A Completely Personal Post About My Visit to San Jose, Part I

I flew to northern California last Tuesday for a week-long onsite working session. The routine is a bit more established this time, and I'm starting to make some progress that feels like progress...that is, I can actually see stuff on the screen now. I've been ramping on some video game graphics technology (Microsoft's XNA 2.0, which we've switched to after giving Managed Direct X 1.1 a go). XNA has a much cleaner API than MDX, and does away with a lot of legacy issues that I'm glad I don't have to worry about. What's been frustrating is the documentation, which on the surface looks comprehensive but lacks the kind of detailed guidance at the mid- and low level references that help flesh out the complete picture. I've been making my own references to fill in the gaps.

On the flight to San Jose, I perused Southwest's "Spirit" Magazine and took some notes:

Possible Food Destinations: The Independent Retail Cattleman's Association is an organization that promotes "the great steak houses of North America", which is an idea I could really get behind. Steak seems to be a big part of airline magazine advertising for some reason; perhaps business travelers looking for deductible junkets are the target audience. I noted a few other mentions of beef places to look into: Arcadia Modern American Steakhouse here in San Jose, Austin Land & Cattle Company in Austin (might have to visit there for SXSW in March), and a place called Lawry's for (yum) prime rib. I love steak because it's an elemental food when it's prepared well: it's essentially meat + heat, with a dash of salt. Once you master the heat aspect, you can do a lot of interesting variations on the basic theme. I

Cirque du Soleil packages excellence, and so should we: The article described how world-class athletes are swarming to Cirque Du Soleil for work, and it's quite a competitive process. What struck me about the article was that Cirque Du Soleil has really developed a methodology for putting on sustained productions of exceptional artistry and uniqueness. Because they handle every detail of the productions they develop, they are the go-to people for creating this type of entertainment experience. So how can we apply this to our own, less acrobatic work? If we can make our obsessions pay off (that is, financially they turn a profit), I don't see why we shouldn't relentlessly pursue them IF we are also competent judges of our own excellence. That takes a pretty uncommon objectivity.

My New Car Could Be a Mini Cooper: The original re-issue Mini Cooper was very cute, but just too small. The new Mini Clubman, though, adds way more rear legroom and cargo space that's accessible via two swinging rear vertical doors. Cool!

Randal Ford's Norman Rockwell-inspired Photography: Randal Ford staged and shot live versions of Norman Rockwell's classic illustrations of Americana. It's amazing that actual people can actually contort their faces into the exaggerated expressions depicted in the original paintings.

Receipt Filing Service: I hate filing receipts, so I do a very poor job of it. I was intrigued to read about shoeboxed, which will consolidate your online receipts and scan in your printed ones. They have a service where you can mail in your receipts and they'll scan 'em into your account, and mail them back to you. While the receipt service itself is free, the scanning service is not. It's an interesting idea! I suppose a real accountant would do the same thing; I wonder how much the difference would be in cost.

And here in San Jose:

Old School Mac Stores: In San Jose I got a chance to visit an actual old-school Macintosh store called Mac Pro, which by strange coincidence is the exclusive North American distributor for be.ez laptop bags. I had just read about the LEvertigo 17 the week before, which seemed to have the combination of vertical carry and cleaner styling I wanted for the new 17" Macbook Pro. My hands-on experience: it's a nice bag, though lightly-built compared to the rugged Briggs and Riley Computer Brief that I used for my smaller laptop. If Briggs and Riley made a 17" version of their brief, I would be so happy.

I want Fry's with that: I also have been to Fry's Electronics in San Jose a couple of times already, and I was enthralled by the selection of components available. I saw things in person that I've only read about in online catalogs. I wish we had one back East; the closest thing I've seen is the Micro Center in Cambridge off of Memorial Drive, and it is nothing like Frys. Not even close.

I probably won't have time to do a tour of the historical landmarks, but it's just cool to be in the birthplace of the (micro)computer revolution.

Four Classes of Adults

There's a children's book called Half Magic by Edward Eager. My sister claims that we both read it when we were kids, but I found I had pretty much forgotten everything that had happened in it (as usual), so it was like new to me. I'm fond of children's books that are about lazy summers spent exploring and having adventures, and Half Magic is pretty much in that vein. It was also written back in 1954, so the slight oddity of language to my contemporary ear makes it all the more enjoyable. It's also quite an observant book when it comes to noting adult behavior; this excerpt regarding the four kinds of adults that the children are aware of is, I think, right on the money (emphasis mine):

The four children generally divided all grownups into four classes. There were the ones like Miss Bick and Uncle Edwin and Aunt Grace and Mrs. Hudson who---frankly, and cruel as it might be to say it---just weren't good with children at all. There was nothing to do about these, the four children felt, except be as polite as possible and hope they would go away soon.

Then there were the ones like Miss Mamie King, who---when they were with children---always seemed to want to pretend they were children, too. This was no doubt kindly meant, but often ended with the four children's feeling embarrassed for them.

Somewhat better were the opposite ones who went around treating children as though the children were as grown-up as they were, themselves. This was flattering, but sometimes a strain to live up to. Many of the four children's school teachers fell into this class.

Last and best and rarest of all were the ones who seemed to feel that children were children and grown-ups were grown-ups and that was that, and yet at the same time there wasn't any reason why they couldn't get along perfectly well and naturally together, and even occasionally communicate, without changing that fact.

It took me a while to figure out why this passage struck me so, and I eventually realized that it was because I felt it seemed to generally apply to the making of connections with other people.

• Some people, like Miss Bick and Uncle Edwin, you just merely try to get along with because there just isn't a connection of any kind. You come from such different worlds with such distinctively different personalities that no connection, however tenuous, is likely to hold. So you talk about the weather, and silently exult when someone's cell phone rings to break the awkwardness.

