Simplicity - Dave Kauffman's Thotz

Kodak's Self-Destruction, an Inside Story

2012-01-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

I worked for Kodak for four years, but it wasn't by choice.

Kodak purchased a Vancouver company named Creo, as part of their vision to convert Kodak to a digital company before the roof caved in from falling film revenue. The strategy was sound. The execution - a disaster. There are three kinds of mistakes we saw as Creo-ites, mistakes that were an anthema to the values that the founders of Creo sought to avoid, and did so successfully, for the years that led to Creo's phenomenal growth and eventual move to a public company. While speculation runs amok in the popular press about Kodak’s demise, I can tell you what it looked like from the inside.

Kodak executives were not naive about the future of digital cameras, and indeed Kodak was in the best market position to bring out the “brownie” of digital cameras - the one that would have made Kodak the household name in point-and-shoot digital. What was lacking was not vision, but courage. Kodak management just could not bring themselves to take a terrific new camera to market, even though Kodak had the Brownie, Instamatic, and Starmite lines in their DNA. In the end they just could not muster the courage to actively end the reign of film themselves. The camera is dead - long live the camera! should have been the battle cry, but no executive vice-president was prepared to be the person perceived to be the reason for the demise of the film cash-cow. Instead, they handed it to Fuji to decimate the Kodak film business, instead of doing it themselves, and losing the market share of film and future digital cameras to their major competitor.

The second thing we learned about how badly things were in Kodak was the exposure to the incredibly large, self-perpetuating bureaucracy that took us from 4 layers between the CEO and staff to about 12. Executive VPs, VPs, executive assistants reflected the 1950’s model of a happy Kodak family living off 90% gross-margin film and loved by America. We watched competent professionals, who made rational arguments and economic decisions, replaced by Kodak company-bots who made a career out of squeezing the innovation out of one division, showing an increased profitability, then moving onto another group before the other collapsed. The kind of pyramid promotion scheme we had only seen in movies was being played out every day, and the shell-game players rewarded each other with promotions and bonuses. A very abrupt insight into American corporate politics, and a foreshadow of the inevitable time when the music stops and the carefully-planned moves of the survivors ensure their bonuses were safe.

Finally, the last element that destroyed Kodak is that they lost sight of who they are. Antonio tried to remake the company into a digital imaging force in the market, to prove that his ouster from HP was a mistake, but HP executed on the digital imaging strategy far more easily, with their purchase of Indigo, and their active self-cannibalization of the LaserJet by transferring energy to the DeskJet line, in a move that preserved their overall consumables strategy. Kodak was not a digital imaging company any more than it was a film imaging company. By losing sight of who they were, Kodak let the 1984 Olympics torch pass to Fuji, starting Fuji's American ascent at Kodak's expense. Kodak’s retired CMO Carl Gustin I think understood this: Kodak was the memories company. Kodak moments were the true American spirit behind the yellow boxes, not the chemically-treated plastic inside them. Kodak glimpsed that vision with the Gallery - at least the Kodak Gallery that could have been. Once again there was no lack of vision for Gallery, from the digital generation of marketing folk. One could imagine the thousands of images uploaded every minute worldwide, correlated by time and location for shared current events, like a tsunami or a rally; by location over time to build a retrospective of a famous landmark through the years. Instead, while YouTube recklessly let people upload anything without limit, the Gallery threatened users that their precious images would be deleted (deleted from their shoebox!) if they didn't buy stuff. The Kodak Gallery could have been the Story of America, shared, over time, instead of lost in shoe-boxes in the attics of the previous generation.

In the end, being stuck in the previous generation is what did Kodak in. Kodak dies an old man, friendless, having squandered his children’s inheritance on dreams of past glory, instead of investing in that same next generation, and treating digital as a tremendous new opportunity instead of an old threat to be managed.

RIP Kodak, and thanks for the company that invented continuous film, the Brownie camera, the Instamatic, and motion picture film that captured nuance and shadow to tell great stories.

Goodbye Steve, and the deepest of thanks

2011-10-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs brought together a wonderfully diverse set of skills and talents that, combined with some luck, gave him the power to change the world of technology. Those skills: Compassion, Courage, and Good Taste are a rare set, and the convergence of events that led him to create Apple were a syzygy we are not likely to see again in our lifetimes.

Thank you Steve, not for the products, but for the role model. Many of us have been encouraged in our quest to "Think Differerent" by your celebration of doing just that.

Compassion, awareness and peace, Steve. Love, Dave

The (Renewed) Tradition of Making Things

2011-07-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

I'm still flying high from the great response and creativity we saw at Vancouver's first Mini Maker Faire on June 25, 26. My friend Tom created some nice metal & wooden stands for our various "less-than-an-hour-of-programming" Arduino demonstration projects.

- The Peak-a-Boo (less correctly called the "I Keeel You!" display) that had a picture of Jeff Dunham's Ahmed character poised to spin around at someone who approached too closely.

- TheRandom Color LEDerizer, which chooses one of 16 Million possible colors an RGB LED can create and used pulse-width modulation to fade it in and out.

- The Ultrasonic Theremin, which coupled a MaxSonar EZ1 sensor, and a Mac running Processing, to translate hand height to frequency.

Maker Faire is a coming-out party for creativity, for people who cross over the illusory creative/technical barrier.

Geeks abound, Athena rejoices.

The Speech That Would Have Won The Canadian Election for the Liberal Party

2011-05-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here is the speech I would make if I were leader of the Liberal party of Canada. Here it is Mike, it's yours for free.

