced. Data-privacy requirements create further burdens. Outsourcing, and turnover in general, also make the problem worse: it is an axiom that documentation for computer systems is always woefully incomplete and out-of-date, so work arrangements that eliminate the handing down of "tribal knowledge" further undermine the organizational knowledge needed to understand how a system works, and what is needed to take it out of production.

Conclusion
So the result of all this is that the typical large corporation, circa 2005, started to feel that it was choking on the complexity of its own systems environment. The single biggest focus of most IT departments, after keeping the lights on, is an increasingly frantic quest for environment simplification. However, because of the complexity of the problem, and the effect of running frantically while trying to shoot a moving target, this is not so easily done. Nothing goes quickly, and many of the results are close to invisible. In other words, corporate IT work has gotten kind of boring[3].

I will be interested to re-visit this post in a decade--my guess is that some progress will have been made, but this will still be a big concern.


Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to try to describe this problem for the "lay" person, as my sense is that most non-IT people have little awareness of this situation.


Notes

[1] This article pertains to the IT systems that are built for in-house use, by typical large companies. The situation is likely different for other categories of IT systems--such as software products or embedded software. For a fuller treatment of those distinctions, see Joel Spolsky's essay "Five Worlds of Software".

[2] Sort of like the original Y2K problem itself.

[3] It's not truly boring, any more than many other kinds of complicated, but slow-moving, professional work are boring. In fact, once you adjust your mind-set, simplifying the complex environment provides a very challenging problem to work with. But it is no longer intrinsically exciting, the way only building shiny, new things can be. (And remember--this only applies to BigCo in-house software, as per note #1.)

.

.

Value-Added Consumer PC Feature: Encryption

I've written before with a few ideas about how manufacturers of consumer PCs could create differentiation and better margins by some value-added features, such as built-in RAID (automated backup). Here's another idea: built-in hard-drive encryption.

Corporations have been encrypting hard drives routinely for at least 5 years, and for good reason. It is admittedly much less imperative for consumer PCs, but still a good idea.

I think I know one reason why PC manufacturers would be leery of shipping consumer PCs with disk encryption turned on--it really works. They are rightly afraid that consumers will forget their passphrase, and will be very unhappy when they can't get their data back. But there lies part of the value-added relationship opportunity--key escrow.

The hardware manufacturer would provide a key escrow service for the consumer. That way, the consumer would be protected from forgetting their passphrase. And the PC manufacturer would not only have a value-added product--they would also have an opportunity for a small annual fee, and an ongoing relationship with the consumer.

If Not Self-Reliance, Perhaps Mutual Reliance?

Ms. Schor is less nostalgic than programmatic. She argues that greater self-reliance could help provide an effective strategy for coping with unemployment and reducing environmental degradation...As a child of the Woodstock era, I think it would be cool if she were even partly right. As an economist of the 21st century, I’d like to figure out if she could be.

I will admit I read this quickly, but my impression is that this is way too back-to-the-earth for my taste. However, I find a seed of potential in it...my contention is that contemporary Americans could do much more to be mutually supportive. Carpooling kids to sports for example--I feel like I have practically had to beg people to carpool--when I was the one offering rides. There seems to be such a pervasive "I don't need any help at all" mentality. Or lawnmowers...at a dinner party, I off-handedly suggested that it would be easy for 3 suburban families to share a lawnmower. People looked at me like I was crazy.

Think of the specialty tools we buy that we don't need more than once a year (if that). Not only do we incur the cost of buying them, we also incur the cost of storing them. I am more than happy to share my small collection of such tools with neighbors--thinks like the DeWalt compound miter saw that I bought for a deck project, or the sturdy hand truck hanging in a corner of the garage. There is absolutely no need for every suburban family to own their own copy of such things.

Securosis Blog

Securosis is a info tech security consultancy, who have this great blog where they publish most of their research. I have found it tremendously helpful for a project I am working on.(I also think "Securosis" is a great name--I assume it is meant to convey "obsessed with IT security, to the point of neurosis".)

Complete College In 2 Years

We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school? 

From Bob Herbert, with whom I do not always agree. In general, I am in favor of more "doing things the cheap way". Especially regarding college.

Android Cloud-to-Device

Very good stuff, if I am understanding this correctly. I want to do as much data-entry as possible on the PC, and as little as possible on my Android phone. That applies to selecting apps, but much more so to creating maps (which already works), and other things, like searching for Podcasts.