• Then there are those people, like Mamie King, who really do want to get to know you, and they go a little too far and make you uncomfortable by crossing certain boundaries. You know, like that guy at the bar who insists on telling you the intimate details of his life story, or the girl at work who laughs a little too quickly and loudly at your jokes. And in the reverse, when we find ourselves reaching for something---anything, really---that will get us through that endless two minutes on the elevator ride up to the office by cracking the same tired old jokes...sigh.

• The people we get along with in a social sense are good people, but they're never quite that close because we've got to watch what we say. So these people aren't so much like the teachers that expect the best of us; as adults, we expects that other adults adhere to certain norms of civility and etiquette. Conformity, in other words. Of course, it's wonderful when you fit in, but it's also kind of a strain because you can't tell your favorite dirty jokes, relate something Bobby said on King of the Hill, or express a heartfelt sentiment like, "You know, Hillary Clinton is kind of hot" and not have it taken the wrong way by someone. Your safe areas of conversation are lawn care, mortgages, sports, and top 10 television shows. Comfortable, but kind of limited.

• The best people of all are those ones that accept you as you are. They're your real friends, and you've decided for whatever reason that you get along and there's nothing more to discuss. Say anything around them, and it doesn't affect the way they feel about you and vice versa. They are indeed the rarest of them all, and the ones to keep around you.

I'll have to re-read Harriet the Spy next; I believe my sis left a copy here for me somewhere.

Kodak Camera Industrial Design Surprise

I was at Circuit City a few days ago, browsing the digital camera aisle. My trusty Canon G2 has served me well, but its bulk prevents me from carrying it around with me at all times. I also have to admit that its operating speed is starting to feel a little sluggish compared to the newer cameras. It wouldn't hurt to look, I reasoned.

As I looked over the assembled Nikons, Canons, and Olympus cameras, I found that none of them really moved me. Feature sets, form factors, etc...all of them have pretty much settled into a silvery melange of difficult-to-differentiate product. What stood out most, though, was the surprisingly attractive Kodak EasyShare One and Kodak V570One cameras.

Good-looking consumer electronics design from an American company???

Something a Little Different

I had become used to skipping over the blobby, featureless designs from Kodak and HP for years, preferring the matter-of-factness of Japanese industrial design. They have a visual design vocabulary that's hard for me to describe; part of me thinks it comes from living in high-density urban areas and a love for iconography and fine detail. My favorite American design tends to draws on the bold attitude that accompanies having lots of resources and the space to show it off. Admittedly, I haven't done an exhaustive review of the American design scene other than what I see in big-box retail stores; what I see there isn't very inspiring.

So it's nice to finally come across a couple US-designed cameras that catch my eye.

• Innovative Features. The EasyShare One was the first camera, apparently, to have built-in WiFi. It also has a very large LCD back panel with a stylus for clicking things off...that's pretty cool. The V570 has a dual-lens design: one is for zoom, the other is for wide-angle. In practice, the transition between zoom and wide-angle seemed a little sluggish and uneven to me, but it's a great feature, in a compact package.

• Nice Design. A lot of American consumer electronics design is just terrible. At best, it gets the job done without being too ugly (Dell comes to mind here). When it comes to making something look awesome, though, it's hard to touch the Japanese. They live and breath small. The only American company that comes to mind in the same space is Apple, with their luscious iPods and brushed-metal Macs. The balance between austere unblemished surfaces and clusters of electronic functionality is usually overlooked. The Kodak V570, by comparison, draws upon retro influences (I love the lens cluster) and bold rectilinear form. It's just so yummy...it's a brick of digital camera goodness bursting with visual candy. It manages to strike a balance between that austerity and excitement, a little reminiscent of the Sony PSP, but more fun. The flat front face almost looks like a cartoon diagram of a digital camera...awesome! And the lens closing mechanism makes the coolest "thunk" sound.

I have no idea if the camera shoots well...I'll have to check Digital Photo Review to see what they're saying about it. This camera, though, is at the top of my list for a new point-and-shoot, if it meets my technical criteria...and when I have some money to spare. In the meantime, the old G2 is shooting just fine.

Can I Pick 'Em or What?

I was curious if the V570 was designed in-house at Kodak, so I did a search on "industrial design V570 kodak"; I discovered that the camrea won an IDEA 2006 Award from IDSA, the Industrial Designers Society of America.

A little further digging uncovered the design house that worked with Kodak on both the V570 and, as it turns out, the other Kodak camera I liked: Blue Map Design in New York City. They have a great photo spread (see above) on the V570 camera. Sweet!

Be sure to check out the other IDEA 2006 award winners...great design deserves recognition! According to the Blue Map website, they also were a Red Dot Award Winner in 2006, a prize I am not familiar with. The Red Dot website, though, looks like it has a lot of interesting communications design resources. Bookmarked!

A Minor Design Mystery

I was visiting a company in the Boston area last Tuesday, and happened to walk by this awesome Vespa scooter accessorized with an Apple Sticker. Two stylish icons of design, separated by some 40 years of technology. Yet, they both somehow draw from the same pool of associations.

This was quite a mystery until I found this photo on Flickr, showing Steve Jobs (with Apple hardware design deity Steve Wozniak on the right) wearing his trademark turtleneck at age 21.

Jobs still seems to favor turtlenecks today. So the chain of association goes something like this:

Apple Computer
is connected to...

Steve Jobs
who wears...

Turtlenecks
which were favored by...

The Mod Scenesters
who rode...

Vespa Scooters

Mystery solved! I have my "hip" sister to thank for that, because she's the one who told me about the whole scooter thing in the first place. In celebration, we must all watch The Lambretta Twist and smile! Beep beep! :-)

Naturally Predatory Business Practices

I was watering the basil plant on my deck when I noticed that an industrious spider had woven a web around the blossoming flowers. I could see the spider laying in wait, its webby business plan optimally deployed to start generating revenue in the form of hapless flower-loving insects.