Canada is liberal. Canada is the Liberal Party.

For most of our 144 years as a nation, Canada has exemplified tolerance, open-ness, and a strong belief that since some of are more fortunate than others, we will choose to share some of what we have with those who do not, in the belief that since we are all more equal than not, helping our neighbour in times of misfortune has the natural consequence of them helping us if and when we should need it. And when it was required, we have gone to war to defend those beliefs.

That is what Canada represents. Our leading bookstore says it best; the World needs more Canada.

Canada is liberal. Canada is the Liberal Party. Centered between socialist and capitalist, centered between giving too much and giving not enough. Centered around ensuring banks can be profitable, but not irresponsible, with Canadians' money. Centered around ensuring Canadians have jobs, but not selling all our natural resources; wood, oil, and water, to the nation with the highest bid.

For most of our 144 years, Canadians have elected the party that represents these ideals. I don't believe that has changed. But we as the party representing Canada have fallen short. We lost the right to govern with integrity, so Canadians told us in the free and fair way we have the grace to live under, the Canadian electoral system.

We don't believe that Canadians want to live with a polarized, two-party system like we see south of the border. Polarized groups unable to listen to each other, poised to find fault rather than merit, to find error instead of possibility, to find division instead of unity.

Canadians want the Liberal party. They want us to be real. They want us to be strong. They want us to be honest. When we do these things, we will have earned the right to govern this amazing country with the balance and integrity Canadians want.

I am Canadian. I am a Liberal.

Welcome to the Smart Grid

2010-04-25T22:57:00.000-07:00

I started work recently at a new company, ironically located just down the hill from the building Creo started in many years ago.

Tantalus is one of the small, fast-growing tech Vancouver companies working to make the smart grid real. Tantalus manufactures radio and software systems read electrical meters by radio. Well, that's half the story. Automated Meter Reading, or AMR, could be seen simply as a cost reduction exercise to reduce employment of the urban university students who jog between houses reading meters, or the more significant carbon footprint of driving trucks around rural areas to read meters of farm-houses. Tantalus' meters alone have saved an estimated 1,000,000 miles of truck travel in the U.S. in 2009. Part of the reason Tantalus' system does so well in these sparse rural regions is the nature of the radio systems they designed years ago, the uses both analog and digital techniques to create a network that allows meters to relay information from any other meter that they can reach by radio, extending the network reach by miles.

The other half of the story is that Tantalus' radio system is two-way. That turns out to be a great innovation because over the next few years, as the smart grid gets overlaid on top of the electrical grid, there will be as much communication going INTO homes and buildings as coming out of them. With radio-connected meters, utilities can have near real-time updates on the actual load on their entire system. We will see utilities imposing highly discriminated pricing regimes called time-of-use, to balance peak power demands to avoid the need to build new power plants. Customers already can sign up for connecting devices to plugs that only go on when power cost is low, or thermostats that can alter the temperature setting to save power to prevent brownouts. As one customer told me, eventually all customers will be on time-of-use, so we will want to have appliances that make good economic choices about when to use power and when not to.

Tantalus has some cool tech, some good basic science, and some good sales folk and customers. I'm glad to have ended up here and help them fuel their next stage growth.

The Lost Opportunities of the 2010 Winter Olympics

2010-02-16T22:45:00.000-08:00

It's only a few days into what is going to seem an interminable period of mess and mayhem in Vancouver, but it seems time to open the discussion about the missed opportunities that could have made this event truly world-class, and one to be remembered and appreciated by British Columbians for many years to come.

Missed Opportunity #1 - Green Transport (Olympic Lanes)

It seems that anyone with a white or silver GMC truck or SUV that weighs over a ton can get a door sticker enabling them to sail through traffic in the "Olympic Lanes". Most of us have no problem knowing busses and service trucks can move the various Olympic-related goods and people around. When you look closely though you often see the same thing - large SUVs with one large driver. Sometimes on their non-handsfree cell-phone. Are they late for a pick-up? I especially had to grit my teeth (and slam on my brakes) for the entitled driver who left their privileged lane to cut in front of me to turn left on Cambie street. Perhaps GM could offer an OnStar bumper sticker for 1-800 How's My Driving?

The opportunity to have the early production Chevy Volt electrically cruising along the route along with any bike, board, or electric cycle - that would have been an Olympic lane to capture the world's imagination. Instead we have GM commercials about huge vehicles complaining to each other about being stuck with "airport runs" (instead of using the Canada Line) and airing their huge trunks while apologizing for the smell of hockey equipment, to say nothing of their own gaseous exhausts.

Missed Opportunity #2 - Green Transport (Sea to Sky Train)

After years and billions of dollars Peter Kiewit succeeded in grabbing each end of the Squamish-Whistler highway 99 and pulling it straighter. Better time and fewer fatalities are certainly worth some serious investment. Sadly, most of the benefits have been undone for a month while the IOC cordoned off a lane for exclusive use. Thousands of small orange sticks limit visibility and create narrow lanes that undulate with little or no relation to the white lines of the road or the guardrails. The time we gained from the reconstruction has been more than lost with the poor lane control.

Of course when you consider that the road widening mainly benefits the occasional or tourist driver the decision becomes somewhat baffling. It's painfully clear that our guests should not be driving to Whistler for events. There's nowhere for 20,000 cars to park, a fact we knew would be true even before the decision to widen the highway was made.

