A Different Kind of "Lean" Needed at the Doctor's Office

I had an ophthalmologist appointment today. I arrived on time. It was a good 70 minutes before I was seen by the doc. And the worst part? Neither by word or manner did the doc betray any indication that he was aware of running late. This was clearly business as usual.

I am aware, of course, of the primary motivation for running their practice that way--the doc's time is infinitely precious, the patient's utterly expendable. Could the situation be improved? I think so.

Even if we accept the proposition that the scale will be heavily tilted toward optimizing physician time, I bet there is a lot of room for improvement--if only there were a will.

First of all, I wonder how much of the backlog is non-optimized, sheer waste? Could the backlog be halved, and still achieve the same level of physician utilization?

Following close after that is the question of sharply diminishing benefits. What is a reasonable tradeoff between wasting patient time and doctor time? 10-to-1? 50-to-1?

Okay so those considerations are the low hanging fruit. Next comes simple process improvement. Could the practice take a page from appliance deliverymenpeeps, and book you for a large window (e.g., 9-11), but let you call in beforehand to get a refined estimate? Obviously, even better would be an automated, real-time system with web lookups and notification texts.

Of course, the cynic in me has to wonder--is part of it image? Does a long wait at a specialist's office serve as a signal that their time is hard to come by, and you are lucky to get an appointment at all?

All I can say is--thank goodness for smartphones. Wait time == reading time.

Early Voting False Analogy

Although I am not a fan of early voting, this is a very broken analogy:

Francis Wilkinson, a journalist who became a Democratic campaign consultant and is now a member of the editorial board of Bloomberg News, says, "You don't have a jury decide a court case when it's just three-quarters of the way through. New information arrives every day."

The big difference is that serving as a juror is an inherently closed-ended process. There is a most definite end. The date of an election is rather arbitrary. There is no process or science behind the length of the campaign. So 3 weeks more campaign exposure might randomly change a few minds either way, but there is no particular reason to identify those 3 weeks as crucial. 

 

In a different system, 3 weeks might be a material portion of the campaign. I have heard it said that British elections typically involve about 6 weeks of campaigning..But in campaign seasons whose length is measured not in weeks, or even months, but in years, it is silly to think an arbitrary 3 weeks more matters in terms of the additional time.

T-Mobile, can you do anything right?

I really want to like T-Mobile. They are low-cost, and relatively less evil than the likes of Verizon when it comes to screwing with their smartphones and doing generally annoying things to their customers. But honestly, they screw up so much. 2 rebates in a row, they gave me the wrong form, I had to call in to get it fixed. A couple of different promos, they told me I wasn't eligible, I had to get the store reps to escalate to convince themselves I was. Then when I got the free Father's Day Data promo, I had to call every single month to get them to give me the credit. Each time, the rep swore up and down they had fixed the problem, but they never did.

Then there was the time I upgraded 2 lines to unlimited minutes, but they put it on the wrong 2 lines, resulting in the classic shock-inducing $2000 phone bill (of course they fixed it, but another call, another story to the CSR). Or screwing with my grandfathered data plan when I upgraded the line...they switched it back when I complained, so now that I think about it, that is probably deliberate corporate evilness (let's see if customer notices), rather than CSR mess-up.

Here's the latest...just received a new Galaxy S3 for Beth. But it takes the new micro-SIM, so I can't just swap her old SIM into this phone. I have to call to activate the SIM they sent. Okay, that's a bit inconvenient, but reasonable and no alternative. I call, get through quickly, rep understands my request, and after the perfunctory attempt to up-sell my data plan, he puts it through. Except...

Except what he did was transfer my line to the new SIM card. Doh! I assume this happened just because my line is primary. He saw that we had a Family Plan, wouldn't it have been a good idea to be sure he know which line to move?!

Okay, so that's annoying, but I figured a call back should solve it. After explaining the situation about 3 times to the polite but somewhat clueless rep, and waiting on hold while she asked her supervisor, they asked if it would be okay if I went to a Tmo retail store to get a free replacement micro SIM. Well actually, no, it's not okay. Of course, that was just CSR-speak for "I can't help you you're gonna have to go pick up that micro-SIM". Not happy.

How to Make WWF Better

I like playing Words with Friends a lot, but I have an idea to improve it: There should be a scoring rule, per turn, of a maximum of 8 times the number of letters used (e.g, 2 letters max 16, 5 letters max 40).

This would have the following benefits:

• Generally encourage longer words that open up the board, versus defensive play that can be tactically very advantageous, but often makes for a cramped, boring game
• Eliminate very high-scoring turns that are the result of very little skill (dropping the X on a double to spell "XI" both ways, for 38 points).
• Eliminate super-high-scoring turns that are somewhat lucky but can create an insurmountable lead
• Helps equalize the playing field between veterans and newer players (who won't have memorized all the silly 2-letter words)

Also, to get the 7-letter bonus, you should have to do it without a blank and without using an "S" to make a plural.

I Dislike Repetition

In general I do not like repetition. It's a waste of precious time, but even worse, it induces boredom. Boredom, in my experience, deadens the mind.

Various institutions make this mistake. I am thinking at the moment of a church I know. Every week they devote the first 3 minutes of the service to repeating the same dull reminders:

• Fill out the Communications Card. Even if you attend every week. (Which nobody feels like doing.)
• Explaining the service.
• Explaining how they love kids, but yes sometimes kids get restless, so if they do, here are the various options you have to accomodate them (padded cell, kids program, etc).
• (I will give them a little credit--lately they have been omitting the silence your cell phone PSA.)

The fact that the precious first minutes are devoted to this tedious repetition compounds the problem, magnifying it from a tactical mistake to a strategic one. People have limited, flawed attention spans. Their powers of attention are strongest at the outset, and wane from there. Devoting the first 3 minutes to deliberately boring your audience, turns an asset into a liability.

I think I do understand, the church wants to be friendly to newcomers. But there is probably a better balance to strike that doesn't involve wasting the prime minutes of the service. A few ideas:

• Rotate the PSAs--don't try to cram them all in every single week.
• Use the video to deliver the PSAs. Run them continuously before the service begins and devote one screen to them during the opening music.
• Let the PSAs wait till a little later in the service. (This may or may not work, depending on the arrangement of the service.)

Nobody else seems to complain about this, so it may be just me. I experience objectionable repetition with work stuff, too, and nobody else complains very much.

Apple Manufactuing Hype

From Apple's own website: Never before has this degree of fit and finish been applied to a phone. Take the glass inlays on the back of iPhone 5, for instance. During manufacturing, each iPhone 5 aluminum housing is photographed by two high-powered 29MP cameras. A machine then examines the images and compares them against 725 unique inlays to find the most precise match for every single iPhone.


It does sound ingenious (though if they really had their tolerances down, there wouldn't be any upside to painstakingly searching out mating parts with optimally compatible dimensional variation). It also sounds like it might e marketing BS. I bet they did this just to have something to talk about. People always fall for this kind of impressive, great-cocktail-party chatter that they don't necessarily understand, or know the importance of.

It wouldn't surprise me if this has minimal benefit, and Apple quits even doing it, after a decent interval has passed.

Lots of tweets and articles about how Apple's replacement for Google Maps is a self-inflicted fail. While on the subject of dumb Apple decisions--I can't believe they didn't take much flack for making the making the back of the iPhone 4s out of glass. Yeah, sure, let's go out of our way to deliberately make it extremely fragile.

iPhone 5: More Fetishizing "Build Quality"

John Gruber goes on, and on and on:

Is it worth devoting the first 750 or so words of this piece to the iPhone 5’s surface appeal? I don’t know how else to convey the niceness of this thing. This iPhone 5 review unit is the single nicest object in my possession. I own things that cost and remain worth more (e.g. my car). But I own nothing this nice. It sounds hyperbolic to put it that way, but I offer this observation with no exaggeration.

I think this is absolutely ridiculous. It's just a phone, people.

Data-Only Plans: Wishful Thinking

For all intents and purposes, T-Mobile's $30 Prepaid Plan (no handset subsidy) that provides 5 Gb of data per month *is* a data-only plan. I agree, it is more the exception than the rule at this point, but it definitely is a sign of things to come.
To an extent, though, the idea that a non-voice-user could save a lot of money with a data-only plan may be wishful thinking. The carriers have fixed costs and need a certain ARPU. They are going to try to get it one way or the other.