I couldn't help but think that this is a common business model:

1. Find some popular content or a popular destination
2. Insert yourself as a middleman or as a distraction
3. Reap a percentage of the traffic that is flowing to the content

Nothing wrong with this, as this model is underlying premise behind television advertising, the businesses that line the roadways to Niagara Falls and Anaheim, billboards, bumper stickers, news agregators, for-profit trade shows, retail channels, Google AdSense, toll roads, taxes, financial services, and many forms of brokering. It's profitable, and you don't actually have to spend time creating anything other than the web. For people who don't create content, managing content is a pretty good way to make a living, because content creators can often use the help; it's a lot of work, and when the partnership is symbiotic, everyone wins: creators, managers, and customers.

In the case of this industrious spider, however, its business model is actually leveraging the creative energies of the flower to ensnare visitors that would otherwise assist its pollination effort. In other words, the spider's interests are in conflict with the interests of the flower, and it grows fat at the expense of the community of flowers.

If this was a business instead of a spider and a flower, I would be absolutely disgusted. Ordinarily I would leave nature alone, but I'm going to go break up that web and encourage the spider build its snare somewhere else. Go ahead, call me a meddling human; I bet the FTC will be on my side :-)

Boston Day Trip Memories

Last Wednesday I spent a day in Boston, as part of a drive to "be more social". My working theory is that by meeting new people, you learn new things you can't anticipate, and I think that's just what I need to be doing right now.

The Horror of the Morning Commute

My first meeting was with Karl G at 9:30AM in Central Square, so I left the house at 800AM. It used to take me about 45 minutes to reach Alewife Station when I used to work in Boston, so I figured I'd get to Central Square with about 15 minutes to spare. WRONG While Route 3 South was fairly quick, 95S was a parking lot. Even Route 2 was backed up. Maybe this has something to do with the Big Dig screwing up traffic patterns, but I ended up getting to Alewife around 930AM, and it took another 20 minutes to finally hook up with Karl. Thank God for cell phones.

Python and Comet and Dojo and Prototype and MochiKit Too

Karl had to get going, so we walked to Harvard Square and had a casual conversation about web development. As it turns out, he's a Python guy, so I got to ask what it was that he liked about it. The gist of what he said was that unlike Perl, it was a rather well-structured language. I can't stand Perl, so I imagine that I would like Python. He also gave me a little insight about the backend stuff you can do with Python with a framework called something like "TurboGem", but I seem to be unable to find it so I must have misheard. He also gave me the lowdown on Prototype being an "object hacking" type of library, and therefore sometimes a cause of problems, and suggested I also look into MochiKit and Dojo, and Comet. This later one I hadn't heard of; apparently it's a server-push type of web application model that works by keeping an HTTP connection open. Apparently this trick of keeping the connection open is now to be known as Comet, much as xmlhttprequest is now collectively associated with the Ajax term. It's all about branding, isn't it? :-) Thanks Karl for all the info, and sorry for screwing up any information here. It's great to listen to people who are passionate about development...I learned a lot in a very short amount of time.

Harvard Square

After bidding Karl goodbye at the Harvard Square T stop, I paused to take a picture of these weird bean-like pods hanging from a few of the trees on Mt. Auburn Street near some of the Harvard buildings. Weird. What the heck are these?

I had some time to kill, so I headed over to The Million Year Picnic (my favorite comic book store). Unfortunately, they were closed until 11AM so I wandered over to L.A. Burdicks for a cold chocolate drink and a raspberry tart thing. Yum! It was something like 90 degrees out, and I was wearing long black pants. Important Note...this establishment has the best air conditioning in the Square.

A quick jaunt across the street took me to Bob Slate Stationer nearby. I love stationery stores, though I didn't really have anything in mind. I did discover some useful factoids:

• Bob Slate appears to carry the full line of Moleskine products, including the colorful Museum line, in various sizes.
• They also carry a few other interesting small notebooks, such as several of the Rite in the Rain waterproof field notebooks. I picked up a small one to put in the bathroom, so I can continue my idea capture in the shower experiment.
• Bob Slate also was selling wooden slide whistles, so I bought one. I have wanted a slide whistle for a looooong time.

While I was checking out, I was looking over their supply of novelty pends and remembered my quest for a flat pen. I asked if they had any, but they did not. The flat pen of my dreams would be a high-quality silver pen with an oval cross-section, with slightly-grippy sides, and would fit nicely into a composition notebook with a sturdy clip. The closest I've seen has been this one from Taiwan. The clerks at Bob Slate didn't quite share my enthusiasm for finding this pen, and hadn't seen or even heard of one before, so I left disappointed. I may have to look at promotional companies; the flat pen is sometimes available there, except in cheap plastic.

I headed over to the The Museum of Useful Things and browsed for about 30 minutes, lovingly admiring the various bits of functionally beautiful and practical design. Affordably priced, even! They had a reproduction of a article on the way from some kind of retail space trade magazine, describing how the owners of The MUT ignored a lot of the traditional advice from retail space planners to create their own store by themselves. I really love the space; it does feel like a museum, except the gift shop IS the museum, and it DOESN'T SUCK. I asked the two store clerks whether they'd heard of a flat pen, and they were more enthusiastic about the idea of it, though they had not seen one before. They suggested Bob Slate, and also the Cross Store (as in Cross Pens). I didn't even know there was a Cross Store in Harvard Square, so I went to check it out.

The Cross Store was not very interesting. Lots of pens in cases. A couple of young guys who looked like they'd rather be clubbing on Lansdowne Street asked me what I was looking for, and I explained my Flat Pen quest. Nope.