The missed opportunity here - affordable, regular passenger railroad service to Whistler. Perhaps the railbed can't accommodate fast trains, but it's still as fast as the bus, and as anyone who was lucky enough to travel the line on the BC Rail train, or has a ticket on the privileged Alberta Train, one of the most beautiful routes in the world. Instead, coming back from Whistler last week, we drove over part of the rail-line south of Brittania that had been PAVED over for cars. What a waste.

Missed Opportunity #3 - Community Signs and Support

A few months ago the City of Vancouver bowed to pressure to pass a bylaw that allowed officials to enter private homes to take down any signs that offended the IOC guidelines. While it probably would not stand up to a court case, Vancouverites are by-and-large not feisty enough to bother getting in an uproar about it. Instead, they display the passive resistance we're known for - there are simply no indications that anyone, anyone at all - school children, families, schools, or businesses, are the least bit enthusiastic about Vancouver 2010, or the Olympics. The occasional "Go Canada Go" banner or Canada flag-as-drapery are all that we can imagine displaying without the fear of hordes of IOC police breaking down the door to tear down the kids' unlawful manilla-and-crayon sketch of 5 circles and a "Welcome to Vancouver 2010" phrase (written with a backwards "r"). Or maybe just a lawsuit from the IOC. Sumi, indeed.

Missed Opportunity #4 - Trust

Hundreds of pedestrians trek from the Waterfront station on a pilgrimage to the Jack Poole Square to see the Olympic cauldron set alight by the Great One on opening night. When they get there, they are jailed, like protesters, locked out by a huge fence. "How could this be?" we ask, to be told it is for the security of the International Press. Security. Its presence is everywhere, a silent, ominous reminder that we are captives in our own city.

Thankfully, bright hope exists. When a guy like Alex Bilodeau can exhibit skill, then top it off with Canadian humility, and the heartfelt love he has for his brother and family, even the harshest critic has to be thankful for those rare moments. It's just sad that so many other amazingly wonderful things that could have been, were not, lost because of overzealous protectionism, and lack of political vision.

Does Adobe Have a Future?

2010-01-02T14:33:00.001-08:00

I've long been an admirer of Adobe, and over my prepress career with Creo and Kodak I saw them go through a number of difficult transformations. The core of Adobe's difficulties is not the migration of paper media to electronic, it's that the founding CEO John Warnock, has not been replaced, and Adobe is still coasting on his innovation.

My first encounter with Adobe was through PostScript, when the company I was working for at the time bought a DEC LN03 LaserPrinter that came with the fabled "Red Book" (now online) on the PostScript language. Up to that point, the only languages that dot-matrix printing devices understood were "choose one of the 6 built-in fonts" and "print this letter at the next position." Even with the advent of the far-superior laser printer, the same protocol was supported, limiting these technical marvels' capability to seeing letters that were not just punched out of a 5x7 array of dots.

PostScript brought singular benefits to the laser printers, which had 300 dpi resolution and the capability to draw anywhere on the million bits of 8.5 x 11 paper. After a couple hours of reading that book, I was printing satellite images and marking annotations at precise latitudes, all computed in the printer by PostScript's programming power.

PostScript was a programming language based John Warnock's work at Xerox PARC. PARC is now known as the textbook model of a company that encouraged and achieved some of the finest innovation in technology, then failed to commercialize it, seeing it instead make other companies a fortune.

I had the fortunate connection to join with Stephen Herron, an independent consultant on printing technologies, who was teaching a course for Illustrator designers to "reach under the hood" of the new LaserWriter and learn tricks that Illustrator '88 was still holding back. Illustrator itself was another John Warnock invention. Having put the controls for smooth Beziér curves into PostScript, only font designers were using them. John's wife asked him how she could create curved objects and lines, so John had some developers create essentially a PostScript editing and creation tool. The user interface for Illustrator was a beautiful mapping from the elegance and power of the PostScript programming language into a visual metaphor. Even the abstract control points of bezier curves found a simple analogy in the tangent controls that adorn every Illustrator curve.

Stephen and I developed an application that let users design custom halftone dot shapes in PostScript. He now teaches at Emily Carr.

With PageMaker, Illustrator, and PostScript enabled by a partnership with Apple, Adobe's fortunes grew. Sadly, QuarkXPress displaced PageMaker as the professional tool for page layout, mainly because the then-CEO Tim Cook, spent many hours at a Denver prepress shop with the Nies family, learning how to coax correct CMYK separations out of a Linotronic 330. This effort cemented QuarkXPress' dominant position for almost 20 years.

John's next major invention was outlined in a paper now referred to as "Camelot." It explores the idea that since PostScript is a programming language, one could replace all the drawing operations, like LineTo, CurveTo, etc. with a command that simply writes them out to another file. The output file would not have all the subroutines and algorithms in it, it would just be a long string of commands to draw stuff. The advantages were clear over PostScript: No long programming chains, no infinite loops, fast execution, and a much simpler reader. This output format became to core of PDF - the Portable Document Format.

While John expected this to make RIPs much simpler, of course Acrobat and PDF have found a whole new market in document archiving and portability. Adobe's Acrobat division now accounts for a significant proportion of their revenue, and PDF is part of the core U.S. government infrastructure, from tax forms to archiving of electronic documents.

All this from one paper.

Look at Adobe now, several years after John's retirement. Bruce Chizen understood business and helped PDF's commercial success. The acquisition of Macromedia was a step towards bringing the print and online worlds together, but much of that effort seems to be lost on internal friction and the difficulty of bringing together two worlds each with its own history.