It is sort of analogous to how everybody wants cable TV stations to be un-bundled. Their reasonsing is that they only use 4 out of 50 channels. If they could just pick the 4 they want, then their monthly bill should plummet (ideally, to 4/50s of its current level). It's not gonna work this way. If it ever comes, it will be something like: (1) channel costs 1/2 of the full-fare, and each additional channel costs another 1/10. So (5) would be break-even.

Oh, and if they do that, most likely the cost of the bundle will go up.

The Way to Implement State Variation

The PPACA healthcare regs (aka, Obamacare)  generally give a lot of leeway for states to "do their own thing". I understand why this was probably necessary, politically, to get anything passed, but it sure is inefficient.

In purely clinical terms, I think the United States is so homogeneous that there is negligible justification for variation. What is going to be different--cover frostbite in Minnesota? Sunburn in Florida? Our diseases are not very particular to geographic regions. So any justification for variation is likely to be based not on local idiosyncrasies and "facts on the ground", but rather on local politics.

One oft-repeated justification for delegating power, and incurring the variation that comes with it, is that the states serve as "the laboratories of democracy".  I think I get that, and generally I support anything that leads to rational experimentation and improvement. But I can't help wondering if "the juice is worth the squeeze" here.

I have an idea for a compromise. Instead of a free-for-all, where every state has great latitude to alter the baseline, require that 5 states band together to define a common variant. One advantage is that it reduces the max number of variants from 50 to 10. But a much more important effect is that by requiring some broad consensus, this arrangement (hopefully) eliminates meaningless variation and catering to special interests.

Declared Non-Precedent

It always pains me when someone or some institution doesn't want to do A Good Thing because "it might create a precedent". I like the concept of the "declared non-precedent". The application for this is when you are going out on a limb to try something, but if it doesn't work, or causes an unsustainable rush of "me too" requests, you reserve the right to disclaim any precedent.

I've tried this at work a couple of times, it has worked okay. In those cases, I have been in the position of supplicant--not decider--and have assured the powers-that-be that in no way would my request be construed as precedent.

Word Processing Needs Tabs

It always surprises me how often people use Excel for word processing tasks. There are a number of  reasons for this, many of them good.

One of the reasons is being able to organize your work in tabs. Interestingly, OneNote, Microsoft's note-taking app, has this feature. To me, that is the biggest draw of OneNote (I know there are others, and my resistance to using it probably keeps me ignorant of them ;) .)

I think other word-processing apps, such as MS-Word and Google Docs, would also benefit from having tabs. Just as with tabbed browsing, it gives you that one extra level of hierarchy to organize your work.

P.S. If outlining, a la Dave Winer, were more widely and better-implemented, then this feature would be less important.

P.P.S. One complementary feature needed: consolidate all tabs into one.

Live-Blogging Over-Rated

I just heard a commentator speaking of how Live-Blogging is a new form of writing skill. I suppose he is right. But for me, live-blogging holds very little interest. We all know that news stories are more informative once there has been time for a careful examination and verification of facts--so why rush to get it so fast? Even in the pre-digital era, for long-running stories, I preferred newsmagazines over newspapers, since newspapers necessarily had to contain a lot of repetition in each day's article.

Likewise, we all know that writing is better with editing...why bypass this process?

I think it is all false excitement...there aren't that many stories that we need to read about in actual real-time.

eBooks--What's the Big Deal???

All this blather about eBooks and intangible artifacts and emotional attachment to physical books...I totally don't get it. Don't judge a book by its cover, right? I have always been a fan of libraries...when you get a book from a library, it is impermanent, right?

There are some interesting possibilities if every book you ever read was an eBook. Imagine your child is reading Moby Dick...you could look up your copy and see what you highlighted. I know, that is a long long way off and probably mostly a dream, but it speaks to the possibilities of digital, which I think in many ways are so much greater than dead-tree.

Mostly, though, the words are what is important. I always used this thought experiment to frame the problem...suppose you have a hypothetical choice. You can preserve all of Shakespeare's works, in accurate but completely plain printed volumes. Or, you could have half of Shakespeare's works in their original versions (Folios or whatever), but the other half would be completely lost. Seems like an easy choice for the former, right? So what that tells me is the format is of secondary importance, at best. So why fuss over it so much?

Okay, this is a first...

...Walgreen's called with an automated reminder, and they pronounced our name (Neu) as it would be in German: "noy".

Staples "Market Basket"

Reports in NYT and elsewhere on the web say that Staples employees will try to get rid of a customer looking to purchase a PC, if they don't show an interest in the extended warranty. If this is true, I am going to predict right now: Staples will be the next Office Depot or Circuit City--out of business within 5 years.

Facebook IPO - Not a Debacle, Exactly

The reader's comments in this article are much more insightful than that of the author. Investors are unhappy because they paid too much for Facebook stock in the recent IPO. I get why the investors are disappointed, but for everybody inside Facebook at the IPO, they executed a brilliant financial transaction. They maximized the return for the current stakeholders, and they didn't do anything illegal in the process.

The irony of this kind of a deal, of course, is that one second after the transaction, the people who overpaid you now become your stakeholders. In this way, CFO Ebersman finds himself in a tricky, uncomfortable position. But still, he totally did the right thing and got outstanding results.

Reminds me of the brilliant move Steve Case made, well over a decade ago, locking in much of AOLs excessive valuation by selling to the Washing Post company. I'm pretty sure he knew they were grossly over-paying, but that was hardly his fault or problem.

Like I said, many of the readers seem to get this quite clearly, unlike the author of the article.

Pay for Performance at the Bottom of the Workforce

My daughter works at McDonald's. Her store seems to have a terrible absenteeism problem. Workers apparently think nothing of "calling in". It happens routinely, not unusual for 5 workers per shift to do this.

I can't believe they put up with it. But if they seemingly can't solve it with sticks, then I think they should consider some carrots. How about a contingent $0.25 raise for 1 month without calling in, another $0.25 the next 2 months, up to 3 months. Reward those who don't call in.

Calendar Remind Type of "Alarm"

Google Calendar (Android and web) has two reminder types: Notification and Email. So far so good, but they need a third: Alarm. Alarms on Android typically work the way you would expect an alarm clock to--they go off, no matter what state the phone is in, including muted for the night.

I would like to be able to create an event, set a reminder type of alarm, and have that result in my Alarm app ringing for the set time. My main use case is for unusually early meetings; the current work-around is to set the alarm manually.

Like Not Drafting Michael Jordan...

Actually, PRI might not exist at all had it not been for a monumental NPR gaffe: in 1983, the network turned down the opportunity to syndicate Garrison Keillor's ''Prairie Home Companion.'' ''NPR declined to pick up Keillor because there was an attitude that they had plenty of producers and plenty of talent back in Washington,'' says Stephen Salyer, PRI's president and C.E.O.They didn't want to be spending resources in the hinterlands.''

GMaps Usability: Secondary Streets, and Label Type Size

I'm a big fan of Google Maps, on all devices. But I have two long-standing complaints. One--the secondary streets are white against a light tan background. It makes them almost invisible. This is true on the PC and even worse on tablets in daylight or printouts.

Two--the labels on street names are too small. This even after invoking the Labs option to make them bigger. This is just another example of the larger, long-standing theme that smartphones need to be more farsighted-friendly.

Why Do Some People Claim Vinyl LPs Are Superior?

Almost since the dawn of CDs, there has been a minority contingent that claims vinyl is superior. They tend to throw around adjectives like "warmer". Although I don't claim to be an audiophile, I don't think it is true. I do have a theory to explain the attitude.

Back in the days of vinyl LPs, you could easily discern who was serious about good sound. A vinyl LP, if not handled very carefully and played on good equipment, degraded steadily. So most people's LPs, if played often, were somewhere between moderately degraded to horribly scratched.

Only if you carefully handled your LPs, cleaned them every time before playing  with an expensive brush like this, and maintained a high-quality turntable--only then would you have good sound. Then CDs hit, and every slob who didn't even put the media back in its container could enjoy the same fine sound that you, the audiophile, felt is your birthright.