By now, it was time to meet up with Susan Kaup for lunch at the Border Cafe, who I only knew in passing from some mutual acquaintances. She's working now in Harvard Square, so I got a chance to catch up and find out about the various projects she's involved with. The ones in particular that interested me are ExploitBoston and FreeAgent Boston. ExploitBoston is a kind of "currated event guide" that lists cool stuff going on in the city; they have a game night that I've wanted to attend, but never seem to have time for. FreeAgent Boston, currently dormant, is a kind of freelancer mixer of the kind that many of us would like to have. We don't get to gather around the watercooler and trade gossip, and frankly it gets kind of dull not talking to people on a regular basis, so having some kind of group to go hang out with would be fantastic. As it turns out, Sooz also was at SXSW, and I didn't know...small world! So it was a good lunch, with the exception of the overly-pushy waiter who kept interrupting our conversation with questions about drink refills. Thanks Sooz! I also got to see the Randstad office in Harvard Square, which I noted had some unexpectedly nice corporate branding spread consistently throughout the office. For noticing this, I got a free block of Randstad note paper. Yay!

The Long Walk

After lunch, I got in touch with Steve Head, a professional movie reviewer who I met about a year ago; he currently writes for IGN Filmforce. He'd just come back from an interview with Nicholas Cage, and was dead tired but pleased. He had to get back to work on his article for a deadline, so I walked back to his place near, as it turns out, Porter Square. This is about a 30 minute walk. After that, I walked back to Harvard Square to meet elusive joke writer Chumworth, whom I used to work with several years ago at a tech company. On the way back, my left leg started to twitch a bit, and I realized that I hadn't walked this much since I lived in Boston. By the time I made it back to the Coop, I had a full-blown charlie horse. "Walk it off," I thought, "Mind over body." This sort of worked, but I would pay for it later.

After catching up over a refreshing beverage at Au Bon Pain, I headed back to the Million Year Picnic and browsed the zine section. I picked out a couple of titles that stood out for their overall design; at a buck a piece, it's cheap inspiration! :-) As I was checking out, I noted the marvelous lettering on their "New Titles" whiteboard. I asked about this, and the checkout person said, "Yeah, Andy (?) is incredible. The illustration is also dry-erase marker." Incredible! I asked if I could take a picture, so you can see for yourself how clean and straight the lettering is. That is dedication, man!

Off to South Station

It's been several years since I visited The Interactive Factory; they'd moved since I last worked there, so I gave them a call and arranged to drop by for a visit. It was quite a change from their old digs on Congress Street, which had dozens of mouse holes and a single shared bathroom. It was a little weird to see familiar people in the new settings, but it was totally great to see them again. I felt a little nostalgic and almost wished I was working in a company again. That quickly passed when I thought about the daily 3-hour commute and not being able to work on my own projects.

While I was walking back to the T, I passed by the location of the old Boston Tea Party Ship, near the Children's Museum by the water. There was a fire several years ago, and the ship has been closed since then. I was somewhat happy to see that it's coming back, though it had the look of a pretty dull touristy thing to do.

This area, incidentally, is where Neil Stephenson's earlier novel Zodiac places a boat chase scene, so it's interesting to peer down into the water and imagine. The rotting piers that served as the chase scene backdrop have been removed as new construction has encroached into the bay, but you can still see a few remnants here and there at low tide.

Observation: Boston is Under Construction

One thing I noticed was that Boston seemed to have construction going on everywhere. The rapid transit system is changing from tokens to magnetic ticket cards called "Charlie Passes", which completely confused me since Alewife was still using tokens. The station at Harvard Square was already on the new system, and they do NOT accept tokens. However, the Charlie Pass vending machines accept tokens and spit out the new tickets; this wasn't clearly marked anywhere, so a MBTA worker kept having to guide people.

Just about everywhere I went, something was being dug up or reconstructed. Bob Slate Stationers was in the middle of a 4-month sidewalk reconstruction project. The area around South Station was undergoing a transformation, as the area that was once I-93 slowly becomes a new park. Right now it's just another Boston mess.

Flash Platform Users Group

After leaving Interactive Factory, I shot over into Brookline on the T to meet up with another friend of a friend who goes by the handle Novel, on the way to the Flash Platform User's Group meeting. It took quite a bit longer to get there than I thought, but I was able to meet Novel and talk about all kinds of comic books and cartoons. That was awesome; apparently her husband is also a big comic book person, so it was great to meet people who actually were into the media. A new connection made!

After that, it was off to the user group meeting, which was being held at the New England Institute of Art. Christopher MacDonald was the presenter, discussing the challenge of Designers working with Developers. The presentation mostly focused on the design work that he'd done in context with his company, EMC.

I learned a few things that I didn't know before:

• You can buy the Zoomify plugin for Flash, which implements a Level of Detail (LOD) bitmap zooming algorithm. It seemed like the kind of thing that anyone could just implement with a bit of math, but buying the plugin is probably faster.

• I heard about FlashLoaded, a resource for buying plugins for various Macromedia products. I have been in a more don't reinvent, buy mood in the interest of expediency lately, so this looked like something worth looking into.

• I was fairly impressed with FlexBuilder and its ability to pull together components into real applications with a minimum of fuss. Here's one place where I need to be less picky; I tend to create my own custom components, but you know what? Slapping together the default components is probably faster, especially when combined with data binding. My only issue with this in the past is that the resulting code seems a little bloated and slow, and I like to have a detailed understanding of the implementation details. This helps me debug, but it doesn't help me build quickly.

• An interesting comment was made by Chris about how 5th through 8th graders have a complete unawareness of American history. I've thought that teaching history might be more interesting if it was re-enacted as a psychological drama to give the lessons some teeth. The High School experience could set the framework for the context of history in many ways: everyone understands the difference between popular and substance, how reputations can be made or destroyed, the nature of power and intimidation, and the desire to rise up against the establishment. In fact, nothing much changes once you leave high school...it's very much the same!