Adobe still has the potential to be the unifying agent for electronic and print publishing, but without the innovation from the top, new ideas only add incremental features to the product line, and it would be difficult for the Narayen-led version of Adobe to embrace the paradigm shifting ideas of its founder, John Warnock.Without that, it will either take a long time for Adobe to enable true multiplatform publishing, or someone else may do it.

Saying Goodbye to Prinergy

2009-11-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

The news came in a 9:00 mandatory meeting. You are no longer needed. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

After 15 years of living and thinking about print and prepress workflows, it's over. Kodak is moving the software development to Israel. There will be a transition period. I'm not on the transition team.

After driving through the well-known early stages of grieving, anger and denial, I'm moving into acceptance, but not without a deep sense of sadness, and of loss, for Prinergy. I know Prinergy like I know my own kids - in fact they have spent their entire lives living with me envisioning, talking, travelling, selling, presenting, architecting, and tweaking Prinergy. It is part of our lives. It has been a singular focus since the fabled train trip in 1995 where I set out with Amos and Tim the top ten things it would have to do to change the prepress world.

While I am often referred to as the father of it, I never really liked the name Prinergy. Even the Creo CEO kept calling it "Printergy". Maybe I never let go of its original code-name, Araxi, which still adorns the code in various places. Even so, Prinergy has been the most significant project of my career (so far!) and I'm very proud to know that it has enhanced the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of prepress operators and managers, and generated over $1B of revenue for Creo and Kodak over its lifetime.

For me, there will be many things lost. I am sad to lose the contact with the many customers I listened to, and sometimes argued with, but whose time and energy resulted in new features and priority of bug fixes, educating us as to their business problems. I'm sad to lose the breadth of knowledge I have gathered with my colleagues here in Burnaby, that we have built up. I am sad that I won't see the completion of what we expected to be a renewed Prinergy 6 vision at Ipex in 2010 - one that brings high speed digital and offset workflows together. And I will be sad to not come into the office each day with my second family: developers, engineers, testers and subject-matter experts who I have worked with for many years, meeting and sometimes exceeding our customers' expectations.

I'm not sure what the next thing to do will be, but as my Dad says, each time the universe closes one door, another opens.

My gratitude to our thousands of customers worldwide. My life is better for our partnership, I hope you can say the same.

/dave

Edna Mode - Product Manager Extraordinaire

2009-08-12T14:41:00.001-07:00

While I love all the Pixar movies, I am especially fond of The Incredibles for the amazing lighting, and for the huge orchestral score, and for Edna Mode. Edna is the diminutive Euro-Japanese fashion designer who bemoans the fact that while she used to "design for gods" she is now relegated to designing clothes for super-models "Nothing super about them... spoiled, stupid little stick figures with poofy lips who think only about themselves" but then realizes her ambition of again designing suits capable of being burned, stretched, and tortured on the bodies of most of the world's then-many super heroes.

But I digress.

Why is Edna Mode, a wacky made-up character for a cartoon, my favorite candidate role-model for a product manager (or as some ex-Microsoft dude calls them, Program Managers)?

It all has to do with the cape sequence. Or should I say, the "No Capes!" sequence.

The "No Capes!" sequence points out some of the most important but least understood aspects of product management.

1. A great product manager abstracts from market samples to identify trends.

2. A great product manager doesn't just do what the customer asks.

3. A great product manager has the market data to back up her projections.

Let's look at these in more detail.

Abstracts from Samples

This is sometimes called "trendspotting", but at the core it is looking at lots of things or listening to a bunch, and finding emerging themes. If you're not careful this can increase paranoia, but otherwise it can be lucrative. Identifying market trends before competitors can put you in a key early market position.

Bob opines "You can't generalize about these things..." but is completely shut down by Edna's fastidious market research and machine-gun delivery, proving that yes, indeed, clear insight and the power to recognize emergent themes is exactly what a great designer does.

Doesn't Do What Customers Ask For

Bob Parr says to Edna regarding her "No capes!" statement, "Isn't that my decision?" Clearly not, as she goes on to prove in step 3 -

Using Market Data To Make the Point

Edna points out in dazzling chronological order (aided by great visuals) of the details of every case in which a cape caused the wearer's untimely demise. She quotes them, hero and date, at a time when she is clearly not had time to prepare for seeing Mr. Incredible. She must have had these facts rolling around in her head for a long time before she finally needed them.

So there you have it - three reasons why Edna Mode is my favorite fictional product manager. Now go away and design something phenomenal, and call me when you get back - I love our little chats...

Operations Vs. Vision, or Why Tim Cook Can't Replace Steve Jobs

2009-01-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

I've had a terrific career in high tech looking back at the last 20 years. I learned tube theory in high school but got to play with the new TTL logic chips. I wrote software for one of the first digital telephone switches, played with an Apple Lisa beside the VPs' office, and designed the file system for one of the first voicemail systems from the disk sectors, up. I worked on a network management system where we had to unpack tcp, udp and ip packets, which are the corpuscles of the internet. And I got to be part of a startup that accelerated the move from film to digital workflows in the printing industry.

Over that time, I've received a lot of positive feedback for a role I like to take on, that of a product visionary. It seems to be a simple but unusual set of skills. You have to be able to listen well, have a feel for industry and human trends, you have to be up on the latest trends in technology, and be able to accumulate enough data points to extrapolate a bit into the future with decent accuracy. But that's not enough. If seeing the future were all you needed, Cassandra would have been a happy person. Seeing the future is just the beginning, and the only times that the vision work I've been part of has come to fruition is when I had the courage, energy, and a great management team, to persevere against the myriad compromises that arise to prevent the vision from being achieved.