Cheesecake Factory Pretty Good

This article, though it is not primarily about the Cheesecake Factory, makes the same point that I have been struck by. The Cheesecake Factory food tastes surprisingly good and fresh, given the collossal extent of its menu.

Google's Second Best Bet in Social Networking

It's been a year or so since Google rolled out Google+. I never use it, I don't really know anyone who does. No buzz. But they should probably still keep it alive. I think their second best bet for succeeding in social networking Google's second best bet in social networking is to wait for Facebook to stumble. I believe the pressure to deliver short-term profits, given the poor stock performance, ironically increases the chance they may do something really dumb. Google should be prepared for that day.

(So what is the best bet? They should buy LinkedIn.)

Finding Your Car in Parking Garage

I like how some parking garages are starting to have fliers that you pick up at the door, to remind you at least what level you parked on. I think NFC tags would be a nice way to take this a step further.

Twitter Customer Service

I have read some articles on how companies use Twitter for customer service. The crux of the article is that they try to respond to each Tweet. I sort of get this, and I sort of don't.

The don't get part is--what is unique about Twitter? And, assuming that the vast majority of the issues are negative, why encourage a medium that is public? My point is that Twitter doesn't really allow companies to do anything that they couldn't have been doing all along via email, if they had wanted to make the same kind of investment. I.e., rather than responding to emails with robot-generated messages, if they had actually taken the same time to field emails as they do Twitter, the result would be the same.

So how to explain the difference? I think it is the sum of a few things. One, the fact that Twitter is public cuts two ways. First, it increases a company's motivation to respond. The second way the public nature of Twitter differentiates it from email is that it may, just may, temper the extent to which people complain irrationally and unreasonably, as compared to email. This is probably a sustainable difference, even though people could, if they catch on, create a different Twitter account for their corporate complaints.

Two, the way Twitter has grown is relatively fast but somewhat linear. So the volume of Tweets has probably been much more manageable than email might be. I am curious to see how long that lasts, because as more people catch on to the fact that the way to get a company's attention it to call them out on Twitter, the volume may become overwhelming, just like email would be.

Three, the Twitter audience may be a self-selecting audience worth paying special  attention to. Higher-income, which is important for obvious reasons. More sophisticated, which is important because: one, the feedback may be more discerning and useful; two, because they may be influencers.

Okay, so as I assess what I have written so far, I think that I have answered my own question. Clearly the question that follows is--how long will Twitter remain a privileged avenue for customer service? My prediction is 2-5 years. Either it will become clogged, or it will decline in popularity.

NYT: Secret E-Scores Chart Consumers' Buying Power

These digital scores, known broadly as consumer valuation or buying-power scores, measure our potential value as customers. What's your e-score? You'll probably never know. That's because they are largely invisible to the public. But they are highly valuable to companies that want - or in some cases, don't want - to have you as their customer.

Very interesting stuff. I have long been intrigued by the thought that companies should be better at knowing who the profitable customers are, and aren't. Banks in particular I think have been going in this direction for over a decade.

Lately, Tires Plus has quit trying to upsell me on unnecessary maintenance...I wonder if their system has figured out is a waste of time?

Likewise, the last time I bought a cheap laptop at Best Buy, they didn't try to upsell me on anything--no extended warranty, no performance optimiazation, nothing.

Solution To Empty Seats at Olympics

Article describing the problem of too many no-shows for seats reserved for "the Olympics family--sponsors, organizers, athletes. Part of the problem is "that which is free is of no value" mindset. One solution I have heard used is to reverse the usual nature of goods and payment. You require the recipients of the free tickets to provide a credit card deposit. If the ticket is not used, then their card is charged. If the complimentary ticket is used, then the deposit is canceled.

Another idea would be to take a page from the airlines' playbook, and overbook on a statistically-driven basis, and start bumping the no-shows. This would require selling some of the late standby seats on a non-reserved basis.

This is exactly the Android opportunity HTC missed

Marco Arment: First of all, geeks are a very large and influential market. As one big example, if not for geeks, Firefox would never have started to catch on in 2004 and broken Internet Explorer’s reign. We installed Firefox on every non-geek’s computer we could find. And while we were there, we set everyone’s search engine to Google instead of Yahoo or MSN, and we made fun of their AOL email addresses until they switched to Gmail. Our preferences matter.

Marco is writing about the Apple App store, but the core point--that capturing the hearts and minds of geeks can lead market-share success--could equally apply to Android. If a manufacturer (HTC would be the most obvious choice) or maybe carrier (T-Mobile) had courted the vanilla-craving geek market from the outset, they could have established a Firefox-like "recommended by the leading geeks" reputation.

Tone down the material arms race

If all male elk could decide to, say, halve the size of their antlers it would benefit the species as a whole. Those with the largest antlers would still maintain their advantage in fighting for mates, but the species as a whole would be less vulnerable to predators. Of course, Frank realises that elk are not in a position to make such decisions, but he believes humans can learn from the paradox. For instance, Americans often feel obliged to organise expensive and lavish wedding celebrations as a result of social pressure. If everyone agreed to scale down their weddings then the whole

Yes!

Did Ice-T Really Rob Banks?

The rapper/entertainer Ice-T was, improbably, the guest of the week for "Not My Job" on the brilliant NPR show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" a couple of years ago. I heard the segment the first time, and then I heard it yesterday in a re-broadcast. It was quite funny, and he came off as reasonably likeable (a feat in istelf, since certainly anything about "gangsta rappa" is about 10 strikes in my book of taste, temperament and sensibility).

In keeping with how that segment of the show is set up, he talked about his personal biography. No surprise, this included a troubled youth and young adulthood: "You know, I was out on the streets doing everything. I mean, I robbed banks. I did all kinds of things." The part about "robbed banks" seriously set off my BS detector. It's just not that easy to rob banks--plural--and not get caught. Does not happen very often. I don't believe it is true, at most I think he might have considered a bank robbery. Maybe.

So anyway I decided to see what I could find on the internet. I didn't put a whole lot of time into it, but I didn't readily find any authoritative sources. I did, however, find this article from The Guardian, where he goes into more detail about  his criminal youth. And I find it even more unconvincing.

He talks about robbing jewelry stores and getting away with it as easily as pick-pocketing might be (and I'm not sure how easy that is). And then the topper: "I never been to prison. I never been caught". Just. Too. Improbable.

I see this as just another variation on the human weakness for a story. In this case, Ice-T needs (or needed) a story to establish his "street cred"[1]. The fact that he has never been to prison is actually a problem. So he invents a back-story that gives him the cred and explains away the fact that he lacks the "badge of cred" of doing prison time. Yech.

_________
[1] I loathe this term, but I'll use it here because it seems to fit.

Next Issue Experiment

How Next Issue can rescue magazine publishing

Very interesting i have thought for a long time that subscriptions are the way to go.

Jargonwatch: Early Days

My trained ears detect that "early days" is starting to catch on. I can definitely remember hearing it twice in the past week, once during the Tour de France. That was from Phil Liggett, so I thought it might be a Britishism. Just now I heard it on NPR.

Definition: Too early in an undertaking to make a definitive judgment.

Example: The breakaway has an 8 minute lead, but of course it's early days in this 200 km stage, and the Peleton will almost surely overtake them before the finsish.

Assessment: A nice, colorful expression with clear meaning. Fine for occasional use, but it will quickly become tiresome with frequent use.

Genesis of an Urban Legend - Rare

It is rare to be able to trace an urban legend back to its undisputed origin. This Radiolab story on the origin of the High Five accomplishes that.  As soon as I heard the urban legend version, even before it was revealed as a UL, I was pretty sure that was the case. What gives it away? First, the story just has too many moving parts. Second, the ending is so pat, like the punch-line to a 6th-grade joke. Taken together, it has the feel of an elaborate build-up to a simplistic punchline, intended to obscure the improbable simplicity of the punchline, by burying it in excessive detail.