By this time, my legs were ready to fall off, so I just got back on the T afterwards without socializing much, though I did talk to Nanu from the Robotech Center in Nashua---they teach game development and robotics to kids and interested adults. It's a pretty cool operation.

Portsmouth

The next day I was in Portsmouth, NH to have lunch with Mark Reeves, who I met briefly at one of the Refresh Boston meetings. We had a great conversation, I thought, about working in web development and the possibility of doing something interesting in the New Hampshire area. He's working now up in Portsmouth, so that's a big win for New Hampshire Tech. He's another ASP .NET programmer, which has been on my radar since Ian Muir first waxed poetically about it during a New Media Group meeting.

I was planning on walking around Portsmouth and enjoying the scenery, but my legs were so sore from all the walking I'd done the previous day that I could barely stand up. I had to hobble back to the car and head home. It was too hot anyway to really feel good about walking around the town, despite its loveliness and plentitude of intriguing ice cream shops. Maybe next time.

Wrapping Up

This is the most socializing I've done in a long time. What I find absolutely amazing is how all these semi-random collisions with people yield new ideas and insights...and I liked it. Is it possible that I'm actually more extraverted than I thought, now that I am more comfortable in my freelance identity? Before, I was never quite sure how to describe myself, but now I'm pretty happy just saying I'm an "information graphics designer" and explaining what that means.

I also realized, in the process of just describing what I've been doing to all these people, that I have developed a life philosophy of productivity: make stuff that people can see and spread what you know to as many people as you meet. These are the two fundamental principles behind the original Printable CEO, more so than the bubble chart or the checklist. I don't think I would have had this insight unless I had actually gone out on Wednesday, and now I have a basis for writing a book around my version of productivity. Awesome!

Yes, I'd say it was a day well-spent.

Tomorrow’s Itinerary

Tomorrow is my Day in Boston trip, a sort of mini-vacation to clear my head and reorient myself. The weather is supposed to be kind of rotten, but forewarned is forearmed!

The Plan

1. Drive in around 745AMi with the rest of rush-hour traffic, which will get me to Alewife station right around 8:45-9ish, which is early enough to grab some of the last few spaces on the roof. That gives me a half an hour to buy my MBTA Day Pass ($7.50) and head over to Central Square for my first meeting with a reader. Exciting!

2. Then it's off to Harvard Square to kick around, maybe meet a few people I know in the area, and browse some stores. I've got a lunch meeting at 1130ish to I guess 1ish, it's one of those play-it-by-ear things. Visits planned: stationery store (there aren't any good ones where I live), chocolate store (mmm), maybe a museum.

3. After lunch, I'm planning on heading toward the Financial District in downtown Boston . I plan to hop on-and-off the various T-stops to see what's there; this is something I haven't tried before, having never done the tourist thing in Boston before. I'm planning on visiting the new offices of a company I used to work at and say hi, which should be OK since I know the guy who runs the place.

4. Then it's off to Brookline, so I can attend the Boston Flash Platform Users Group meeting; the lecture is by a designer who has to work with engineers, so I'm interested in hearing another person's perspective on it. That's at 7PM. Before that, I'm going to meet the friend of a friend somewhere around there and say "hi".

It's not much of a plan, but that's by design. I plan to be as open as possible to experience and see what happens. I'm not even going to bring a computer with me, just my backpack with an umbrella in it and maybe some business cards. I'm thinking of making a 4"x6" business card for the heck of it, just to see how that goes over :-)

If there's anyone else out there who wants to plan a random collision somewhere along my itinerary, feel free to shoot me an email :-)

Getting my RSS Subs under Control

In the past, I actually haven't read a lot of other blogs. Oh, I subscribe to them, but I am bad about reading them. My thinking was that I needed to keep focused on getting my own stuff done, and didn't need all those extra ideas swimming in my head.

When I was diagnosed with Adult-Onset Productivity-Responsibility Syndrome, I realized that getting back in touch with the world was a very big deal, both personally and professionally. I just need to be smarter about it! In other words, develop a process that maximizes my productivity in this regard.

The Process, inspired by the "batch cognition" approach that I see in GTD:

1. Skim all blog titles only in Bloglines.
2. Open summary for interesting titles.
3. If it looks interesting, middle-click the post link (this opens the link in a new tab).
4. Scan the article. Add it to my StumbleUpon toolbar if it's exceptional.
5. If it's really good, print it out and file it in my General Reference.

It's important that I middle-click the post link, not the links inside of the blog post itself. That's because otherwise I lose the original attribution for interesting sublinks.

Why Bother?

I would say that there are two areas of interest for me, professionally speaking.

• Productivity -- This is a subject very close to my heart, and I didn't even know it until a few weeks ago. I like stationery and office supplies. I am naturally curious about information graphics, design, communication, and workflow. This is quite probably the core of my business, and I need to find a community of like-minded individuals to talk with. I think this will help shape my "corporate identity".

  There are supporting categories for this: graphic design for how people perceive visual communication, industrial design for how people interact with objects, interior design and architecture for how people deal with spaces, heck, just about all forms of design are pertinent. Cognitive science and systems analysis also come to mind, as do the various writings on organizational science, logistics and management.

• Empowerment -- I like the feeling of being empowered, and I like figuring out how to make it happen in myself and others. Anything I learn, I naturally like passing along. Normally I draw upon my own experiences, but there is a lot going on that I'd like to help build.

  Supporting categories for this: education and learning to understand how to effect change in somone, psychology to understand personal motivation and the self, and leadership to have the strength to show people the way.

So that's what I'm thinking the core of my reading will follow. Then there's the maintenance of skills which act in a supporting role.