Sadly it is the compromises that keep many great products from shipping, becoming only "good", or even "mediocre," in the process. What's important to know is that none of these compromises, in and of themselves, seem bad. But accumulated together, one after another, without someone seeing where it is going to lead, and you end up with products like Microsoft Vista, the Blackberry Storm, and non-RPN calculators. There is no one person to blame, just a series of little things that turn into Cortlandt Homes. This is also refered to as the Death by a Thousand Cuts.

Here's the thing. None of the changes suggested along the path of dumbing a visionary product down to a me-too, unsatisfying object, are arguable on a solely rational basis. Each one seems "reasonable" - it will save 5 cents per machine, the competitors have one, and the famous - "we don't have time." You have to be driven to overcome all these setbacks, you have to persevere against the small rationalism in favor of the big picture, and you have to have the authority to say "no." You have to inspire and drive the vision into the people building it so they defend it themselves. You have to create a visionary army.

This is why Steve Jobs could create a company capable of creating, developing, and delivering great products. As CEO, he built the company around the core dna of product beauty, integrity and ease-of-use. He is crazy, and that is how we get insanely great products.

That this should be self-evident is in the examples of yesterday and today. When Steve was kicked out of Apple, the Mac lineup turned into a myriad of beige, functional boxes with hundreds of incremental new features and looked pretty well the same for years. Spindler and Amelio were decent operations guys, but they did not understand the core Apple values of design passion, and of pricing at the premium brand level. You can see the opposite this week when Jon Rubinstein, who was well-schooled in the Apple way, unveiled the most beautifully designed Palm product since the Palm V.

Yet, companies love to have an operational leader. The COO at a company I worked for explained it to me; if you put an operational person in charge, you can be sure that the budgets will get done, the numbers will get tracked, and all the action items will be completed. If you put a vision person in charge, you might get something amazing but you won't know when it will ship. An operation person, he argued, will go find vision if that's what they need to succeed. Sadly, that has never been my experience. Everyone falls back to their comfort zone, and when the going gets tough, the ops people cut back, trim budgets, get conservative, efficiently tracking the shrinking revenue and laying people off, right into bankruptcy. They never believe they need vision. They don't get it. They don't respect it. "We have plenty of vision," one manager told me, "we have more things we want to do then we have people, so vision is not our problem". That product went on to several versions, each with hundreds of new features, without a comprehensive theme, difficult to use, and looking almost exactly the same after years of development.

You have to have the madman at the helm. The person who wants to drive the crew to the edge of the world to do what has never been done before. The same thing that inspires the visionary makes the operations person quake in their boots and run back into the cabin to count things. Operations people join the navy. The visionaries want to be pirates.

So it's fine for Tim to cover daily operations while Steve recuperates, hopefully returning in time for a standing ovation and newly-unveiled innovation at WWDC 2009, but the next CEO of Apple has to be someone who knows how to get the best from Apple, and that means pushing innovation and passion to the forefront, and having the team behind him, sure - sometimes shaking their heads, but nonetheless on board, and making it happen. From what I've seen, that person might be already there.

Pilot to Copilot...

2009-01-12T16:24:00.001-08:00

Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software (or some mailbot) asked me for my experience with Copilot. This was my reply.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's a fact. I am a Mac user. My Dad, who lives in a far-off city has a PC, because his friends all told him they can help him fix his PC when it breaks, but if he gets a Mac, he will be exiled and left alone on an iceberg of cold-shouldered hatred and loneliness to die while futilely clicking on icons that look like backlit ju-jubes. Who knew? But while I enjoy working on my little pretty Mac, I know all the tips and tricks to make sure that Windows users never really know that I am on the same network as them, sharing their DHCP service, and printing directly to the printers instead of going through the Windows printer queue. They always look at me funny when my printout comes out first. Don't tell them.

Since my Dad does little other than run Eudora and IE on his PC, his needs are few, until his Windows buddy told him he should switch from IE to FireFox to avoid all those nasty viri that would email his bank account to Russia and send him 500lbs. of unwanted caviar while extracting several thousand dollars from his chequing account. (We spell it that way in Canada - cheque, not check, 'cause we like the French people). But when I directed him to our new family web site with animated pictures of nerdy grandchildren, the website informed him that he was an idiot, and would probably be happier being exiled to go sit on an iceberg. Or at least that he needed a newer version of Firefox.

No problem, he thought, "I can do this. I don't have to call in a favor from my tech-savvy coffee buddies, surely I can download my own copy of the latest Firefox." So my Dad, confident and in full possession of his faculties, who has written copy for hundreds of radio and tv commercials, and narration for dozens of award-winning documentary films, simply typed www.firefox.com into internet explorer and downloaded the newest version of Firefox. What could be simpler?

But, lo and behold, the web site complained AGAIN? How could that be? The son (that would be me, aren't you following?) then received a cryptic email - can't see images of grandchildren, web site bad. must not be windows-compatible. you are a bad son for putting your pictures on a web site that only your elite and stuck-up mac-friends can see and leaving your poor pc-using parents without a way to see our own grandchildren - what kind of son are you? (Actually I am embellishing a bit, perhaps it's just what I imagine was between-the-pixels)

By this time, sweat is emerging on my brow, and my hands are shaky. I tested the site on Mac Safari and Firefox, and Windows IE 7 and Firefox just to avoid that problem. How could I have failed at so basic a task?

