rivulet
fonetik

the songs will write the words
The songs will write the words. A rivulet of unconventional aesthetics.


Sat Jan 14
“ On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. […] Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. […] Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, in an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times, as referenced in a Forbes piece introducing Roger L. Martin’s book Fixing the Game.
Fri May 20
Hype

I think what we have long been waiting for. Build dynamic, interactive, HTML5 based web content in an easy to use graphical environment. Things like this will be the true Flash killers.

Wed Apr 27
“ Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

(via nefffy)

(via nprfreshair)
Thu Mar 3
“ Snobs are people who make judgments for non-intrinsic reasons.
Kenneth Davids, nailing it as per usual, this time in a piece about Starbucks Via and other instant coffees.
Sun Feb 20

Apple’s Three Laws of Developers

yourhead:

  1. A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
  2. A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

— I. Developer

Mon Feb 7
“ In a more aesthically advanced republic, most people wouldn’t be allowed to decorate their own homes, much less design their own user interfaces.
Greg Knauss, in an article on the problems inherent in user skinnable applications.
Sun Jan 2
“ I don’t eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service. I love mussels. But in my experience, most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them. More often than not, mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss in the bottom of a reach-in. Some restaurants, I’m sure, have special containers, with convenient slotted bins, which allow the mussels to drain while being held—and maybe, just maybe, the cooks at these places pick carefully through every order, mussel by mussel, making sure that every one is healthy and alive before throwing them into a pot. I haven’t worked in too many places like that. Mussels are too easy. Line cooks consider mussels a gift; they take two minutes to cook, a few seconds dump in a bowl, and ba-da-bing, one more customer taken care of—now they can concentrate on slicing the damn duck breast. I have had, at a very good Paris brasserie, the misfortune to eat a single bad mussel, one treacherous little guy hidden among an otherwise impeccable group. It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I’m the worst kind of atheist. Fortunately, the French have liberal policies on doctor’s house calls and affordable health care. But I do not care to repeat that experience. No thank you on the mussels. If I’m hungry for mussels, I’ll pick the good-looking ones out of your order.
Words to live by—Anthony Bourdain, in his book Kitchen confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly, on why he doesn’t eat mussels when out at a restaurant.
Fri Dec 10
“ These attacks, in addition to being a misguided effort that doesn’t accomplish very much at all, are incredibly simple to launch and require no technical or hacker skills.

2600 Magazine, in a press release condemning the denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other entities after those entities took actions against WikiLeaks.

Obviously they are on WikiLeaks’ side, but they bristle so much at the media using the word ‘hackers’ to describe stupid script kiddies running DDOS attacks that they had to issue a press release.
Wed Jul 7
Knoll: Further down the side of Mt. Tam towards Bolinas, just above the fog line.

Knoll: Further down the side of Mt. Tam towards Bolinas, just above the fog line.

Fri Jun 11
“ So perhaps the best way for people to express outrage and inflict pain on oil companies is to use less fuel, thereby lowering overall demand. This is much harder than flinging brown paint at a BP sign, as many people have done. It may mean walking more or wearing sweaters indoors in the winter with the thermostat set at 64 degrees. People who still need a short-term hit of righteousness may continue to avoid filling up at BP stations. But it would be nice if they picked up a week’s worth of milk from a BP mini-mart on the way home at night. That way, the station owners don’t suffer as much.
Ron Lieber, in the NYTimes article Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations, where he explains how the byzantine structure of the fuel industry makes impossible the continued use of fuel while avoiding the purchase of BP originated fuel.
Brewers Take Risks to Make Sour Beers

The NYTimes on the bourgeoning Sour Beer market. Glad to see it expanding. Russian River Brewing’s delightfully sour beers fermented with Brettanomyces yeast and aged in oak are among my current favorites. Although there is also some wisdom in the remarks of Ron Gansberg, the brewmaster at Cascade Brewing, “I didn’t sign on to the hops arms race and I’m not going to go down the road of, ‘My beer is more sour than yours.’ ”

Sat Apr 24
Balloons: Contrail, Palm Frond

Balloons: Contrail, Palm Frond

Sat Apr 10
Crust

Crust

Mon Mar 8
“ I’m a dam buster.
Yvon Chouinard, in an Oscars-aired-commercial where he also explains why pitons are bad.
Wed May 14

A Limited Philosophy of Software Development

Technology has become a very complex area. It is my belief that technology professionals should serve to insulate the general population from the myriad protocols and specifications and engineering. To operate a product correctly should not necessitate an understanding of the systems and principles the product is based on. Things should just work, or else provide an intuitive and high level response as to why correct operation is not currently possible.

