Archive for the 'Rant' Category

The trouble with nostalgia

Published
by
jason
on September 30, 2008
in Management, Rant and Photography
. 1 Comment

I have been caught many times by the feeling that things used to be simpler, sweeter, or better. When enveloped by the warm blanket of memory, I recall all of those wonderful little details of the holidays with family, or the rampant productivity in the weeks prior to the launch of a new project. This feeling comes on most strongly when I am faced with a problem or frustration with something that seems all too similar.

The trouble starts with the remembering. The human mind has an incredible ability to fool itself into believing that it is recalling or observing with a very high level of detail. Your eyes are only high resolution at the very center. As a result, your brain has to splice together the images from your rapidly moving eyes into a single coherent, seemingly high resolution, image.

For fun, take a moment and look at one spot about 20 feet away from you. Concentrate on not moving your eyes, and think about how much of what you see is actually in focus. Very little.

If this is the input for our memories, how do we imagine that our memories can serve to help us recall what really happened? Even if you argue that there are all sorts of other sensory and emotional inputs that help to capture a more complete picture, think about your favorite birthday. Great, right? Think hard now; was it all great? Did you get annoyed because someone was 10 minutes late? Did your Mom get you a stupid gift? But, you also got a promotion, raise, and the coolest birthday present ever from your best friend. The emotional quotient for the day is a weighted sum. Not all of the events mattered in the same amount, and so the memory is like our vision experiment, very clear on a few details and everything else is pretty fuzzy.

Where this gets us in trouble is when you try to apply the wisdom of your nostalgic memory to your current problem.

The last time this went really well. What was different? Instead of this we had that. Instead of doing that we did this.

In my experience, success is usually not specifically repeatable. If it were, Microsoft would have major successes beside Office and Windows. They have been applying the specific strategies that they learned about what made those products successful over and over again with arguably limited success. In most cases, if things went well last time, you have already internalized the important parts of that success. The processes, work styles, tools, and attitudes that worked then are now just how you do business. It is so easy to make the mistake of thinking “If I could make right now more like back then, it would auto-magically make things better.” But, you probably have a new problem, and you almost certainly have an imperfect recollection of what made stuff so much better back then.

The solution? Treat your current problem like it is brand new.

Its scary to think of each problem as new because that means you don’t know the answer. But I find myself asking, so what? That only matters because I am afraid to fail. A little fear/uncertainty combined with a new problem are the perfect conditions for an innovation. If you try something new and fail, you have brand spankin’ new information about what didn’t work and a chance to understand the why of it. Not a bad worst-case scenario.

But the juice is worth the squeeze…

Published
by
jason
on September 26, 2008
in Rant and Photography
. 0 Comments

There are a lot of people completely cheesed off at Apple right now. Rejecting iPhone applications for seemingly undefinable reasons has been going on for a while, but the latest row is over the fact that some of those rejections have been accompanied by an NDA warning:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE

Developers and bloggers are up in arms, as they should be, over a system that is clearly designed to disenfranchise the folks who are the App Store’s heart; pumping the icky-green cash-colored blood through the veins of the feverish iPhone apps market.

But guess what? Some guy made a game the netted $250k dollars in a little over 2 months. Holy smokes! Another guy made a virtual coy pond, and I would guess that he has made around $100k. These are low-utility apps. They aren’t solving a real problem for every person that purchases them. This is impulse shopping at its best (you don’t even have to take out your wallet).

This isn’t an established market with lots of rational actors. Its the gold rush all over again, for buyers AND sellers. The rules as to what was acceptable were “bent” back then (read: broken; smashed to pieces), and they will bend now. Until more people are betting their livelihoods on the app store, most people in there now are hobbyists, the majority of developers will grumble a bunch and go right ahead and submit another entry into the free money giveaway that is being sponsored by Apple. If a few people get hurt in the process, well, prospecting is dangerous work.

UAC designed to annoy people: Microsoft misses the point

Published
by
jason
on April 13, 2008
in Rant and Technology
. 0 Comments

While this isn’t wholly surprising, it was disappointing to have it confirmed. In a recent interview, David Cross, a program manager responsible for UAC made some seemingly tongue-in-cheek comments about the rationale behind UAC and its current impact on the average Vista user.

The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious…UAC is not a perfect security boundary, but it [has helped us] move from ‘zero click’ exploits to ‘one click’ defense, said Cross.

Essentially, his position is that having a UAC prompt has made users aware of the dangers that they face in a connected world. In addition, those users have a better defense against exploits. This position was based, at least in part, on internal research that claimed that the vast majority of Vista users have UAC enabled and don’t receive prompts on a regular basis.

I wonder how much actual in-home observation time was included in that research. It has been my experience that UAC leaves non-technical consumers, think about your Mom, in essentially the same position they were in before. A UAC prompt basically gives the user a choice between allowing or disallowing an action which they don’t completely understand and almost certainly believe is happing at their request. In my limited observations, most people click “Allow” without carefully reading the prompt. Same risk as before, just more inane clicking around. It is the usability equivalent of your car asking you if you would like the engine to burn several chemical compounds, that you certainly don’t recognize, as they might be harmful to your car.

Mr. Cross would have us believe that the solution to Windows’ vulnerable code base is to force users to act as police for their computer’s activities. Isn’t this what software is supposed to be really good at? While I agree that there is no perfect solution yet, I think turning the human behind the keyboard into a filter for the “bad” things that are likely to happen on their computer sorely misses the mark. At the very least, more work on tightening down the core Windows code that is consistently exploited would be a good start.

Chuck Schumer on the Asian flu or Technology as a cause of terrorism

Published
by
Jason
on May 18, 2007
in Rant and Journal
. 0 Comments

I spent the morning in literally bone numbing cold at my sister’s college graduation at SUNY Purchase. I will keep this short as I am still trying to restore feeling to my left hand, but I was simply aghast at the total lack of organization and horrendous “motivational” speakers.

The president of the school attempted, in vain, to make a point about how events in one’s life that seem inconsequential may in fact be consequential. He attempted to do this, apparently, without the aid of a thesaurus. This resulted in a speech nearly 10 minutes in length of which fully 4 minutes were devoted to the repetition of the words “consequential” and “inconsequential”. He made some allusion to the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but made no obvious connection between those events and the rest of his speech other than a vague and depressing one about how they represented the “real world”.

This masterful oration gave way to the introduction of NY State Senator Chuck Schumer who delivered an amazingly trite and self aggrandizing speech about the world and his contributions to NY State voters. The highlights of the speech were, as the title of the post suggests, a slip of the tongue which lead him to call the “Avian” or “Asiatic Bird” flu the “Asian flu” ( an ailment believed to cause the insatiable desire for General Tso’s Chicken ) and a completely ridiculous compound sentence which referred to “Rapid change”, “global warming” and “terrorism” as examples of things caused by technology. While there is probably a very erudite argument to be made for the relationship between technology and the activities of terrorism, I would doubt very highly that Chuck could either a) elaborate upon it or even less likely b) prove a causal relationship. This is representative voice of the people of New York? I refuse, at my young age, to believe that people in this state are truly that stupid and clumsy.

I seem to be able to move the small finger on my left hand again, so I am off to rejoice in a warm cup tea. I am left to wonder if the gradual numbing of my entire body was actually due to the cold, or the result of my brain shutting down in protest to the day’s barrage of banality.