Then I made a crucial mistake. I picked up the phone. Never do this. Repeat after me. Never, ever pick up the phone to call someone less tech-savvy than yourself to engage them in dialog as to how to fix a technical problem. Why not? Because voice communication is to technical problem solving what megaphones are to trench warfare. Wrong tool. Many deaths and sore throats will ensue.

Nonetheless, I picked up the phone and called my Dad. I asked him to tell me the version of Firefox he was running. He said it was the latest. "Dad, do me a favor, find the menu item Help, and pull it down to see "About..." and tell me what it says". "Version 2.1. but I don't understand, I downloaded the newest version a week ago?" "Dad, is there an icon on the desktop that says Setup.exe" "Well, there are a lot of things on the desktop, do you mean the Firefox logo with the little arrow?" "No. Hang on. Let me think about this."

So you know Joel, because you are the CEO of a major respected technical organization, and have been in the geek trenches for years, what happened. Everyone reading this knows what happened. If you don't have a plausible theory as to what happened you have to turn in your geek cred badge and you will never, ever be asked to work at Fog Creek. But it doesn't matter. I sat on the long distance phone call, ticking off minutes, while I calculated how long and how likely I was to succeed at getting my Dad to:

a) understand the Windows Download Run/Save dialog
b) find the location on disk that the installer got saved to
c) run the installer
d) ensure that the desktop icon pointed to the newest install, not an old one, or be some orphaned phantom, stuck on an iceberg

Too long, and too frightening to consider. It's time to pull out the big guns. "Dad, I want to try something, and need your help. There is this program called Copilot written by this company I respect that is made for exactly this purpose, and I'd like to try it out 'cause I think that will be simpler than trying to explain to you the things you need to do to install the Firefox upgrade." "Why do you have to do that, I've already downloaded the latest version?" "Because you not only have to download it, you also have to install it, although since you already have an older copy, it should upgrade it instead - see what I mean?" "Why didn't it upgrade it by itself?" "Dad, it's software - never ask why" "Well, OK, what do I have to do?"

And now, dear Joel, having had the patience to wade through all that preliminary bio-fluff we will come to the question you so innocently asked me today, "How is it (Copilot) working for you?" Because, your 15-day free trial is almost over and you might want to subscribe, (going on my own thoughts here) so that we can have a nice annuity stream and g-d knows - once you've fixed your Dad's PC, you'll probably want to take control of his machine what, 3 or 4 times a day! No, just kidding. The pricing policy is very nice, and the DayPass option will be perfect for the occasional times he gets into a pickle.

But the problem we had with Copilot is that is is too symmetric. Face it, there is big imbalance of power here, and I am ok with the fact that I want to do this mitzvah, this good-deed, and will pony up some time and $ to do it, but I want my experience to be powerful but fast, while I need my Dad's experience to be simple and painless.

Sadly Joel, it was not.

Now I can't even recall all the details of what happened, but that should be a pretty good indicator itself that there is work to do here. My side worked as I'd expect. I download a little app, ok the java stuff that happens, approve its install, and choose a license option. I took the 2-minute free-drive cause I thought it would involve less effort and time - true.

Not so smooth on Dad's side. To start, he really appreciated the big buttons at copilot.com - Receive Help or Help Someone. That was good. He typed in the code I told him into the field, blithely accepting the terms of service (I'm sure they're fine Dad, I trust Joel), and installing the application (Do you really trust these guys? Are you sure this isn't a virus? - It's all good Dad, I've met the guy, Joel. He's Jewish and kind of chubby. I trust him. "Ok, it's on your head if this kills my computer.") But then - the pause. "Do I want a free 15-day trial of Copilot? yes!"

NOOOOO! See, I didn't really want to have him have to do that. 'Cause then he has to go back to Eudora, and wait for an email and click on a link or type a code, or whatever. I wanted his side to be seamless - once he says "Yes, I trust whatever applet you are about to install on my one PC that is my gateway to the world and if you screw it up I will be upset but my son-who-vouches-for-you said I should do it" is done, he should just sit back and watch me move the cursor from afar. I want to pay for us both, or why does the person receiving help need think they need to have a license at all? I'm used to dealing with this stuff, it's exactly that that I'm trying to save him from, and here copilot is making getting help more complicated instead of easier.

Any way he got his email, clicked the link, got his license, and my copilot screen lit and changed from "waiting for connection" to seeing his desktop in full remote-access glory.

"See, I can move your cursor around, isn't that cool? then proceed to minimize some windows so I can see what's going on. "Uh huh. Wait - I see this icon "FirefoxSetup.exe" should I click on that?" YES! So he clicked it himself, and we watched Firefox install, properly replace the old version, and remove or replace the desktop icon, just like a good installer should. Tried the photo website again. There it is! "Am I seeing your website now with all those pictures?" "Yes, Dad, that's our family photo website" "Nice. What, did you gain a little weight over Chanukah?" "Ya, ok, you're up and running, talk to ya later," and hung up the phone. Then Copilot told me my 2-minute trial was up.

So, I think you could improve the user experience of Copilot by making it even simpler for the person on the receiving-help side to be talked through a simple install of the help app, even if that simplicity costs more, and puts a greater burden on the giving-help side to do techy things.

I'm going to visit my Dad in a couple weeks. I'm thinking I'll install Copilot OneClick....

Get Well Soon, Steve!