Another very cool API they've introduced is called Cloud to Device Messaging. This means that – using Android's "intent" call – you get real-time, two-way synching between your phone and any web-app that would take advantage of it. One huge feature that showed this off was the ability to browse apps on a web-based Android market and send them straight to your phone: you can install apps without even having to look at your phone. Note that while this feature will be supported in Froyo, the sight may not be launched with Froyo: that's still a bit down the timeline.

NYC Pensions

It's what the system promised, said Mr. Tassone, now 47, adding that he did nothing wrong by adding lots of overtime to his base pay shortly before retiring. "I don't understand how the working guy that held up their end of the bargain became the problem," he said.

Despite a pension investigation by the New York attorney general, an audit concluding that some police officers in the city broke overtime rules to increase their payouts and the mayor's statements that future pensions should be based on regular pay, not overtime, these practices persist in Yonkers.

I am not a close follower of NYC politics and news, but I have been hearing about this stuff for years in NYC public works.

More on Public Pensions

NYT forum on the grave problems with state pensions. This state and municipal pension crisis is absolutely poisonous to the trust of the elecorate, in their government.  The combined degree of incompetence, corruption and self-serving short-term thinking required to mess up this badly is staggering. Any competent normal organization (business would be the archetype) first and foremost safeguards its own financial best interests. That governments have dug such a deep hole makes one question why they should be trusted to do much of anything. (Note--In case anyone is wondering, I am not saying this as an anarcho-rightist, I have no doubts that effective government is crucial for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I am merely making an observation.)

(Sadly, it is also another nail in the coffin of defined-benefit pensions, in general. Not that the coffin lacked for nails. And I would have to say, if the vast majority of private industry employees can't expect a pension, I see no reason why they should be retained for public employees.)

Thomas Friedman Re-Generation

I really liked this Tom Friedman article on the need for "re-generation" of the United States infrastructure, social fabric, moral capital. It is the kind of call-to-arms that I wish President Bush would have made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Tire Replacement Tip - Keep A "Spare"

It is very desirable to have matched sets of tires on your car. Keep them properly inflated, rotate every oil change, and you're all set. No ground-breaking tip there. The tip involves overcoming certain situations that might foul up your plans.

Time was, if you had a flat tire, you could replace it with your full-sized spare. This would give you plenty of breathing room to get the damaged tire fixed, or figure out your replacement strategy. But unless you drive a Jeep or full-sized van, your spare tire is going to be a "donut"--a very small tire that is rated for only enough mileage, at sub-highway speed, to get you safely to a service station. You can't drive around on it all week while the tire place awaits a shipment of your desired tires.

That's where the problem lies. A tire gets damaged beyond repair (maybe because it has already been patched before), and now you may have a quandary. If the remaining tires have significant tread on them, like maybe 10,000 miles, you might not be ready to run out and replace all of them. You would like to do a one-off replacement for the interim. But you don't want to buy a brand-new tire for that purpose.  Or, maybe you are ready to replace all the tires, but the shop doesn't have your desired tires in stock--it could be a 2-4 day wait. What do you do?

In the last 5 years, I have found myself in each of those situations. The answer is to save the best tire from your previous set, and use it as a spare. Unless you are: A) Running your tires down to the nibs before changing; B) Both utterly fanatical and very lucky, and have totally even wear--there will be at least one of the four that is in quite serviceable shape. Keep that as a spare, and hang it up in your garage.

Google Giving Up on Selling Nexus One Direct

I never fully understood that move in the first place. There was a lot of talk about phones from carriers and plans--like they do with un-locked phones in Europe. That seems noble, and in many ways it could be good--cross-subsidies often mask inefficiencies. But, but, but...

First, it just seems too much like competing with your distribution channel. That's never a good thing--where would Android be without the relentless Verizon campaign for the "Droid"?? Second, T-Mobile, Google's closest Android ally, had already taken the step of offering the "Even More Plus" plans, that offer lower rates but no subsidized phones. Third, my comments about cross-subsidies aside, if you really want a new phone, it is often net short-term cheaper to get the subsidy[1]. Fourth, why in the world would it be available with only one very specific plan?! Probably in some way tied to the arms-length arrangement with Google (I'm not sure exactly how, but that is the only theory I can muster), but from a consumer point of view, what a colossal fail. 4 strikes, give up the game.

[1] I think cross-subsidies are distortive in two ways. One, they may save you money in the short-term, but they lock you in to the carrier for 2 years. Two, in some cases they may cause people to upgrade just because they can: spending $50 to get a new phone that retails for $200, when they never would have shelled out $200 for a new phone. That is clearly an economic inefficiency.