• Flash Development -- I've been doing interactive development in Flash since version 3, and Director since version 3 as well, but I'm not really drawn to the hardcore Flash/Director community. This lack of passion used to bother me, but now I just see it as a sign that Flash is a "supporting interest", not the interest itself.

• Web Development -- Another skill I picked up along the way that falls into the "supporting interest" category. Javascript and DHTML does not get me hot and bothered, but that's OK. I can navigate this area comfortably now, and the Web 2.0 community has a wonderful we built this city on rock and roll vibe to it.

There are tons of other areas of interest, but I think these 4 categories will suffice for the daily read. It just struck me that there's one more category of blog that I need to have:

• Personal Blogs -- There are a number of people on the Internet that I just find fascinating, and I follow them because they are personally inspiring. There's usually some kind of overlap with one of the other areas, but not always. I read these blogs purely because I enjoy them.

Now that I have a process in place, I'm hopeful that my blog reading will be more productive. I'll reorganize my bloglines subscription by these categories, and remove any blog that doesn't fit. That should improve my focus considerably.

Taking A Look at Getting Things Done

I have finally read David Allen's book Getting Things Done...yay! I'm impressed by the simplicity and clarity with which he's addressed the psychology of being productive in a working system...it's just awesome!

I have to admit that my reading was motivated not by the desire to be more productive, but to make sure I wasn't inadvertently retreading the same ideas in The Printable CEO™. While I creep on some of the same ideas that David Allen defined 20 years ago in his corporate training programs, it looks like my emphasis is compatible but different. That's a huge relief. And since discovering GTD through other blogs referring to my original articles, I've been delighted by the tremendous sense of community that's formed around the very idea of being more productive. That fits very nicely with my own goals of being around empowered, happy people. ROCK ON!

Having now read "The Book", I can finally make some informed observations about how The Printable CEO™ relates to GTD. But that will come in a later post; first, I'll summarize my impressions.

The Prerequisite "AWESOME"

First of all, I was impressed by Allen's writing style. It's to-the-point and confident without being overbearing, refreshingly free of those "poignant true stories" that pad the other books in the self-help section. Don't get me wrong---I love those kind of stories, just not when they're used primarily as testimonials. Anyway, GTD is such a lean book that, upon finishing it, I felt the sort of satisfaction that I normally get from eating a big green salad and drinking lots of water. This is different from the feeling I get from reading, say, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which delivers two good bits of advice leavened with ingredients of dubious nutritional value. But I digress.

Since there are already great summaries and commentary sites out there, I'll just summarize the ideas I found particularly interesting.

Martial Arts and Productivity

There's a couple places where Allen makes a comparison to martial arts mastery. As untrained noobs we have a tendency to overreact or underreact to any given stimuli, and are thus easily exhausted and overwhelmed by the uncategorized senses that bombard us daily; and thus, we are easily defeated. By adopting the ready state of the martial artist, we can learn to condition our reactions and stay loose...he talks about this at some length in the introduction. I really started to pay attention when I read the following (page 199):

When you become elegant at dispatching what's coming in and are organized enough to take advantage of the "weird time" windows that show up, you can switch between one task and the other rapidly.

I envisioned myself dodging bullets in a ballet of Chow Yun Fat-style productivity, gunning down To-Do lists with an endless stream of next actions. Now that's an image worth living up to...wha-cha! And intuitively, I know it's possible. It just takes training.

On the other hand, Joel Spolsky is onto something too when he talks about task switching being harmful, or when Kathy Sierra mentions similar ideas regarding the false hope of multi-tasking. Now, Allen isn't specifically talking about multi-tasking; he's talking about being able to adapt what task one does to the available time, which is more about out of order instruction scheduling than multi-tasking. They're related only in that they're both methods for achieving time-efficiency in task completion. It is tempting to take the analogy too far; I started looking at RISC versus CISC design philosophies as a source for similar ideas, but I eventually realized that Allen's other methodologies address this very issue; in this case, I'm thinking about the 4 Criteria Model for Choosing Actions of the Moment. This is a good reminder that I should really "live" the GTD system before I can really evaluate it.

Stress Comes from Uncertainty

When I had first read the back of the GTD book, I misinterpreted what was meant by the following phrase: Our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. I thought this was one of those "take a deep breath" bits of advice that were ultimately useless in the face of real adversity, but Allen actually delivers the insight behind it: when we're uncertain about anything that could possibly have a negative impact on ourselves, we get stressed. And when you're stressed, you're not loose. And when you're not loose, moving fluidly and rapidly is pretty much impossible. You burn more energy while getting less done. Controlling the levels of anxiety is absolutely key.

Bluntly stated, most of us don't know what we're supposed to do beyond a vague sense that yes, there are things that have to happen, and we're being held responsible for them. Sometimes we're holding ourselves responsible; I love that section he has about treating all commitments equally, because a broken commitment feels bad no matter what it is. In either case, all those little bits of "not knowing" have an anxiety cost associated with them, each a fatty little bon-bon of self-hate. It goes right to your hips, and soon you'll find yourself waddling around, wheezing and sweating from the sheer effort of merely not keeling over.

If not knowing is the cause of anxiety, then create the ultimate personal knowledge management system. That's GTD: situational awareness and logistical support rolled up in one system. Not having tried it yet, I imagine that the feeling might be like when I was like 5 years old, when I believed that Mom and Dad knew everything. If I needed to know something, they would give me the answer. They reminded me when to do things, looked both ways before crossing the street, anticipated the downside of not getting my nap, and so forth. GTD, I'm thinking, might be like having that again, except this time by my own hand. I'm optimistic, but as Mom would have said, "We'll see."