2009-01-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

Ever since I played with Lisa Paint in 1983 I knew that Apple was a rare company capable of bringing innovative software out of the lab, wrapping it in beautifully-designed hardware, and getting the message out to people that this was the way technology was supposed to be.

The drive behind this synthesis has been Steve Jobs, who brought a very rare combination of skills and aesthetics to a culture of nerds and geeks that has fuelled Macintosh to be the creative and design tool for the "rest of us".

Having attended both MacWorld 2008 and WWDC 2008 I was worried about Steve's weight, and today he explained that it appears to be a treatable condition and we can relax.

Get well soon Steve, even if that means needing to do more meditation and taking some personal time. You've taught us well and we'll all take care of Apple for you while you do.

Trains Reign; Trucks Suck

2008-10-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

I have always loved trains. But then, I am an engineer. I always loved seeing the train switching yards around my home town, and seeing them along the highway on vacations. Our Kindergarten class actually took a train trip and I recall being amazed (and a bit scared) as we passed over the High Level Bridge.

Growing up a bit, my Dad helped haul a 4x8 plywood sheet down into the basement to sit on trestles for my Lionel H-O railroad set, and saving up to go to Moro Craft to buy the very coolest thing - crossing lights that flashed when the train went by.

I took a year off between high school and university, armed with an International Student ID, an International Youth Hostel and the fabled Eurail pass, spent a few months traversing Europe exclusively by foot and by train. I took my son across Canada on the Via Rail train, a great way to see Canada.

Train travel is so much better than air or car or bus. Trains travel at human speed, or soul-speed as William Gibson explains in Pattern Recognition. But more importantly these days, trains are more efficient for moving goods than trucks, for a couple of reasons.

First, once a train is rolling, it takes much less energy than a truck, because of something called "rolling resistance" which is much lower for steel wheels on tracks than for rubber tires on asphalt. Second, when train rights of way are built, they are expensive because they have a low grade, that is - not many hills. So while it takes more energy and time to build a railway bed compared to a highway, every train that runs on that track saves energy, while on the highway, every truck and car has to use extra gas to climb the hills.

It is a shame to see so many tracks being removed and replaced by roads, and to see overgrown urban tracks fall into disuse and disrepair. There used to be a very nice and inexpensive trip from Vancouver to Whistler, until the cars they used became so old it was cheaper to blow one up for an episode of the X-files.

I hope trains make a comeback. Maybe it's time the economics will make this viable again.

Wireless Keyboard & Mouse - Use Rechargeable Alkalines

2008-09-30T22:37:00.001-07:00

Although we have both a wireless Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, we only use the keyboard at this point, having gone back to the wired mouse. I like being able to move the keyboard around, but the mouse went through batteries too quickly.

Like many people, I bought some NiMh (Nickel Metal Hydride) rechargeable batteries and a charger but was disappointed with the few weeks of time I would get before they needed recharging. Then I read something interesting about NiMh batteries - they have a rapid self-discharge time. No matter how little you use them, they will be discharged in 90 days.

That sent me looking through the junk drawer for our older-technology, rechargeable alkaline batteries from Pure Energy. We had moved away from them since they don't carry the amount of energy you can pack into an NiMh battery, but a wireless keyboard is perfectly suited to rechargeable alkalines - it draws little current, so a long self-discharge time is more important than stored energy density.

Anyway, the proof is in the pudding, it's been more than 6 months since I had to recharge the keyboard batteries...

This Might Be Our First American Car

2008-09-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Our family has never owned an American-made car. Just wasn't in the genes. My Dad had a few VW bugs that I grew up jumping around the back seat of, and I drove his VW "Square-back sedan," i.e. station wagon, to university with all the worldly possessions I owned in the back. My wife drove a yellow Chevy van (The Broom) for years but that was more an adventure-device than a car, and she learned to fix it herself.

Our immediate family have been pretty loyal to Toyota, currently with a 2001 Prius, my folks have a wheelchair-mod'ed Rav 4, and I love our mid-90's Volvo station wagon.

Not buying an American car has not about ideology, but about design. Large, heavy cars withpoor gas mileage, mushy suspensions, and window cranks that didn't work was our idea of Ford and GM.

That may change with the Chevy Volt. With most of our power being hydro-generated, and the fact that cars would charge at night when demand is low, I've been looking forward to an all-electric or plug-in hybrid, and it looks like GM may get to production before Toyota.

We're happy to wait and hope someone else comes to our market like these guys, but in any case, an electric-hybrid is on our shopping list.

Sabbatical 2008 - Mid Course Evaluation

2008-07-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

I'm on an extended vacation this year, thanks to Creo and Kodak, as my 15th year at the company and 50th on the planet. It's taken about a month for me to relax enough to really feel that I have time to do things other than "be productive." Mind you, I did get a bunch of long-postponed tasks done, like fixing the drawer on the oven and other menial things that involve a car fetch trip and a couple hours, which seem hard to find time for on the weekend.

This year overall, I've endeavored to accomplish some other things I have dreamed of doing. My pickup band, Six Degrees, played a few gigs, including my 50th birthday party, and the Farmer's Market at Steveston, and after many years of being idle, had my Gibson SG Deluxe wailing away on solo's I practiced enough to play publicly, Play That Funky Music, and Sunshine of Your Love.

This summer I also finally mixed down our recordings of Sol's band Tusk to create a 4-song EP mastered and duplicated at Spin Digital Media. Our first CD!

I also had the chance to take a course on Jewish Mysticism from Rabbi Laura Kaplan, as well as having had time for several lunches with friends and old acquaintances.