Disaster Date (TV Show)

I am not one for reality TV. But my kids have been watching Disaster Date lately, and I have caught bits and pieces of it. Fortunately, its concept is so simple that you don't have to follow long to catch on. I must say, it is pretty amusing. I'm sure they will eventually wear out the concept, but for now it is pretty funny!

ERP Customization 80/20 Rule

Infoworld:

Although open source implementations invite all sorts of customization, a clear lesson learned from the ERP wars of the ‘90s appears to have sunk in: When it comes to commercial software, avoid hacking the system when possible or you’ll end up with maintenance costs equal to or greater than those incurred by apps developed in-house.

 After my experience as an ERP manager in the 90s, I concluded that if you customize more than 20%, you would have been better off building.

Mental Bandwidth and Willpower Bandwidth

This is an email I sent to Sendhil Mullainathan. Unfortunately, he never replied to me. It is in reference to a discussion between these two economists, discussing the concept that the extra mental distractions arising from managing in poverty conditions (e.g., "which bill do I pay") detract from total "mental bandwidth", thus making poor parents less able to attend to the needs of their children. While I think there is something to that concept (though it could also easily become an excuse), that is not the application of the mental bandwidth concept that interests me.

I caught some of your bloggingheads discussion with Glenn Loury. I am intrigued by the mental bandwidth concept. It reminds me of the "finite willpower" concept that was in the air a few years ago (I believe promulgated by Dr. Roy Baumeister). One feature of this theory is that willpower is a lot like physical endurance--although one's capacity can be developed somewhat over time, it is a finite resource in the short-term. So, the more willpower expended on solving a hard intellectual problem, the less available for dieting. The more spent on training for an athletic event, the less available for managing the budget. Etc.

A feature of the concept was the notion that willpower could be built up, like a muscle or like endurance. So I wonder if you think that is true for mental bandwidth. Either that it can be built up, or at least we can train ourselves to focus our bandwidth on useful things (economics, health information, developing skills) and less on useless stuff (keeping track of celebrities, indulging conspiracy theories), etc.

It is probably evident from the way I phrased the above, but this is a pet theory of mine. I consider myself a generalist. I am constantly dismayed at how under-informed and not intellectually curious people are. I attribute this largely to the fact that in today's age of specialization, economic success is typically derived from being very, very good at one specific thing. So specialization is where all the mental bandwidth goes.

Theories of Employee Evaluation, Motivation and Recognition

You should at least skim this, it is really good:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html

There are (at least) 2 distinct theories of employee evaluation. One is the hard-core GE / Jack Welch--rank people, tell them where they stand in the rank. That will fire up people's competitive spirits, and cause them to work harder to move up.

Another school of thought says that the Jack Welch theory is counter-productive, for several reasons. One, it motivates internal competition, which often takes destructive forms. So if your enterprise requires a high-degree of collaboration (and what modern corporation doesn't?), then you may get some very bad side-effects from over-emphasizing internal competition. Second, it idealizes human behavior. That idealization may work for the ultra-competitive types that find themselves in the Olympian Jack Welch-like position of establishing company norms. But for the rest of us, it may be that we do our best when positively encouraged, and we are all allowed to feel like we are doing good work and are a little bit above average. Obviously you can't allow gross distortions, it is a subtle thing. Does the 11th player on the basketball team constantly get reminded that they are at the bottom of the list, or do they receive some encouragement for working hard, and staying prepared, even when game after game they never see action?

That example is not perfectly analogous to the workplace, but it's something to think about. Joel on Software also has written insightfully along these lines.

At Snopes, a Quest to Debunk Misinformation Online - NYTimes.com

At Snopes, a Quest to Debunk Misinformation Online - NYTimes.com

Identify Theft

Bruce Schneier (who is by no means a Pollyanna bout security matters) says:

Identity Theft Over-Reported

I'm glad to see that someone wrote this article. For a long time now, I've been saying that the rate of identity theft has been grossly overestimated: too many things are counted as identity theft that are just traditional fraud. Here's some interesting data to back that claim up:

Multiple surveys have found that around 20 percent of Americans say they have been beset by identity theft. But what exactly is identity theft? The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 defines it as the illegal use of someone's "means of identification" — including a credit card. So if you lose your card and someone else uses it to buy a candy bar, technically you have been the victim of identity theft. Of course misuse of lost, stolen or surreptitiously copied credit cards is a serious matter. But it shouldn't force anyone to hide in a cave. Federal law caps our personal liability at $50, and even that amount is often waived. That's why surveys have found that about two-thirds of people classified as identity theft victims end up paying nothing out of their own pockets.