Reserve Your Brain for Thinking About, Not Thinking Of

When we're constantly having to remember what to do, we spend less time doing actual work. When we doubt that we're remembering everything we have to do, or suspect that there's something else we are supposed to do first, then that's even worse. GTD addresses this by emphasizing the "front-end" decision making to reduce the number of tasks, and by using what he labels as distributed cognition: the offloading as much crap out of your brain into physical systems that are easily accessible and reliable. A side benefit, he notes, is that viewing your thoughts from the "outside your head" context often leads to new insights. It's an idea I have stumbled upon also in the context of drawing and in un-tapping my brain...I didn't know what it was called until reading it in GTD. Cool! Our brains are really good at problem solving, but we have to keep it clear of distractions to work efficiently. Since a lot of the tasks we have to do today have complex state, evolving efficient strategies for managing all that information is absolutely critical.

One odd line of inquiry comes to mind, which is why we have the anxiety response in the first place. I imagine that people who were really good at worrying also, somehow, managed to unblock themselves long enough to actually do something proactive about it; scared into action! The other thought, which is a little unkind, is that "worrying without taking action" may have selectively evolved in certain societies, as those people who gave up their control out of fear were the ones who tended not to get beheaded and therefore reproduced. To some extent, we're also conditioned by unprogressive educational institutions to think in a similar way. We can feel rejected and grouch about it, letting ourselves get disenfranchised by the system, or we can self-empower. The underlying message of empowerment is something I like very much about GTD, particularly toward the later chapters...and it's backed by a solid systems approach to getting there. That is incredibly rare to find anywhere, and it's quietly revolutionary. Fight the power!

The Natural Planning Model

I have often wondered why people just never asked WHY whenever they were presented with a task. From the looks I would get, I used to assume that everyone else knew what they were doing. I figured out that this wasn't the case eventually, and that contributed to a greater confidence in my own process. That was a very important moment.

Despite my personal breakthrough, I found the process of asking WHY is still foreign to most people; I'm feeling a sense of relief that Allen also appears to believe this. Even so, I tend to keep the full-strength process to myself unless I'm actively spec'ing out a project with other people. Even then I tend not to push it too hard...people can be very sensitive to the WHY question, as they sometimes perceive it as a kind of challenge to their competence. To help reframe it, I now use guiding principles like "finding intent, expectation, motivation, assumptions, resources, metrics"; this is a little more accessible because the scope is more limited, and it places the locus of control back with the person who needs the work done. Instead of asking "WHY WHY WHY", I can ask "What is the reason you're making this website right now?" and "What does your business expect as a result of doing this project?" These questions are much easier for someone to answer, because they're expressed from their point of view. The wrong questions to ask would be "Why do you want this implemented in PHP instead of static HTML?", "How many pages do you want on your website?", and "What is the budget?", as these questions are actually dissociated from the client's perspective. Yes, even the budget one, if you ask it TOO SOON. But again, I digress.

I am not so sold on Allen's explanation of writing an outline is unnatural planning (pg. 58), though I agree with the underlying assumption: people tend to want to jump right to the action, and shortcut the process in a mistaken belief that it's what you're supposed to do. The failure of his fourth grade teacher, perhaps, was the failure to teach the agile thinking/brainstorming techniques that lead up to the outlining process. When you emphasize just the final product, the creative process gets shortchanged and you end up with junk, unless you've already done the creative and are just executing steps by rote. I think a lot of us have the expectation that following steps that "guarantee" results is the ideal situation, and therefore act accordingly in situations out of wishful thinking. But this is a minor digression...I heartily endorse the Natural Planning Model!

General Design Principles

I am also really impressed by the GTD system's underlying design principles. If I were to extract my perception of what they are for general use in any workflow-oriented system, they'd look like this:

• Create a Trusted Reference System -- Not only does your filing need to be quick-to-access, you have to also dilligently practice maintenance of the system to ensure it remains trustworthy and reliable. This is actually probably more difficult than people imagine, because there are many sources of mistrust that can be injected into the daily workflow. I happen to be very strongly in the "trust but verify" camp, assuming information corruption and mismatch between intention and action as the natural order of things. Therefore, I tend to re-check everything coming in and going out. Because of this mentality, my processes sometimes seem very slow, but I've come to realize that I tend to converge the reliable solution faster...and indeed, this causes me less stress. However, my system is rather ad-hoc; seeing how Allen systemized the process into something more efficient is very encouraging.

• The System Must Have Very Low Cost to Access -- You need to get stuff into and out of the system very easily, otherwise you will tend to shortcut the process. "Cost", in my mind, means time to access, number of steps, and amount of thinking/recall required to accomplish the fundamental act of reliably completing a informationally-meaningful transaction. In other words: the fewer moving parts, the more naturally part of your workflow, within hand's reach and eye's glance, the better. I suspect software solutions to GTD are more difficult to implement, IMHO, because application designers mistake dynamism of the display for ease-of-access. Clicking something to see it, even if it's just OneClick®, is one click too many if that information is critically part of your workflow. Paper, by comparison, is "on" all the time, and you can tape the information you need to the wall next to your monitor. It's faster for pure information lookup than clicking on windows and buttons.

• Write Information Once, In The Right Place -- If information capture is complex, requires multiple steps, involves copying information from one place to another or synchronizing multiple sources, you're creating friction in the system. You create opportunities for mistakes, conflict, and misunderstanding. You increase the time it takes to access data. You also lose trust in your system, which defeats the whole point of practicing GTD. Allen's point about not using support systems to keep track of reminders in GTD comes to mind also; lists and actions in your system are the reminders. Don't do the work twice! People hate doing things twice if it brings them no measurable gain.

• Put Information In Context to How You Work and Think -- Anything that forces you to stop and remember what you're supposed to be doing is going to slow you down and create opportunities for distraction. The Tickler File is genius...I can't believe I'm just finding out about it. Also, the idea of tagging tasks by "location" is fantastic, though in my case I need to single-task my locations. The computer itself doesn't make for a good location, because it's a source of way too many contextual tasks.