Sleets grew up in Campbellsburg, KY and starred on the basketball team at Eminence High School.  When he was young, his father, Lamont Sleets, Sr. would frequently entertain visits from his old army buddies.  Sleets Sr. served in Vietnam, in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry regiment.  "It was the Bobcat division," Mont said, "but my dad and his friends always called it 'The Five.'"  Sleets Sr. and his army friends started an informal greeting between them while serving in Vietnam.  It consisted of extending their arm straight up in the air with all five fingers parted and saying the name of their division: "Five."  Sleets thinks that when he was around 2 or three years old, it was only natural to want to emulate the old army men that gathered in his house.  Since it was tough for a youngster to keep track of all the different names of the visitors, the saying of "Five" became young Mont Sleets' universal salutation for his fathers friends.  Sleets recalls the story with the weariness of anybody recounting the family stories they heard over and over while growing up, but not without telltale signs of enthusiasm throughout: "They'd walk in the door, and a three year old kid, he doesn't know the difference between all these grown-ups.  But they're all sayin' 'Five' with their hand up like this, so I just start saying to them, 'Hi, Five!' like it was their name."

Article: Power Tools: The Libraries of the Future

I really like the idea of libraries as centers of sharing things, not just books (my prior post on the general idea). If we could learn to better share infrequently used implements, we would save money, save resources, feel more connected band just maybe, long-long-term, have more leisure time without even sacrificing material standard of living!

Data Is Like Evidence

I have always preferred data in the singular, but long ago grew tired of the linguistic debate. For whatever reason, the other day I was thinking that data is a lot like evidence, which of course is well-established as a mass, uncountable noun.

Idea for small businesses to game Yelp

Include a QR code link to your enterprise on Yelp, with the check or receipt. Except instruct your staff to do it very sparingly--only for 10% of customers who are clearly delighted with your enterprise.

I plead guilty to holding this view and not having read him

Scribd.comhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/114566742/Fear-and-Loathing-on-the-Campaign-Trail-72
: "Hunter had such a brilliantly flashy narrative style that a lot of people were fooled into thinking that’s all he was—a wacky, drug-addled literary party animal with a gift for memorable insults and profanity-laden one-liners. The people who understood him the least (and a lot of these sorry individuals came out of the woodwork, bleating their complaints on right-wing talk shows and websites, when Thompson died) had this idea that he was just the journalistic version of a rock star, an abject hedonist with a gift for the catchy tune who was popular with kids because he stood for Letting Loose and Getting Off without consequence."

Criticality of Macr Resurgence vs iPod

This point is overlooked a lot in discussions of Apple...I remember what a watershed it was when they moved, seemingly effortlessly, from traditional proprietary, Mac OS base to BSD Unix. It was like I woke up one day and all the geeks who were not interested in the Mac were suddenly in love with it.

And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren’t already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps.That’s one of the biggest reasons there was so much pent-up developer interest in the iPhone before the App Store opened: these consumer-product developers were all using Macs already. As the dominant consumer platform shifted from the web to apps over the last four years, most talented consumer-product developers built products for their app platform of choice during that time: the Apple ecosystem.

Example of why Io mistrust Samsung

To add to the fun, Samsung have some strange ideas about my willingness to buy into their hardware ecosystem. Apple's products use the now-familiar dock connector instead of regular micro-USB. This is annoying, but (a) you can buy a tiny dock connector to micro-USB dongle for about £5 if it irritates you sufficiently, and (b) there are lots of cheap third-party cables. Lots of third party kit out there uses the dock connector, which has been stable for about 8 years: the evidence is in the shape of all those alarm clock radios and speaker docks. Samsung, in contrast, invented a wholly new and incompatible dock connector for the Galaxy S II tablet. One that is not compatible with earlier Galaxy tablets released as recently as late 2010. The cable sells separately for $20 (so if you lose the cable for your tablet you're stiffed paying nearly 10% of the total price for a replacement wire to the wall wart).

Hate Facebook Apps that Insist on Posting on your Behalf

I DO NOT need apps to post on my behalf. The world simply does NOT need to know that I just played a turn in one of my half-dozen concurrent WWF games. I reject all apps that ask for this permission. Unfortunately, there appears to be no "line-item" veto on that, so I have to reject the whole app.

IVRs have gotten a lot better

Both actual wait times, and the fact that the systems have gotten pretty good about telling you the average wait time. Bonus points for: 

• Offering to call you back
• Advice about best time to call
• Friendly, on-shore CSRs

Black marks for

• Making it very hard to break out to a rep

Focus-Stealing: Just one example of why people like new, mobile UIs

Focus-stealing is a very old problem, but Webex is a terrible offender. Worst part--it does it when the meeting is being closed! So, the use case:

1. Webex meeting occupies your attention
2. Meeting winds down
3. Jump over to whatever you urgently need to do
4. Webex grabs the scope

Solution...Windows should have some kind of notification bar/window, where an app can tell you if it is doing stuff and maybe you want to check it out.

In fact, the whole notification metaphor is a problem. A lot of people live and die by their Outlook calendar reminders. But if your reminder happens to activate while you are away from your desk, it is very easy to not see it. Contrast this with the Android notification bar, which is low-key but nicely persistent.

These are old, crufty problems. Perhaps they could be solved in legacy UIs, but there is so much resistance to doing so. Then a fresh, new UI paradigm comes along, simpler, cleaner and without these problems, and it feels so good.

(While we are on the subject of the Android Notification Bar, it is not perfect...it gets way too cluttered with unimportant notifications. It seems like more and more apps want to put their icon into the notification bar. That is more analogous to the Windows system tray (status) than a true notification (something happened, pay attention).)

Employers: Qualified Workers Aren't In Jobs Pool

This is a pretty good report, discussing the fact that even though unemployment is high, employers have trouble filling certain jobs.

One thing we know is that if employers were willing to do a little more training, and maybe there was some way the government could give them an incentive to do that, they might be able to take people who are capable of doing jobs but don't have exactly the right skills. And the thing is, the software needs to be redone so it's not so picky and it flags, for consideration, by a human being - an applicant who doesn't quite fit the bill but could do the job

I do not believe HR is very data-driven. For instance, do they track data that tells them how good their screening is?

James Traficant, Worst Congressman in Recent Memory?

I stumbled across this interesting article about Jim Traficant and the Youngstown, OH area on Longform. I remember seeing an excerpt of a Traficant speech, years ago (when respect for Congresspeople was a bit higher) and being positively dumbfounded that the ill-groomed, blustering jackass I on the screen was, in fact, a U.S. Congressman. This article told the rest of the story--and it was even worse than I had imagined. #iHatePopulism #AndiHateCorruptionEvenMore

Why I returned my HTC One S

I just returned my HTC One S under buyer's remorse for a number of reasons. I am going to opt instead for the Samsung Galaxy S3. I am really a bit disappointed about this. We need strong competitors to Samsung--HTC is the most likely candidate. And I have been mis-treated by Samsung before (Galaxy S/Vibrant). So I really wanted HTC to have a winner here. Alas, it was not to be.

Severely Broken Multi-Tasking

As has been more publicized for the HTC One X, the memory management is so aggressive that you can barely multi-task at all. It's like the Generation 1 iPhone. Especially a killer, since one of my main uses cases is to listen to streaming NPR.

Signal Fluctuation Issues

I think the signal fluctuation issue was largely fixed by the recent update. Pre-update, sometimes I would spontaneously have no signal at all. Post-update, sometimes the signal drops precipitously for no reason at all, but hasn't gotten to the point of "X for no signal".

Bluetooth Spontaneously Disconnecting/Crashing

The bluetooth would spontaneously disconnect, pretty frequently--probably once every 2-3 hours of use. A couple of times I think it even caused the phone to re-boot. Again, since my #1 use case for my phone is voice calls for work (I know, who would have though, voice a primary usage for a smartphone! :) ), and my #2 is streaming NPR, this is a big problem.

Screen Size

I knew what I was getting, but I had really wanted a 4.6" widescreen (like GS2). I was willing to compromise on this, but it was a factor. Had I known T-Mobile would get the GS3 so promptly, I probably would have held out from Day 1.

App Association (Probably Intentional) Bug

In Android, you can set a default app association for various "Intents", such as Contacts, Messages, Home Button. The first time the Intent occurs, it will list all the available "Intent Receivers" (Apps), and let you choose if you want one to be the default. From then on, you don't have to choose, you get the default. In HTC ICS, it seems like this is broken--I set the default, but it is never remembered. This gets very, very annoying. Especially for a Launcher app that replaces the Home Screen.