The more pernicious versions of identity theft, in which fraudsters use someone else's name to open lines of credit or obtain government documents, are much rarer.

Grade Inflation

Grade inflation has been in the news lately. I try to explain to my kids what it was like in a competitive engineering school...tests where 60% was a solid "A", and 17 was a passing grade! We complained about it at the time, and that last example is a bit extreme, but in general, the rigor is good. It is good in terms of "resolution"--if you crowd 80% of the scores into the 80-100 range, you don't have enough room to make real distinctions. It is also good for the soul--it imbues students with a sense of humility, and knowledge that, however hard they have worked and how much they have mastered, they still have miles and miles to go.

Android Useability Feature: Make non-Homescreen Apps Prominent

Android should arrange the App Slider so that it groups all the non-Homescreen apps at the top. This would be a very nice convenience, when going for those less-frequently-used apps.

Android/Google Ready to Improve the TV Experience?

Google is essentially trying to develop a television set operating system. It will be tough to make it work, since many of the television manufacturers will likely be protective of whatever software goes on their hardware. However, it sounds like Sony, Intel and a few other companies are already on board.

It's about time! I look forward to much better DVR software, and using my smartphone as a remote control.

Stack Overflow Is A Marvel of Useability

I have been aware of Stack Overflow for some months, and have looked briefly at it once or twice. But this week I had the first occasion to post my own question, so I spent more time and much more focused time than ever before. The core concepts for Stack Overflow are terrific. But the many terrific useability touches just seal the deal. This is the best useability experience I have had in a long, long time. Some things that stand out, in no particular order:

• The insta-preview is perfect.
• Smart parsing of my offline-edited, pasted-in question was very impressive (converted *word* into italics, converted"-" into bullet).
• Everything is BIG and easy-to-read (Atwood must be following his own advice about Fitt's Law)
• The suggest-answers-before-submit was: 1) Painless, unlike the typical step-by-step, HTML-round-trip approach; 2) Pretty accurate (though ultimately did not answer or change my question).
• The auto-complete for tags is very well-done.

So I would say that Jeff Atwood is doing a good job eating his own dogfood when he says "relentlessly polishing and improving every little part of it -- no matter how trivial -- you're not executing". 

Wikipedia Is A Teaching Opportunity

My kids are forever complaining about how teachers won't let them cite Wikipedia as a source for reports. Now I do understand, kids would like to use Wikipedia, and nothing else. It was much the same when I was a young student--teachers would make us use at least three sources, only one of which could be an encyclopedia. But we were allowed to use an encyclopedia. Many teachers are completely banning Wikipedia. Their rationalization? It's not authoritative, "anybody" can edit Wikipedia.

They are SO missing a great teaching opportunity. There is so much to think about with Wikipedia. It is fundamentally an astounding collaborative intellectual achievement. It is remarkably resilient. And it contains articles on topical and pop-culture subjects that would just never be found in a traditional encyclopedia. Oh, and the fact that "anybody can edit"--this is often a feature, not a bug[1], because it lets errors get corrected, and quickly.

Dissing Wikipedia--especially when not having a full command of the facts[2]--takes a toll on credibility. Sorta like exaggerating the dangers of drugs and alcohol[3]--in my book, it's always a long-term mistake to mis-represent your subject for the short-term benefit of "winning" a debate.

If any teachers out there are interested in this topic, I might be up for collaborating on creating curiculum for a seminar or unit on Wikipedia.

NOTES

[1] This very link is an example of the kind of topical thing that Wikipedia is indispensable for documenting. (Ironically note that this link it not to Wikipedia, but an extremely edgy offshoot of it...which would make for a supplementary lesson in the Wikipedia curriculum, and just points out how rich the subject is...

[2] Just to pick one...as it has developed, Wikipedia has put more and more limitations around the "anybody can edit" policy.

[3] In no way should this be interpreted as a blithe, laissez-faire skepticism that drugs and alcohol are bad. No debate, they bad. My point is that their badness more often manifests in the longer-term, so exaggerating their negative effects in the short-term torpedoes one's credibility, particularly with an audience--teens--that is, for well-established reasons, especially prone to the bias of over-weighting short-term evidence.