• Don't Create Opportunities to Disappoint Yourself -- I'm thinking of the section where Allen describes making commitments. Disappointment sucks no matter how you slice it. The front-end processing of "stuff" is the right time to be real about what you can and can not do.

• Objectifying Results -- My insistence on identifying tangible results is very similar. If you can't measure it, see it, visualize it, or identify the next immediate step to do something...it's just not something that needs doing. It's just, as he says, "stuff". To catalyze stuff into something productive, you need to have that next action item that is actionable. Amen!

• Use Phased Thinking To Reduce Cognitive Load -- Sometimes you need to do a lot of thinking, and sometimes you just need to know what to do. Knowing how to estimate the time and energy requirements for either type of task is a really important insight. While unburdening our minds of the "remember everything" requirement frees up more mental horsepower, the thinking process still burns a lot of energy. If you have to switch between thinking and doing, you will burn out your "mental clutch". What I like about the "collect, process, organize, review, do" workflow is the clear purpose of each mental state, each with a clear tangible result. Masterfully done.

• Recognizing the Power of Tricks -- I love tricks, because they are high-yield moments of productive pleasure. Every time you apply a trick, you feel like you're getting more than you paid for, and that's a good feeling. In the design of video games (games in general, actually), making sure that there is some unbalance is important to keep things feeling "alive". One subjective example is the difference in individual weapons balance in Quake 3 versus whatever version of Unreal Tournament was out at the time. While the weapons type themselves were pretty similar in each game, UT's weapon mix seemed balanced to do approximately the same amount of damage no matter which one you used. Some of them had tactical advantages based on range or mode of fire, but they all delivered roughly the same amount of firepower per second. As a result, no gun seemed overly powerful. Sounds very fair, doesn't it? Well, I hated it...all the weapons felt exactly the same. Quake 3, by comparison, had more limited firing modes, but the weapon damage potential varied hugely! As a result, people had very strong feelings about the "unfair" advantages of one weapon versus another. In UT, skill made the difference. In Quake 3, picking up the BFG (the game's ultimate weapon) would, in the hands of even a novice player, wreak havok against veteran players. And that gave us something to talk about. The strategy drastically changed...anyone seen going for the BFG would be picked-on and destroyed, which made getting the BFG all the more sweet if you could grab it...good times!

In Closing

I'm glad I finally read the book and got some framing thoughts around the system. I can now review The Printable CEO™ in context, and adapt it slightly to be a little more compatible with GTD's guiding principles. The PCEO falls into the Trick category, I think, but maybe experienced GTDers have more informed opinions on this matter.

The Rise and Fall of the American Club Sandwich

I've noticed a disturbing trend among American restaurants: the club sandwich has been downsized from three slices of bread to two, which in my mind makes it just another sandwich. I suppose it may be a return to authenticity, as this quote from food diety James Beard suggests:

[the club sandwich] is one of the great sandwiches of all time and has swept its way around the world after an American beginning. Nowdays the sandwich is bastardized because it is usually made as a three-decker, which is not authentic (whoever started that horror should be forced to eat three-deckers three times a day the rest of his life), and nowadays practically everyone uses turkey and there's a vast difference between turkey and chicken where sandwiches are concerned.

I was all set to complain about how restaurants like "Ruby Tuesday" and "Bugaboo Creek", two institutions which serve a particularly disappointing club sandwich, seem to be spearheading a move away from the three-slice stack of bread, bacon, tomato and turkey of my childhood. Authenticity be damned!

I first encountered the club sandwich as a displaced American kid in Taiwan. This was the late 70s, when the island was under martial law. This was well before any American franchises were allowed into the country; imagine a place without McDonalds, and that was Taiwan. In other words, a horrible place to live when you're a kid: no TV, no nice stores, no ice cream...nothing! Maybe it was actually good for me in some unspecified way, but it was rather depressing at the time. Our mom, sensing that we needed regular injections of Americana to bolster our spirits, took us to the only nearby Western restaurant, Foremost on (I think) Chung Hua Bei Lu in Shihlin, a suburb of Taipei. Foremost Foods was one of the only places that actually sold cows milk and western ice cream. The dairy was obviously reconstituted, watery, and a little funny tasting, but they also served burgers and club sandwiches. I don't actually remember eating many of them (sis might remember), but they anchored my sense of identity in some weird gastronomic fashion.

I often wondered how Foremost had come to be in Taiwan in the first place, a country not known for its love of dairy in any form; milk usually means "goat" or "soybean" (yuck). Well, the Internet is here today, so I found that the post-WWII US military presence in Taiwan probably had something to do with it; Foremost Dairies supplied milk to US forces abroad from 1932 onwards. Particularly interesting is this excerpt:

During World War 11, the U.S. military sparked Foremost's international growth and the creamery opened additional plants nationwide. Foremost Dairies became known as "the longest milk route in the world."

[...]

Wherever it set up a facility, the organization wanted to teach local people how to operate it and then share in its success.

While searching the Internet, I came across Foremost in places like Vietnam and Hawaii, the logo largely untouched. Taiwan itself benefited from the facilities and training Foremost introduced, creating a sustainable local business in a fashion similar to the Singer Corporation...or so I imagine. I find the remnants of foreign cultures fascinating, especially when they've established a foothold in a place where the original influence has disappeared. Asia is littered with this: Vietnamese cuisine, forks and spoons in Thailand, master sushi chefs in Taiwan...you get the idea. Then there's interesting ideas backwashing into the former colonial powers, like Cobra Beer importing Indian beer to go with curry served in the U.K.

Where was I? Oh yes, club sandwiches...I guess it wasn't about the number of slices of bread after all.