Menu Button

For the many apps not updated to ICS, you lose quite a bit of space in portrait mode, due to the on-screen menu button. I know this isn't HTC's fault, they are following the Google spec, but it was a real bummer (and compounds the screen size compromise). I am thinking Samsung made a much better choice with the GS3 by going against Google's intent and including the menu button. Surprised this hasn't been discussed more, it is a real bummer.

eBay Scam Prevention Idea

I previously wrote about my first attempt to sell an expensive, extra cell phone on eBay, and attracting overseas scammers both times. After the second time I called eBay, and they promised to add "filters" to my account that would prevent it happening again. Well, all the filters accomplished was to raise the bar and attract a (slightly) more sophisticated scammer. (Hint: any buyer email with a plea and a gratuitous "God bless" thrown in is probably an overseas scammer ;) )

Stipulated that I am an eBay newb, but I can think of an approach that seems like it would fend off such scammers. Have an option--recommended for all newb sellers--to require the bidder to have a PayPal account with a $20 balance. Upon winning the bid, PayPal places a hold on that balance, until the full payment is received. If a scam, the $20 is forfeited, of course. Not likely that will happen, scammers won't leave a money trail with real money in the first place. The point is deterrence.

The money doesn't have to go to the seller, it can go to eBay. Don't want to create any incentive for sellers to invent scammers for their own profit.

"Playback" does not prove that multi-taskers can absorb external information

With few exceptions, I don't believe that humans are generally effective at multi-tasking. It is totally a myth that the upcoming generations will be great multi-taskers[1]. Here is another myth to be aware of: I call it the "playback fallacy".

I will say something to my kids, notice they are absorbed with the screen, and ask them to pay attention. They will claim that they are paying attention, and will offer as evidence the ability to "play back", verbatim, what I have just said.

The problem is that they played back from "cache". Very analogous to the small amount of cache memory on a CPU. Information can be quickly stored and accessed there, but it is very volatile. It only becomes data when it is actively processed and stored to a less volatile location. So, if I hadn't said anything, the cache would have either been over-written by the next small stream of information, or decayed quickly within a few minutes, and the info would never have been absorbed.
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[1] Multi-tasking means actively processing more than one activity, concurrently. It should not be confused with "context-switching", which means being able to juggle and switch between multiple activities. I think humans have fewer absolute biological limitations on the ability to context-switch, though it is still problematic. One, it imposes the overhead necessary to manage the contexts. Two, there is risk of contexts over-writing each other's memory. It seems possible, though not proven, that today's youth will be better context-switchers.

eBay Scam Anatomy

I've only sold something on eBay once or twice before, and it was low value. This time I had an unopened, $400+ HTC One S cutting-edge smartphone to unload (it was part of a Buy One, Get One deal from T-Mobile).

So with the help of my son, who has more eBay experience by far than I do, I listed it with a $375 minimum bid and a $450 Buy It Now. Based on other selling prices, I was pretty confident of clearing $400.

The phone was only listed 1 day, when I got an email that it had been purchased via Buy It Now. Shortly after that, I got an email from the buyer, who was in the U,K., asking for my email address so that he could pay me via PayPal.

That seemed fishy to me, I know you can pay someone, for anything, if you have their PayPal email, but I didn't see why he couldn't just click "Pay" within eBay. It also didn't help that he had been an eBay member since...earlier the same day. So I called eBay Customer Service.

I got a bad vibe right away. The person on the other end seemed possibly competent, but tired and uninterested. But they assured me that the request for an email address seemed valid, and in any event, I would be protected as a seller. Somewhat skeptically, I sent the buyer my email address.

My skepticism was rewarded. Hours later, I received an email from the buyer's PayPal account, telling me the payment had been made, but couldn't be released until I provided a shipping number. Oh, and would I mind shipping it to his son in Lagos, Nigeria?--it was to be a birthday present. At that point, the tell-tale fractured English wasn't even necessary to convince me that this was a scam, and a closer inspection revealed that it was a phishing email with a spoofed, pay-pal-like email address[1].

So now I have to go through the whole eBay complaint process, who knows how long that will take. Basically, this has supported my skepticism about whether eBay is worth the hassle. (Oh, did I mention the phone was actually listed before this, and eBay sent me an email telling me it had been won by a fraudulent buyer, and canceled the transaction?)

I know it is hard for eBay to eliminate scammers, but the inattentiveness of the Customer Service person is inexcusable. There were so many clues.

Also, it seems like eBay's defaults leave a lot to be desired. After about 10 minutes research, I concluded I should have only accepted domestic shipments and, much more importantly, should have required immediate payment, which would require the person have an existing PayPal account. So my point is, with all the Big Data that eBay has, can't they connect the dots:

• I'm a newb seller
• Selling a pricey electronics item

...and advise me as to the safest defaults to use? I'm not sure if they fail in this way because they are lazy, or because they don't want to scare people.
___________

[1] As spoofed emails go, it was somewhat realistic, until you got to the actual content. If they would hire a competent Enligh-language writer, they might actually fool a few people.

P.S. I feel really, really sorry for anyone who lives in Nigeria and actually wants to buy stuff off of eBay! :(

Early game intentional fouls

Stipulated that I am no student of the game, but...I think fouling in basketball to avoid a near-certain score is often a bad idea. Especially early in the game.

In last night's game 7 Celtics vs Sixers, Rajon Rondo committed a foul on the offensive player who had a pretty open path to the basket, early in the first quarter.  By late first quarter, he found himself benched to avoid foul trouble[1]. Then later in the game, he again was flirting with foul trouble and spent some extra time sitting down.

Rondo is a key starter on the Celtics. Losing his services is a big deal. He traded an important early foul to save, on average, about 0.5 pts. Seems like a bad deal to me.

How does the math on that work? Here's how...an ordinary field goal is worth 2 points. NBA players shoot 75% on average, meaning the "expected value" of a trip to the line is 1.5 pts. 2.0 minus 1.5 = 0.5. Seems like a pretty poor return to me, and that is the best-case. Most significantly, it doesn't quantify the risk of putting the opposition into the bonus earlier.[2]
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[1] Whether you should bench a key player for being in foul trouble, so readily, is the subject for another blog post.

[2] It also assumes a 100% chance the offensive player would have scored. Even with breakaway dunks, you do see a few misses. And this wasn't a breakaway--it was just an open lane to the basket. I would guesstimate an 85-90% chance it would have been converted.

Let's Spike the Tired Old Notion of the Suffering Artist

Sometimes I would like to be a novelist. A micro reason is novelists get to explore  ideas that might be verboten or just never come up on ordinary conversation. A macro reason is to explore a major idea or theme. The latter purpose is the occasion for this post.

I think a great theme for a novel would be the bankruptcy of the notion of the suffering artist. While I might concede that some great artists have suffered quite a bit, and perhaps their suffering was to some extent related to their greatness as artists, I have two observations:

1. My belief is that they would have suffered no matter what, due to problems of temperament or mental conditions. I reject the idea that it was a choice they made, as a sacrifice for their art.
   
2. In the meantime, that mythology of suffering misleads so many young, talented but insufficiently gifted, would-be artists, at a substantial cost in lost happiness.

I stumbled onto an article that thoroughly explores this territory (my italics):

One can see why the cursed poets believed they had been chosen for so terrible and sublime a fate. Their mythology of genius born in suffering helped make their hard lot endurable, as countless adolescents who have read J. D. Salinger can testify. But it also drove them deeper into misery—drove them to seek out misery, to cherish drunkenness, madness, ordeal, as a source of poetic inspiration. That wisdom comes of suffering, at least for prophets and tragic heroes, is an ancient truth; but is it wisdom to chase after suffering, as though the evil of the day were insufficient?

There is something perverse about these poets and their view of their calling. Their loneliness, drunkenness, disease, the early deaths of or abandonment by their fathers, the tauntings and beatings they took from their schoolmates: These and other blows became the fundamental truths about the world and the stuff of their poetry. They did not imitate Christ’s selfless suffering. Instead, with a poet’s vanity, each relished in his own way his martyrdom, championed it, flaunted it.

Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud: They were remarkable artists, yes, among the greatest of their time. But the perversity of unhappiness cherished and cultivated constricts their excellence: The pursuit of unhappiness assumed too large a place in their souls.

Angry Birds Is Boring

Definitely agree with his characterization of stupid games. Casual gamers are missing outon one of fhe very best uses of smartphomes--reading devices.

Advice to Grads: Industry Matters

Advice I would give to young people charting their careers--all things being equal, seek an employer in a large, well-recognized industry (doesn't have to be a large employer, but a large industry). Example industries would be healthcare, finance, insurance, retail, pharmaceuticals, petroleum..

For the first 12 years of my career, I worked in the elevator industry. A very small, insular industry. My lack of obviously transferable industry experience was a real handicap in trying to change jobs.

(Eventually I did make the change, and it was no problem at all. The sad truth is that most recruiters and even hiring managers are terrible at being able to evaluate talent . So they way overrate nominal industry experience, and way underrate aptitude.)

In-App Purchases Are Evil

Okay, I don't know if they are entirely evil. But I don't like them. People never like the "getting nickeled and dimed" feeling, and nothing feels more like that than getting hit up for in-app purchases in the middle of using an app you already paid for.

Mostly this occurs in the games world, which means nothing to me since I don't waste time on them play them. But I ran into it for the first time on an app I already paid for--Words With Friends. And for a very basic feature that really should be built-in: computing the score of your candidate play.

Like I say, I recognize that app developers need to make a living, and don't always find that easy on Android. I hated the advertising in WWF, so I happily sprung for the paid version. I think it was $2.99. Maybe the publisher would argue that $5 or more is a fair price, so I'm still getting a good deal even if I pay $2 for the in-app feature. Could be, but like I said, I instinctively resist getting nickeled-and-dimed. Too much of a slippery slope.

Facebook IPO illustrates widespread misconceptions

Facebook IPO'd yesterday, and there was a lot of ink spilled about how little "pop" the stock experienced on its first day of trading. It closed up just a fraction over its IPO price. Many people greeted this a sign that Facebook or the IPO had problems. That's nonsense. It shows that the stock was priced almost perfectly (from Facebook's perspective).

The perfect price for an initial offering is very, very near the end-of-day equilibrium price. Anything less is leaving money on the table. That's what the brokerage house managing the offering, and their favorite customers, want, but there is no reason for the company going public to do them any special favors. The price needs to go up, just a little, to ensure that the offering is fully subscribed. But that's all.

Then today the stock was down 12%, on a day the overall market was up. My interpretation--the lack of an obvious bubble was enough to torpedo the stock. It reminds me of the sadly funny Onion headline from a few years back: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In".

Everything you always wanted to know about PUNCH LIST

I used the term "punch list" at work, and someone asked me what it meant. While I was confident that I knew the common usage of the expression, I realized that I had no idea where it came from. Here is the answer...the full Wikipedia entry is here, but the punch line (pun intended) is this:

A punch list is generally a list of tasks or "to-do" items. In the U.S. construction industry, a punch list is the name of a contract document used in the architecture and building trades to organize the completion of a construction project. In other places, it is also commonly known as "snag list".
…
The phrase takes its name from the historical process of punching a hole in the margin of the document, next to one of the items on the list. This indicated that the work was completed for that particular construction task. Two copies of the list were punched at the same time to provide an identical record for the architect and contractor.

Family plans are great for smartphone upgrades

I have 5 people on a family plan. Is that ruinously expensive? No, because it is our beloved, low-cost TMo. I am on 2 Gb, everybody else is 200 Mb (grandfathered with no overages), for a grand total of $60 in data charges. That gives me 5 upgrades every 22 months, or an upgrade every 4.5 months. I take the latest and greatest, and the family gets my hand-me-downs.

Jargonwatch: Hands Down

I can't remember the first time I heard the use of the phrase "hands down" to denote a clear or easy victory. As in "Wilt Chamberlain was, hands down, the most dominant NBA player in any era". It's been at least 4 years. But recently I have noticed a major increase in usage--I seem to hear it more than once per week, including from my teens.

I'm sure nobody who uses it knows the origin. That would have included me, until I looked it up:

Jockeys need to keep a tight rein in order to encourage their horse to run. Anyone who is so far ahead that he can afford to slacken off and still win he can drop his hands and loosen the reins - hence winning 'hands down'. This is recorded from the mid 19th century; for example, 'Pips' Lyrics & Lays, 1867: 

"There were good horses in those days, as he can well recall, But Barker upon Elepoo, hands down, shot by them all."

 It began to be used in a figurative sense, to denote an easy win in other contexts, from the early 20th century.
 

Why fiction is good for you

I thought this article was an especially good case for what I have always believed--reading fiction is good for you in many ways, including morally/spiritually. I am always surprised by how many people say they never read fiction.

Dave Winer: Politics Is Not War

Dave Winer puts it very well:

Many people see politics as I see sports. There are two teams, and my team is going to beat yours, and nothing else matters. Winning is everything. And that's a bad mistake. Because as we noted yesterday, while sports is a simulation of war -- it's harmless to project tribalism on the symbols of basketball or baseball -- it's not harmless to do that with politics. We're not manipuating symbols there. There are real armies and economies at stake. Nuclear weapons. The viability of the planet. The future of our species. If we see this as war, then it is war. How much do you know about war, and do you really want to usher it in so quickly, without thinking.

One More Routine Altered by InfoTech

Add to the list of old routines altered by InfoTech: Listening to the news (for me, that is synonmous with "NPR"). This is an example of technology takes away, and technology gives.

Like so many, I did almost all of my NPR-listening in the car. Morning + afternoon commutes, that added up to an hour each weekday. But now I telecommute. Time-in-car is drastically reduced--some days to zero. But streaming allows me to listen even more than before. Basically, when performing any mundane chore--kitchen cleanup, laundry, yardwork--I walk around with my wireless headset and consume the news. Not only do I listen more, I listen better--I get to skip the long hour of  Minnesota news, and all the music stories.

I am actually trying to find a way to donate directly to NPR, and bypass my local station, which I have little use for. (Now if only they would clean up the buggy-as-heck Android app.)

Game Giant Forced To Play Catch Up

I like to hear that Electronic Arts, purveyor of expensive video games, is struggling to compete with producers of low-cost video games (i.e., Zynga). Not because I play, let alone, buy the things, because I don't. I like it because it is a nice triumph for Doing Things the Cheap Way.

Food Trucks Seek 'That Mystical Spot'

This article provides a good example of why "government is the problem" rhetoric sells well. Food trucks in Manhattan covet the perfect parking space, but there are way too few of those. In an effort to control what might otherwise become a third-world-like, chaotic mess, NYC holds an  auction, to ensure that carefully designed food truck-friendly spaces are allocated with maximum economic efficiency imposes many layers of byzantine rules to plague the food truck vendors, create jobs enforcing the rules, and undoubtedly offer rich opportunities for low-level bribery in exchange for non-enforcement.

Seriously, is there any other explanation for such an inefficient, frustrating approach that also ignores a nice, opaque way of raising tax revenue?!

I think the lesson here, of interest to non-ideological centrists and "good government types", is: government will be better when it does fewer things, well.

Next up: the artificial shortage of taxicabs in NYC (and many other cities).

AT&T Exec regrets offering unlimited data? That's Karmic justice.

"My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat," he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute's Global Conference on Wednesday. "And it's a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital."

I agree with him in principle--there should have been more options than "all you can eat" data. Here's the thing, though--it is the phone company's anti-consumer greed that created that monster in the first place! That was, for all intents and purposes, the only option offered, way back in the pre-iPhone era, when users were only going to consume small portions of data. It was a huge rip-off, but they very intentionally offered no practical alternative. It was either that big $30 commitment, or pay-per-megabyte at about $2 Mb--literally 1000X the unit cost of all-you-can eat. Karmic.

PS--AT&T is at it again. Their entry-level data plan is already 50% more than T-Mobile's, but now they are going to a $20 minimum. For $20, T-Mobile gives you TEN TIMES as much data, with a feature that eliminates overages in favor of throttling down to 2G speeds.

Is Competition Over-Emphasized?

This David Brooks article on competition versus creativity rings true for me.

