Month: August 2013

What the next CEO of MS might say

What the next CEO of MS might say:

Here’s the deal. As a company, we’re in a bit of a pickle. Because of policies and decisions that made sense in 1995 being clung to as though we were carved in stone, we are now thought of as a company that hasn’t innovated, or really, done a damned thing right since the Xbox, and I have to say, the people saying that aren’t wrong. However, that’s our fault, not the naysayers. Yes, I know, haters gonna hate, but when that many people are saying something’s kinda screwy, you don’t have to slavishly do what they say, but you should allow for the fact they’re at least not completely wrong.

[If only…]

Source: bynkii.com

Animation pain

Along For The Ride:

These animations in iOS 7 feel like its designers are showing off their cool new abilities, and we’re just along for the ride. After sitting through all of these, day after day, it’s no longer impressive — it just feels needlessly, artificially slow.

Cut the animation durations in half.

[While I can’t speak to this case (since I haven’t spent any significant time playing with 7, I agree with his point. Animations are delightful the first time you do something, or when you have something that you don’t do all the time and suddenly you become aware of the depth of care a dev put into this quiet corner of the app. But generally, speed is the killer feature, and anything that gets in the way of that that doesn’t inform or make some more useable is a problem. It’s why the splash screen died.]

Source: Marco.org

Patience

Brent:

Don’t be impatient. Consider Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Start there. You’re not going to publish a novel by age 20, but, if you work hard and keep working, you might write one true sentence by then. There are no shortcuts, and *sounding* true is not the same as true.

[Patience seems especially difficult in our world. It’s why I’m so amazed at what Bezos pulls off with Amazon’s financials. How do you get all those hard charging investors to accept that the answer is “we’ll get there”. Magic!]

Slow Bicycle Movement Wins Fans

Slow Bicycle Movement Wins Fans – WSJ.com:

In 2011, she launched the Slow Bicycle Society on the Eastern Shore, an Alabama club with 100 members and a mission statement: “No Spandex needed!” In Tennessee, the Murfreesboro Slow Ride Cyclists, which formed two months ago, calls itself “a never-get-left-behind fun bicycling group” with “baskets encouraged.”

“We’re mostly focused on ringing our bells and waving at kids and just cruising around and chatting with the person closest to you in line,” says Sarah Murray, a 40-year-old manager for the city of Chicago who founded the Slow Bicycle Society in Chicago in 2009 and has watched membership grow to 300 from 15 people. She rides a three-speed upright.

[I never understand the issue that surrounds spandex. Why the hatred? No one forces anyone to wear it and why care if someone else does? Also, why do you have to be either/or? Sometimes I like to ride slowly and be social, other times I like to ride as hard and fast as I can. Why does society always as me to choose? I refuse.]

via Dave

Don’t fly during Ramadan (if you’re not white and stuff)

Don’t fly during Ramadan:

I barely noticed the irony of the situation – that the TSA and NYPD were clearing me for takeoff, but JetBlue had decided to ground me. At this point, I could think of nothing else but how to inform my family, who were expecting me to be on the other side of the country, that I wouldn’t be meeting them for dinner after all. In the meantime, an officer entered the room and told me to continue waiting there. “We just have one more person who needs to speak with you before you go.” By then, I had already been “cleared” by the TSA and NYPD, so I couldn’t figure out why I still needed to be questioned. I asked them if I could use my phone and call my family.

“No, this will just take a couple of minutes and you’ll be on your way.” The time was 12.35.

[Amazingly sad. These processes don’t work at all at the individual level. They protect no one, harm innocent people, and give people who don’t care, or who want to exercise power over others, the freedom to do so with impunity. It all needs to change, stop, and go away.]

via @GlennF

Hedgefox Buys Metayacht

Hedgefox Buys Metayacht:

Amazon isn’t a store. It’s a system for making other systems, some of which sell things. He has a meta-platform from which he can, with a wink and a wave, fabricate any media platform he could imagine. Still he buys a big old paper?

[snip -ed]

Again—not Bezos. He could slip leaflets into every Amazon box and have a greater reach than any paper in the world. As to the Post, aren’t there cheaper, more efficient ways to find power in Washington, D.C., and without alienating your customers? For example Bezos could buy Politico and destroy it utterly, then salt the ground on which it sits while grinding its web servers into powder, and we would all celebrate this gift to humankind way more than the future descendants of our parched hellworld will celebrate some oddball clock in the desert.

