Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.

Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.:

Google once aspired to give us access to “all the world’s information”, which suggests a library. But the library-building job is now up to Archive.org. Instead, Google now personalizes the living shit out of its search results. One reason, of course, is to give us better search results. But the other is to maximize the likelihood that we’ll click on an ad. But neither is served well by whatever it is that Google thinks it knows about us. Nor will it ever be, so long as we are driven, rather than driving.

I think what’s happened in recent years is that users searching for stuff have been stampeded by sellers searching for users. I know Googlers will bristle at that characterization, but that’s what it appears to have become, way too much of the time.

But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that browsers are antique vehicles.

See, we need to drive, and browsers aren’t cars. They’re shopping carts that shape-shift with every site we visit. They are optimized for being inside websites, not for driving outside them, or between them. In fact, we can hardly imagine the Net or the Web as a space that’s larger than the sites in it. But we need to do that if we’re going to start designing means of self-transport that transcend the limitations of browsing and browsers.

[Brilliantly put. As usual form Doc.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Apple makes the left turn at Albuquerque

Apple makes the left turn at Albuquerque:

Yes, yes, you’re not going to stand around appreciating the finer details of the map application if the data is wrong. I get that. Pointing out that the vast majority of the data in the maps application is very clearly correct is small comfort if you need some of the data that’s wrong. But the vast majority of the data really is correct. When you’re talking about a data set the size of the entire world, then a 99.9% correctness still means hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of incorrect data points. Google Maps had very similar problems, and their most valuable resource has been users who reported them. This will probably work for Apple, too, at least if we actually report the problems rather than just creating Tumblrs mocking them.

For the record, Apple Maps knows exactly where that teriyaki place in Livermore is, and it’s the first hit on teriyaki livermore ca. Google still has no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

[Good points. More curious to see how quickly the app improves than anything else.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Of federal taxes and such

Of federal taxes and such:

Because one spouse isn’t working, there is no child care tax credit. There could be up to $2,500 in education credits per child—but let’s say the kids are younger and go with the lower $1,000 child tax credit for both of them. So that’s a $2,000 credit. To owe taxes at this point, you’d need $19,000 in taxable income—or $45,400 in total income. This still a hair below the EIC phaseout in this case. So to hit zero exactly you would need a few more dollars to bring your annual income to $45,750.
In a given year, you have about 260 work days. Let’s say you work a full day on all of them. This means that any vacation, sick days, or holidays you want had better be paid. To make your $45,750, you need to bring in $174.62 a day. Let’s round that down to $174 to make the math work out more smoothly.
You’re earning the federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour. To get to $174 a day, you’ll need to work for … 24 hours. Congratulations. You can sleep on the weekends. If you want to get down to an 8 hour day, you’ll need to earn at least $21.75. (You still have to work every day.) Good luck finding an early-career job that pays that well.

[Or if we maintain the current trend in government… ever finding a job. Period. But none of this is really the problem. This is just the Romney haters, hating. And sure, he gave them plenty of material to work with… But Obama’s no different. There’s no surprise that people who have little in the US sense of the word want redistribution. Surprise! Not.

Years ago there was no such thing as a telephone. If you wanted a doctor to see your ailing child, you hitched your horse to a wagon and you drove to the doctor’s house (if you were lucky). Then you woke the now annoyed doctor, and, assuming you could convince him of your need, drove him in your wagon back to your home. After he was done, and told you that your kid will be fine despite how dire things look at the moment, you got to drive him home. BTW, while you were waiting you unhitched your horse, watered the poor beast and fed him a bit and hooked everything back together for the return trip. So why do we no longer have house calls now that you can shepherd a doctor in the comfort of modern vehicle with hot and cold running air and a cushy ride instead of a way too hot, way too cold open air buckboard? Because the telephone was invented. And once you could *call* the doctor and convince him to hitch up his own horse, to his own wagon, and get his butt over to your place the house call was history. It was only a matter of time.

So stop waiting for bed time stories that some guy who we call president for a few handful of years is going to fix your life. None of them are. None of them can. I believe that none of them actually even want to. But believe me, sure as the doctor visit went away, the answer to anything you actually need lies in yourself and no place else. Allez!]