One of [Peter Thiel's] core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

Stipulated that competition will always be a big part of business. No doubt. But competition is a means not an end. I remember a former boss--who I never felt much affinity with--saying, "I wake up every morning and think 'let's go beat [Brand X]' ". I thought that was off-base. First of all, what does "beat" mean? Does it mean sell more units, or make more money? (There can be a big difference--just ask Apple.) Does it mean destroy the competition by any means? (Even if it risks violating regulations or laws?) Much better to wake up and think "let's go create, build and deliver great products that will delight customers, who will pay enough to provide a healthy profit margin".

Along the same lines, 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.

Pocket/Read It Later

The app I use by far the most on my phone, Read It Later, has changed their name. I don't love the name change. Pocket is okay, but Read It Later was wonderfully self-descriptive, and well-established.

I am completely indifferent to the snazzy visual stuff they have on their web view. I am text-oriented, and I use it mostly on my phone. The phone app does look a bit nicer, but only trivially so. I am very happy with the long-overdue near-full-screen mode[1] (all apps for which screen space is at a premium should have this). But I still have two ideas for improvement. One is a quibble, one is a legitimate refinement.

1. First the quibble. I don't want to have to long-press the screen to turn on full screen mode, for each and every article. I want "default to full screen mode" to be a Setting. (Also, I bet a lot of users will never discover the ability to toggle this, since it is so hidden.)
2. Now the enhancement. Along with point #1, the perfect implementation would be to automagically display the bottom toolbar when you scroll to the end of the article. So that the checkmark is right there, for me to click "done". They already do this at the top of the article, where you have buttons to toggle between offline text view and full web view.

[1] I say "near" full-screen because the Android notification bar is not hidden, like it is on Kindle and some other apps. I don't see this as a big deal, it's important and not too many pixels. Being able to hide the native Pocket function bar was the key thing.

T-Mobile: 0 for 3 on Rebates

This Valentine's Day I picked up a free-after-rebate HTC Sensation from T-Mobile. So I had to pay $150 at the counter, file the noxious rebate paperwork, cross my fingers and hope the promised $150 Visa card arrived 8 weeks later.

4 weeks after submitting the rebate, I received a letter stating my rebate had been rejected. The reason provided was cryptic, but seemed to suggest I didn't have a qualifying rate plan. I knew I did, though.

I've been through this drill before, so of course I saved all my paperwork. When I called the TMo rebate center, it took the CSR all of 20 seconds to figure out the problem. My rebate had been submitted on the wrong form. The very wrong form the nice people at the TMo store had handed to me. She nicely fixed the problem on the spot.

This is a perfect example of why I think rebates are unethical. It's the third time in 3 years this has happened with T-Mobile. The previous year, I took advantage of their "free data for a year" promotion (really not free, just $10 off per month--still a very nice discount on a family plan). For 5 straight months, I had to call to get them to give me the discount (they seem to have finally fixed it permanently). Then the time before that was another free-after-rebate handset, and again, the wrong form provided by the TMo store.

In all cases, the Tmo people were very nice, didn't argue with me, and came across with the credit. But SO much time and tedium, on my part and theirs. If I didn't know better, I would believe that there was some very powerful labor Union of Rebate Processors, furiously lobbying to require all mobile phone special offers be provided in the form or mail-in rebates!

I am actually a TMo fan, due mainly to their lower prices, but my loyalty is starting to wear thin.

Jargonwatch: (Information) Technology "Lift"

Definition: to enable a business capability through information technology.

Example: Rolling out the new online rebate status tracking system will require about $2 million of technology lift.

Assessment: not inherently objectionable, I think it is a riff on the aerospace term. Like most business jargon, though, it is starting to wear thin. 

Rebates: Unethical?

I think rebates are unethical. Or, at the very least, anti-consumer. One of the reasons that Amazon has my loyalty and goodwill is that I never feel like they are trying to screw me. Rebates are all about screwing the customer (they call it breakage).

Experiential Learning On The Job

This article hypothesizes that Google and Facebook employees are so cossetted that they don't actually experience many of the same mobile technology use cases that ordinary people do, and that is causing them to under-value the importance of mobile design. I don't know if it's true--and it would certainly be ironic in the case of Google, the purveyor of Android--but it stimulated an old thought.

In my early 20s, I read a business book (I think it was Tom Peters "In Pursuit of Excellence", but I can't be sure offhand) and one of the things I remember it talking about was the idea that executives shouldn't be insulated from the day-to-day challenges of their employees. The example I remember was that Disney required its executives to regularly take turns doing very, very mundane things, such as directing in the parking lot.

This has always stuck with me as a great idea. I worked for Otis Elevator the first 12 years of my career. The Otis HQ was in suburban CT. Most of the people who worked there were suburbanites. This matters, because elevators are not very important in suburbs. A suburb-dweller can literally go weeks without needing to take an elevator. So we had no feel for the usage, let alone "culture" of the product. It always seemed ridiculous to me.

Other examples:

• Everyone in IT should regularly take turns using the product and working the Help Desk. I actually suggested this to a CIO once, and they brushed off the idea without even stopping to consider taking it seriously.

• Forbid your insurance company (or any other service provider) from keeping VIP lists. Execs are throwing away a valuable window into quality of service when they allow themselves to experience the Potemkin Village version of the service.

This is all related to the "eating your own dogfood" concept, though not quite the same thing.

Standard Smartphone Feature: Auto-Dim Option

Any app which is likely to be used for extended periods in standby display mode should have the option to auto-dim after an interval. The #1 candidate app for this is the dialer. I use my phone a lot for conference calls, and I need Mute to be handy, so I can't turn off the screen, but it would be fine if it dimmed.

I would also like it in Navigation. Music players is another place it could apply.

It should go without saying that this needs to be a settings option, default to OFF.

Wireless Chargers in Cars

Too expensive, probably not based on the Qi standard, but definitely the wave of the future (in cars, and out).

The wireless charging system consists of a dedicated charging “mat”, placed inside the center console where users can simply toss their compatible devices, start their car up, and begin charging.

What's wrong with "flip-flopping" on the issues?

Conventional political tactics says it's fatal to be viewed as a "flip flopper". There are commentators who lament this, rightly offering observations to the effect that "it can be a mark of growth and wisdom to change one's mind".

I couldn't agree more with that view, but there is a problem with the proposition. They aren't defining their terms. Flip flopping has a strong connotation (maybe denotation) of going back, forth, back, forth. So either changing one's mind, or pretending to, simply to cater to a particular audience or interlocutor. That is an inherently, strongly negative quality.

They are talking about a one-time, directional change of view. The kind of thing that takes time, wisdom, consideration, and, finally, self-honesty and the guts to admit it. A reasonable, honorable even laudable thing, assuming it doesn't happen too often.

Trying the Walled Garden Again

For the most common queries, Dragon Go usually bypasses search engines by taking users directly to Web sites of companies like Amazon, Expedia and OpenTable, which are Nuance partners on the app. If people don't find what they're looking for there, Dragon Go offers traditional Web search.

This is an insta-fail. One of the reasons Google was so successful was the purity of its results--no paid placement. I hate this already.

The benefit for consumers, Nuance executives say, is faster answers in fewer steps. In many cases, Nuance collects a small fee from partner sites when people make restaurant reservations or complete purchases. The app could be construed as a challenge to the likes of Google and Microsoft, which have their own voice products.

Yeah, sure, fewer steps down the walled garden path. Blech.

Phones: Silly, Apple-Inspired Fetish about "Build Material"

I really don't get the fixation so many reviewers and smartphone enthusiasts have on "build materials". It's just a phone, not jewelry, and will likely be replaced in 2 years, max. Subtle aspects of physical appearance are just not that important.

To me, the most important considerations are: 1) reliability--primarily resilience when you drop it; 2) weight; 3) cost. Intangibles about look and feel come a distant fourth, especially since they are largely canceled out when you put your phone in a case of some kind--which is usually still a good idea. A ceramic backplate may help ensure there is no *visible", cosmetic damage when you drop the phone, but I don't think it protects the innards from from the impact, which is the bigger consideration. Nothing protects better than a rubbery coating, and of course that covers up most of the cosmetics related to build materials anyway.