Undercover CEO Reality Show

I don't usually watch reality shows, but I caught an episode of Undercover CEO (GSI Commerce the featured company) because my family was watching, and I got interested. I won't go into all the details, but it involved the CEO taking several pretty low-level, blue-collar hourly jobs. He learned a lot, made some changes based on what he learned, promoted a couple of people, and fired another one. All plausible, all good stuff.

It reminded me of something I read years ago in Tom Peters' book In Search of Excellence. He talked about companies making sure that execs got their hands very dirty, with menial work--like having Disney execs direct traffic in the parking lot. I always thought there was a lot to be said for that approach, and that was basically what happened in Undercover CEO.

The other interesting thing was that he uncovered talent in fairly "low skill" workers. Latent talent that was just in need of some nurturing, to make them more valuable and probably much better-paid. I think this is one area of vast, untapped potential in our economy. SO many employees are stuck in dead-end jobs, where nobody is making any kind of investment in them. And the results show.

Innovative Flex Part-Time

20 years ago, when I was in MBA school, there was a lot of talk about what the workplace would be like in the future. Some it is has come true--distributed and virtual teams, and along with that, working from home and flex-time. It's sometimes hard to remember, but flex-time was a pretty new concept 25 years ago, and working from home was almost unheard-of for the average knowledge worker.

Other concepts have not come to pass, such as job-sharing. Very few professional positions are offered on anything other than an full-time basis. The rare concession is usually a reward to retain a valued employee--never something offered to a new hire. I see this lack of flexibility as unfortunate, and hope it will change over time.

I think it would be very desirable if different variations on other than full-time were available. In some cases, that might be simple part-time. A more interesting case, though, would be flexible part-time. I am thinking of an arrangement, for example, where an employee is guaranteed 20 hours per week, but will work as much as 30 hours per week if needed. That is just one example, there could be other variations. For organizations with significant seasonal variation, they might work 40+ hours during peak season. If done right, the flexibility could benefit both the employee and the orangization.

I think norms tend to get in the way of this for exempt employees. But especially as retirement gets pushed out (which I think is a given for most under-50s), this kind of flexibility will become more valuable. Apparently it is popular in the Netherlands: 

The researchers concluded that — despite the carefully calibrated incentives that economists love so — women work part time in the Netherlands because, simply, they like it that way. It’s easier on the family and promotes a good quality of life. And over time, Dutch companies have gotten the message, and created rewarding jobs for part-timers. 

WSJ Superstar Effect

It's always interesting to connect different things you read. This article talks about the "superstar effect" that actually diminishes competition--the presence of a standout star so demoralizes the competitors that they try less hard (Tiger Woods is their favorite example). Then this article talks about "The Humble Boss" versus the hyper-competitive CEO model.

So maybe companies that overdo the GE-style rack-and-stack employee rating do so because it fits the personality style of the CEOs. They are the type of people who are driven to complete, and probably are very accustomed to winning. I'm sure that feels good. On the other hand, it's not humble. It it also contrary to the tenets of much religion, notably Christianity, which cautions against falling prey to "scarcity thinking".

I am all for high standards and high performance. I just think that it can be a mistake to always frame it in terms of direct competition. In competition, a win is a win--you don't have to great work, you have to make sure that your work is viewed as better than anybody else's. That can lead to some severely dysfunctional behavior.

What Sets Apple Apart

Excellent article from Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, putting the iPad release and strategy in historical context, based on his involvement in the original Mac project. I have been meaning for a while to write about how preposterous it is that Apple can go, from a standing start, to industry leader with the iPhone. It would be as if Hyundai entered the auto market, and their very first automobile surpassed Toyota for quality and BMW for product experience.It just shouldn't be possible--new entrants always start at the low end and claw their way up.

It is both preposterous, and unfortunate. Apple needs competition (I need.Apple to have competition). They have it in some quarters, from Google thank goodness, But they could use much more. And there is just absolutely nobody even close to their league. They are as much better than the competition as Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, at the top of their game (except more so). Sony used to be thought of as an innovator, but they are on life support, they couldn't eat Apple's crumbs.

So I have been contemplating how this can be. I hadn't come to any satisfying answer. Tog's observations do give some insight:

Probably the strongest character trait of Steve Jobs is his absolute lack of fear. While every other CEO in America, it seems, shakes in his boots at the very thought of not having a good next quarter, my experience in knowing Steve Jobs is that, frankly, he could care less about the next quarter. He’s much more focused on the next five years, rather than the next 90 days. But even more than that, it is his quest to change the world, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish that end even if he risks failure in the process. [my italics]

As any high school coach worth their salt would say--if you are afraid to fail, you will never excel.