This has the side effect of making technology professionals gatekeepers. This brings responsibility upon our shoulders but as long as we are willing to take that responsibility, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Lawyers and accountants and architects all serve as gatekeepers for their particular areas of specialty.

So fantastical has the rise of the internet and related technologies been that often these technologies are seen as magical and unbounded. In some sense the future of technology could be seen to be unbounded, at least in terms of dramatic and unforeseeable advances and changes. However, at any given moment there are very real physical bounds imposed by the present computing and networking infrastructures. As such, it is our job to intelligently make tradeoffs, packaging together into a product the best possible set of features that can be made to work together.

Returning to the idea of the gatekeeper, in a realm that is unbounded, a gatekeeper is always seen to be evil, someone who wants to arbitrarily prevent access to good things. Unfortunately, many people view the world of technology as unbounded and so technology professionals who are grounded in reality are seen to be evil guardians who prevent fun. This view is probably primarily promulgated by the technology press which finds it easy to report on features but hard to report on something vague like user experience. While features may generate a quick, sensational popularity, a good user experience will promote lasting goodwill and devoted user based that grows more slowly but is ultimately for more profitable.

Many specific points fall out from this but a few are worth explicit mention now. First and foremost, simplicity is king. Every new technology or feature is one more thing that must be remembered and understood by the user. It is not enough for the new item to merely provide some benefit, that benefit must be greater than the additional memory burden presented by the item. Social media can provide great new avenues of communication for reaching and interacting with customers, but it can also dilute brand and overwhelm customers who just want to simply keep up with something they find interesting. The same goes for any other new technology buzzwords that a user may be sure of needing but in fact add no new capabilities or power.

This brings up another point: there are times when technology professionals must say no to users or clients, but just because what they are asking for will not bring them what they ultimately want. Flash is a good example of this. It is a complex browser plugin that is responsible for more browser crashes than any other reason. It is one more piece of software that a user must keep up to date. However, it provides no new power or functionality. Movies are much better delivered via movie specific codecs, which like Flash necessitate an additional piece of software, but they do what they are supposed to do much better: display movies at much higher quality with fewer bugs and crashes. Animations and interactive visual displays are much better created with Javascript, HTML and CSS, all native browser technologies. This means that there is no additional software to download or that will possibly crash.

In addition, since the browser was designed to do precisely this, the operation is fairly efficient, reserving much processing power and battery life for other functions. Flash on the other hand is quite inefficient at most tasks it is asked to do, meaning longer download times, less available processing power, and increased power consumption. That is if Flash can even be made to run at all. It is not purely marketing that keeps Flash off of nearly all mobile devices. The one argument Flash has in its favor is that the development environment is familiar to many creative professionals who already use Photoshop or Illustrator. Without downplaying this benefit, it is still unacceptable to foist a more poor product on users just because someone does not want to learn how to create a better product.

The iPhone is a perfect counterexample. It uses a very unique development environment that was understood by few people before learning it for iPhone development, but the process is entirely oriented toward producing good products which are efficient and highly usable. So while a new developer faces a steep learning curve, once the environment is learned, great products can be more easily produced, rather than sticking with a easily known environment that was hamstrung to almost always provide mediocre results.

All of this essentially boils down to understanding where your strengths end and weaknesses begin. Sometimes technology professionals understand computational products better and so we do know better. However, this cuts both ways. Most technology professionals have little sense for visual design, so it is important for us to work with visual designers in order to produce the highest caliber products. So there should also be an emphasis on aesthetics, especially as it pertains to design and interaction. Ultimately, this emphasis is driven by a desire to create highly usable products, letting the goal of increasing user happiness guide each design decision.