My wife has a Tmo Galaxy S2, the huge one. Yes it is noticeably lighter and thinner than my 4.3" HTC Sensation. Not a deal-breaker difference, but those qualities are more valuable to me than the intangible cosmetics related to build materials.

I "blame" Apple for the obsession with build materials and look and feel.

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People Want Transit-Accessible Housing, But Will They Be Able To Afford It?

People Want Transit-Accessible Housing, But Will They Be Able To Afford It?
Good short article. I think the last sentence nails it: If you build the [transit] lines but don't allow the density, you've really just created a private benefit for people who happen to live near the stations. 

Speaking of Healthcare Reform: Protect Employees of Self-Insured Companies

If you have health coverage through your employer, and your employer self-insures and goes bankrupt, you could wind up being for the bill. I'm not an expert here, I think the intent of ERISA is to prevent this from happening, but it doesn't always do that (you can't get blood from a bankrupt stone).

This strikes me as unfair and wrong. The employee has absolutely no control over this, it is completely arbitrary, and if it happened at the wrong time, could be a complete disaster. I think employees of self-insured companies should be indemnified or insulated in some way. Either the self-insured employer should have to buy backup reinsurance, or the providers that accept the insurance plan should be required to indemnify patients.

Nothing Beats a Parts Washer

I would love to have access to an industrial parts washer. Lacking that, though, I try to make use of my dishwasher. A dishwasher is almost always the most convenient way to clean something--as opposed to manually scrubbing. But if the something in question has lots of acute angles and recessed areas--as so many molded plastic parts do--the dishwasher is more than a convenience, it is the best way to get the job done.

So my wish is that manufactured items would be designed to be dishwasher-friendly. For instance, my microwave has a grille for the air intake. Pretty standard stuff. Unsurprisingly, it collects a lot of grease, and needs to be rinsed and scrubbed at least quarterly. More often would be better, but it is such a nuisance, it has to get to the point where it is very noticeable before we tackle the chore.

The problem is that it runs the length of the over-stove microwave, so is too long to fit in the dishwasher. But if it were of two-piece construction, instead, it would easily fit in the dishwasher. We would probably wash it every week, and it would be almost effortless!

Wegman's

I have been introduced to Wegman's through my visits to my parents and sister in NoVA. It is amazing. I have been threatening to write a feelance article on them. I thought the Slate article and the one it linked to might be the article I have been threatening to write, but they weren't. Too cursory, and also they had a major fallacy--which many commenters pointed out. The really amazing thing about Wegman's isn't how pleasant it is, or what great products, or polite employees. My boutique neighborhood grocery store has those things, albeit on a smaller scale. But I avoid that store if at all possible, because it is so bloody expensive. That is the miracle of Wegman's--it is cheaper than the average grocery store, while delivering high-end in terms of quality, selection and shopping experience.

That, my friends, is a business miracle. And that is why I want to research and write an extended-length article on Wegman's. It seems to me they could march out of Rochester--just as Wal-Mart did from Benton--and conquer the grocery world.

Wireless Charging: Apple Is Missing A Lock-In Opportunity

A big component of Apple's strategy is lock-in. Apple's version of lock-in is somewhat subtler than some--the average Apple customer probably doesn't think "damn, I'm locked in", they just think "hmmm, might be interesting to try Google Music/Android Phone, but I've already got this big investment in iTunes/iOS Apps".

So I'm surprised Apple hasn't targeted wireless charging as a high-potential avenue for lock-in. Wireless charging has been around for a few years, it seems like a clear crowd-pleaser to me. There is a consortium trying to create an industry-standard (Qi), but it seems to be moving very slowly.

I think Apple could swoop in, and make all their devices wireless-chargeable--using a proprietary approach, of course. The wireless-capable batteries would be standard, the profit would come from the external chargers. With their economies of scale and power to move markets, Apple could make it all more affordable than anyone else. Overnight, the huge iOS ecosystem would be committed to Apple's proprietary charging technology, creating one more barrier to Apple users even trying non-Apple products.

"This American Life", Mike Daisey and the Human "Weakness" for A Good Story

In a previous post, I wrote about the human "weakness" for a good story. The core idea was that we humans are very much disposed to welcome, accept and internalize a "good" story. In that post, I didn't spend much time defining the characteristics of a "good" story.

I don't have time and motivation to fully define the term now, either, but I'll flesh it out a bit more. Characteristics that make a story "good" (and, sometimes, "too good to be true") include:

• Linear--the story arc is smooth, steady and in a consistent direction.
• Dense--the critical events occur in a very compressed time or narrative space, typically much richer than you could ever expect (or tolerate!) in real life.
• Drama--the story contains the ingredients--timing, character involvement, utterances--that heighten dramatic effect. Often these involve multiple improbable coincidences.

The NPR show This American Life just broadcast a remarkable episode. It is a program-length retraction of the Mike Daisey episode on work conditions in factories of Apple's China-based suppliers[1]. The episode was based on an adaptation of Daisey's one-man monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

How does this relate to my theme of humans-and-stories? Two ways. First and most obvious--it is a textbook example of the weakness part. Rightly or wrongly, Daisey seemed to believe that to command the audience's attention, he needed to make the story really good. Ira Glass takes issue with that--he seems to say, "no, just tell the story, no need to embellish".

I'm not so sure. Before I explain, let me make a couple of things clear. First--I hugely respect and enjoy Ira Glass. I don't know that much about him, but from my experience as a listener, he is an amazingly talented storyteller and a journalist with the highest integrity. He comes across as a pretty darn likeable and admirable human being, too. Second--no matter what, the ends don't justify the means. Even if it were provably the case that the only way for Daisey to get audience attention is through embellishment--I still don't approve. No good comes from falsification.

So back to my point. Really good stories, and claims of first-hand personal experience are, unfortunately, excessively arresting. One case in point--James Frey and A Million Little Pieces. It was rejected 17 times when submitted as fiction, before being accepted as a memoir[2].

So if Mike Daisey wanted to stay on safe ground, he would have had to eliminate at least one of the two things that made his story so compelling:

• Remove the claim of first-hand experience.
• Keep the story truthful, at the cost of diluting the qualities that made it such a good story.

In my opinion, when working as a dramatist he should opt for the former--admit that many parts are composite, but stick the the spirit of the truth. On the other hand, when (if) working as a journalist, the latter is preferable. Ultimately, I think the two are not fully compatible. It is too much of a stretch for Daisey, a dramatist, to wear the journalists hat. What would have worked much, much better would be for This American Life to have created the report using their in-house journalists, and heavily featured Daisey's work, acknowledging it as drama.

Okay, that's enough for one blog post. In Part 2, I will look more at the role of This American Life in the incident.
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[1] I am writing this having listened to the episode, but without having read about it, other than a few pre-broadcast news items, which alerted me to it in the first place. I added this link after-the fact.

[2] The linked Salon article also does a good job explaining why writers such a Frey or dramatists such as Daisey may be sorely tempted to take liberties.

Time-Zone Awareness: Advanced Calendar Feature

I was on vacation, in a different time zone, and a friend from home asked me to drive them to the airport at 2:45. No problemo, I put it in my calendar right then and there--pick up at 2:45 Wednesday. Only problem--I entered that appointment when I was on EDT, so when I got back home to CDT, that appeared as 3:45. I happened to catch the mistake, but I easily could have blown it.

So what's the solution? I think the best general-purpose short-term solution would be a Calendar program Setting to let users set a home time zone, and then be prompted any time they enter an appointment when not on their home time. The prompt would say "Use Local Time (2:45) or Home Time (3:45)?".

The long-term solution is that we all need to start quoting time in GMT offsets. That's a joke...sort of.

Don't Like Frictionless Sharing

I got a Facebook notification, asking me to validate that I worked with a former colleague at a former employer. Fine, no big deal, I clicked yes. But Facebook--without so much as a "by your leave"--frictionlessly decided that meant that I desired to add my experience at that employer to my own status.

I use Facebook strictly for personal stuff, and segregate professional stuff to LinkedIn. So I don't really have any burning desire to list my employment details on Facebook. I don't really have any objection, so I'm not freaked out, but this is an example of being way too frictionless for my liking. At a minimum, Facebook should have asked me if I wanted to post that.