Mute Botton = Ejector Seat Button

Jeff Atwood discusssing why it is important for the "ejector seat button" on a plane to be very, very hard to hit by accident, and extending that analogy (of course) to software--where all too often it is very easy to hit. My favorite commonplace example is the hangup button or switchhook on a phone--it is just ridiculous how easy it is to hang up on yourself, when you are eagerly reaching for the mute button, to make an insightful comment during a conference call! And my rant about a similar "feature" of my cable modem.

New Term: Sitused

This doesn't happen very often, but I learned a new word at work today: sitused. Here is a definition. There are a lot of senses, the one that seems most appropriate for my workplace usage is:

the state, territory, or country where a Company or Corporation has filed its Articles of Incorporation becomes the place where the company is "sitused"

I am not entirely sure why we couldn't just say "where the client company is incorporated" instead of "where the client company is sitused", but I am sure there is some subtle difference that is escaping me at the moment.

Backdoor Billboard Ban

Article claiming that electronic billboards are a dangerous distraction.This could be a good way to ban them ex post facto, sort of like OSHA attack on second-hand smoke as a workplace hazard. I am a billboard disliker, especially in scenic areas I think they are an abomination, but I do find the electronic ones are less ugly than traditional billboards.

Jargonwatch

"Get After" for "take on". Usage: business presentations. As in, "we have to get after our 2011 budget planning, if we want to be funded in the next fiscal year." Assessment: not too bad, but as with anything that shows up in Jargonwatch, in danger of being over-used.

"Stand Up" for "put into production". Usage: business presentations. As in, "we've stood up 4 new, low-power, multi-core servers in the past 2 months, and that is only the beginning". Assessment: not too bad, but having a strongly colloquial flavor, it could be easily over-used.

Mathemeticians Have A Predilection for Obfuscation

DoggCatcher Doesn't Delete

I really like the Android podcasting app, DoggCatcher. It is by far the most complete, detailed Android app I have seen. However, I was recently surprised to learn that it had filled up my SD card with 2.5 Gbs of stuff. Almost nothing was getting deleted, even though I had the global setting of "Delete as space is needed". It turns out that only applies to items that have been marked as "Done".

The thing is, the way I use DoggCatcher is to accumulate lots of stuff, so that I have a lot to choose from, when I want a PodCast. I do not for a moment plan to listen to more than 20% of the stuff I capture. So as it fills up, I want the old stuff to roll off to make space available, even though I have not listened to the old stuff.

So I had to go in and manually delete every old podcast. Very tedious. I just find it so surprising that the DoggCatcher folks designed it this way. The DVR is somewhat analogous, and it works exactly the way I would expect--the old stuff rolls off as it fills up (assuming you don't invoke the "Keep" feature). I think this is a case of designing with slightly the wrong mind-set--quite analogous to Dave Winer's preference for RSS aggregators to deliver a "River of News", instead of treat feeds like a mail reader. To SnoggDoggler's credit, they do realize the need for an enhancement.

Weirdly, the old feeds don't actually show up in the UI of the app. You have to go directly to the file structure to see them.

Software Craftsmanship

As Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror says, "In software development, execution is staying on top of all the tiny details that make up your app. If you're not constantly obsessing over every aspect of your application, relentlessly polishing and improving every little part of it -- no matter how trivial -- you're not executing."

A small example of this is how Google tends to treat text pasted into text boxes. For instance, when searching in Google Maps, it is very common to wish to paste in address, scraped from some other web page. Addresses, however, typically have at least two and often three lines--with carraige returns embedded, of course. Most apps just choke on that--they typically truncate everything starting with the first carraige return. Google, on the other hand, elegantly parses the text, and strips out the carraige returns. And it all just work, for the user.

Dolphin Android Browser: 2 Key Features

I have been trying out the Dolphin browser for Android over the past couple of weeks. I don't do a lot of mobile browsing, for I don't yet have a fully-formed opinion. However, it incorporates two features that should be core to many mobile apps.

Click-to-Scroll. Swiping to scroll the screen is fine for many uses, but when using the mobile device for reading content, you really want a button to click to get a page-down effect. This was something I looked for the first day I used Android, and have consistently looked for in a dozen apps since, but this is the first time I have found it. The Dolphin implementation is very sensible--it includes the configurable option to use the volume key to Page-Down and Page-Up. Every app should do this.

Flag for Read Later. While surfing, I come across a lot of stuff that I want to read later. Dolphin specifically includes a "mark to read later" flag for this feature. Very nice.