Get Up

The Selection: Get Up, by Bill Strickland:

It helped somehow, goofing around. All of us, anyone who rides, normalizes the risk of being on a bike. In a pack, there is something else on top of that, the need to find a way to acknowledge the danger without either glamorizing or dismissing it—either of which, we all know, courts its more wrathful incarnation. When the danger does arrive, I have been taught by my elders and betters and fasters, you entertain it with a kind of respectful insouciance.

[True. But danger doesn’t arrive. It’s part of the system and crashes happen. And once you climb on a bike it’s almost guaranteed. It’s not always epic. Sometimes it’s just that heartbreaking flop onto your side because you failed to clip out and then panicked. Other times… it’s the real deal. I think about this almost every time I’m going down a hill quickly. I certainly thought about it last Sunday when I was doing 37MPH and saw down the hill a little bit that the strong rains had washed a stream of gravel across the road (I had ridden up the other side of the hill). I picked a line, and let the bike float and all was well. But my first thought was “wow, this is gonna suck”. Danger’s always there—it’s built into the system.]

Apple’s Magic Is In The Turn, Not The Prestige

Apple’s Magic Is In The Turn, Not The Prestige:

While it lacks the pomp and circumstance of a Prestige on stage at some big event, this interaction is much more intimate, and as such, much more powerful. You may not perceive it directly, but the care and craft of The Turn percolates through your hands and eyes. Within minutes or even seconds, you just know this is something different. Something far beyond what others are doing with their false magic. You want this. You need this.

That’s why Apple is now the most valuable company in the world. And that’s why you will buy an iPhone 5. And an iPhone 6. And beyond. You’re upset about The Prestige, or the lack thereof. But it’s all about The Turn.

[Great piece. At work I’d really like to get to the point where I can spend time carefully researching and redesigning our work. It won’t be for a while in larger sense, but in a smaller sense we do it every day.]

If this isnt nice, I dont know what is.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.:

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” – Kurt Vonnegut

One of the best pieces of career advice that I have received is that you should never forget to have fun.

A lie that people like to tell themselves is that once “success” is reached (ie raising money, hiring new people, reaching important milestones etc), their life will get a lot easier, and only then can they start to have fun.

Unfortunately, “success” invariably raises the stakes and life actually gets harder and more complicated… not easier.

Instead of admitting this, we try to keep the lie alive by creating a new, more ambitious mirage of “success”. Months, years, decades and entire careers can fly by in this manner.

With all of this in mind, I am trying to take a deep breath, feel the love of my family and friends and say: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

[Right before the start of the Jewish New Year, this bared repeating in whole.]

Source: Dalton Caldwell

The Next Big… uh, Slightly Taller Thing

The Next Big… uh, Slightly Taller Thing:

Please, enough with the “iOS is not for power users” argument. Don’t tell me that the ability for a word processing application to open any RTF document in your iCloud document storage rather than just the ones assigned to its sandbox must be forbidden on the grounds that it might confuse Aunt Tillie. Don’t tell me it would create unnecessary user confusion to let FireFox for iOS ask “Make Firefox your default browser?” on first run, and to have that as a dropdown somewhere in Settings. Aunt Tillie has figured out manual transmission cars, child-proof pill bottles and digital alarm clocks; she will not be reduced to sobbing existential despair when presented with a few more toggles on her phone’s configuration screen.

[Smack on. Yes, I believe that design is making choices, but the choice to not allow you to customize this behavior feels wrong to me as well.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Last of the warmest rides…

Nights are cool, days are warm. Autumn is around the corner. I love that riding during the mid day gets more comfortable. I dislike that the early morning rides are cold. But overall one of my favorite times of year. The pic snapped this past Sunday morning on a quick 20 mile jaunt into the Park. The herds of deer were around, including these two little ones.

Idyllic ride...

★ Amazon’s Play

★ Amazon’s Play:

Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.

[Why is it so hard for folks to remember this? Making customers happy is all there is.]

Source: Daring Fireball

A quick bit of BS skewering

A quick bit of BS skewering:

Either own what you said, accept both the reaction and the consequences of what you say, or stop saying things that only an asshole would say. To paraphrase Randy Millholland, for someone who doesn’t thrive on controversy, you seem to say some shitty things about people a lot.

Either way, for the love of christ, stop crying that people are thinking unkind things about you when you say things about them that are kind of shitty. If being thought of as an asshole bothers you, stop being one.

Really.

[If nothing else, it’s to the point.]

Source: bynkii.com