People hate the media and with good reason; it tells them things, often without first asking their permission (self-link; deal). And usually the writers take the brunt of popular hatred; after all the words are theirs. But sooner or later people figure out who really owns the paper and pays the salaries and start to yell and scream and promise boycotts. In order to stomach running a paper, an owner needs to take a near-erotic pleasure in being: (A) hated; and (B) sued. Newspaper employees sometimes hate their owners, too, and will humiliate them. It’s the inverse of a compliment sandwich. The owner of a mass-market news publication is typically the money cream in an Oreo of hate.

[Love the viewpoint. Delicious writing and descriptions. ]

Zoë Goes Running

Zoë Goes Running | Running Le Tour de France for World Pediatric Project:

When I finally did finish, at 1:05 am, my knees and elbows were crusted with blood, and my palms dotted with blood blisters from falling down, my skin pickled and covered in a sun rash, my ankles swollen red and hot, dirt everywhere, and my face completely flushed with fever.  It was, after so many runs in my life, the first time I felt so deeply that I could not possibly have gone one extra step.  So often people have commented upon seeing me after a 30 mile day that I look great, considering.  I’ve always felt conflicted about that – sure it’s nice I can run that much and not look awful, but on the other hand, I want to look awful!  I want to look like I’ve been through something.  And finally, at 1 am on Friday morning, I looked like I had been through something.  23 hours, 110 degree heat, 8000 feet of elevation gain, all of it was written on my face, etched in my body.  Finally, I looked like hell.   And it felt great.

[It’s amazing anyone ever thinks of these things… let alone complete them.]

Why We Should Care About 4,000th Ichiro Pro Hit

Why We Should Care About 4,000th Ichiro Pro Hit — Daily Intelligencer:

But in at least one way, it doesn’t matter whether 4,000 professional hits is exactly as impressive as we’re trained to think it is because a lot of them came in Japan. Sports fans love round numbers, and we especially love large round numbers — the kind that take a career to accumulate. We make a big deal when a pitcher gets to 300 wins, or a slugger hits his 500th home run, or a hitter gets his 3,000th (or 4,000th) hit, and the main reason we do so is because it allows us a natural opportunity to reflect on the player’s career, which almost by definition is an impressive one. All-time greats like Ichiro deserve this sort of treatment; he and players like him ought to be celebrated as their careers wind down. New York fans have been through this a lot lately, with future Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera reaching significant milestones in recent years. The prime of Ichiro’s career happened outside of New York, of course, but he’s in that class of player.

And so too much debate about the legitimacy of Ichiro’s 4,000 hits would obscure what should be (and for the most part is) happening now: a celebration of one of the most iconic baseball players ever. Yankee fans are watching an Ichiro whose best days are behind him, but even if we focus just on his American career, his time in Seattle was incredible. (At least his unorthodox-but-effective slap-swing — the one that helped him pick up an insane 262 hits in 2004 — still remains.) Ichiro’s American numbers are plenty good enough for induction into Cooperstown — he has a .320 career average thanks to a steady stream of singles — but it’s possible he won’t reach any major round-number milestones. (He’s 278 major-league hits away from 3,000, but he turns 40 this fall.) Which means this might be our best opportunity to collectively celebrate his career before it ends. Let’s be sure to take it.

[Let’s not forget this article that says a lot about how he went about this. With the recent debate over 10,000 hours (genetics vs. practice) let’s not forget that there’s always a practice component. There’s always relentless, focused, efficient practice involved.]

Source: Gruber

Sports, Complexity, and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule : The New Yorker

Sports, Complexity, and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule : The New Yorker:

As it happens, I have been a runner and a serious track-and-field fan my entire life, and I have never seen a boy who was slow become fast either. For that matter, I’ve never met someone who thinks a boy who was slow can become fast. Epstein has written a wonderful book. But I wonder if, in his zeal to stake out a provocative claim on this one matter, he has built himself a straw man. The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.

[Gladwell and Epstein go at it. Looking forward to reading the book. And don’t miss this either.]