This week sees the arrival of family from England, with 3 kids so we will have the pitter patter of little feet around the house for a while. Off to Tigh Na Mara for a quick visit...

For August: Clean out various caches of junk in the house, build my Peggy kit (thanks Wendel from Evil Mad Scientist), write an iPhone App...

Garbage is Anything You Don't Want to Have to See

2008-07-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

"Give me a lever and I shall move the world" is a quote attributed to Archimedes after discovering the mechanical advantage afforded by a stick and a rock.

My brain is always looking for levers - small things that would create big change. Here's one: Make the price of oil $500 a barrel and see how fast alternate energy takes hold. Oops, too late.

Here's another: Make it illegal to move garbage more the 5 miles. Unworkable? You bet. People stashing stuff in nooks and crannies, smuggling garbage around in their cars.

Maybe the first will take care of the second...

A Letter to Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks

2008-06-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

I sent this to Starbuck's HQ last year. I got a very polite form letter from someone in PR.

Howard Schultz
Chairman
Starbucks
2401 Utah Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98134

Dear Howard,

As a Starbucks customer, I find myself planning to reduce my number of (numerous) visits, but as I have had hundreds of pleasant experiences and enjoyed many espresso cups over the years, I feel the need to tell you about my reasons, so that they might positively affect the company.

Just for background, I am in a demographic I heard disparagingly categorized as “cappuccino-drinking Volvo drivers”. Our family has two teen-age boys, and over the last 25 years I have been to Starbucks locations all over Canada, the US, and Japan, and spent thousands of dollars there. My formative coffee experiences included a visit to Italy in 1977, where after stumbling off the red-eye train from Roma to Firenze at 5:30 am Sunday morning, the train-station’s café was bustling, powered by a barista-owner with energy and a sense of humor inspiring to those of us dragging ourselves out of the train. She affectionately echoed our requests by ordering up “cappucio” – yes, without the “n”.

I brought back my love of the coffee and café culture, much as you did, but not being as entrepreneurial, had to seek out opportunities, nuggets like the Java Shoppe in Edmonton Alberta, where I learned the phrases “long-pull” and “short-pull” were literally about heaving the pressure arm on the Victorian-age steam-powered espresso maker. After that, you could find pockets of it in the folk-music-and-carrot-cake music clubs, like the one I went to “The Hovel” and first heard Leon Redbone.

But I ramble. If we had time, we would sit at a small table with an espresso and have a conversation, and I hoped to come close to it last month when you were in Vancouver for the 25th anniversary of the CPR terminal location. I was at that location earlier that day but could not stay for the event. Here’s what I would have said:

Number One: Bring back the coffee smell. Working as I do at a large corporation, I can almost hear your accounting firm point out the waste of money they saw in having open beans in drawers. Hard to account for; spoilage; mess; the occasional overage in filling up a customer’s bag; beans dropped, stepped on, kicked into corners, stuck in customers’ show treads, in the corner of the shelf. How much more efficient it would be to eliminate that mess, and just sell prepackaged beans. But what the shops have lost as a result of that is – serendipity, and aroma. The mix of wafts of beans, roasted and mixed, was for me like a bee drawn to a flower. I used to pop into a store, just for a whiff. But now, the coffee smell is missing,

Number Two: Bring back baristas. I imagine anyone can be taught to steam milk. You just read the temperature. But being able to measure, tamp, and pull a shot is a skill, a craft, perhaps an art. The auto-mech machines that are now sweeping the locations simply do not make as good coffee as the hand-made. I don’t even bother now getting espresso from shops that have those machines, and it’s getting hard to find a Starbucks without one. I am sure accounting has determined that the labour-cost per cup has now been reduced and can quantify the savings on the bottom line, but my dollar is going to disappear from the top-line. No company I am familiar with ever considers reduction in top-line revenue as a consequence of cost reduction, I believe because the cost-reducers do not understand the ephemeral elements of quality, and so ignore them when they are impacted by cost-cutting. It takes top-level leadership to avoid the erosion of these hard-to-quantify elements of brand equity, as you alluded to in your memo in February.

Now I realize that I am a coffee snob. I always knew that Starbucks’ ability to continue to attract me would be at odds with the mass-market, good-enough approach that seems to be the sweet spot for public companies. I can imagine that as a company, Starbucks believes that the mass market is key, and consistency is more important than uniqueness or high quality. Still, I am saddened at the prospect.

My coffee indulgence has been moving back to the smaller, unique coffee houses in Vancouver, like Take Five, and Café Artigiano, both run by Italian families, where each cup is a little work of art, and I can be re-instated in the coffee culture of Italy that I came to love as a young man.

May I finish with a sincere thanks for bringing the coffee house experience and a wish for good luck with Starbucks, Howard.

David Kauffman

Batman is Brückner

2008-05-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

The movie trailer for the new Batman movie has an orchestral chord (in the last 30 seconds, over the title) that sends chills up my spine. After listening to it a few times, it started to sound familar, and after a few days of letting it roll around in my brain, I remembered where I had hear that before. It goes back awhile...

While a student at UBC, I met a friend who introduced me to classical music. While I had heard Beethovens' greatest hits and even heard of Mahler, the ones that I had never even heard of before were the last three symphonies by Anton Brückner. Like Mahler, these are big orchestras, with big, sweeping themes, and awesome brass sections.

Brückner's music you have to sit and listen to. You can't be doing something else. It ain't background music. I have to physically prepare my space before listening, then need unwinding time after, with silence and no interruptions between. The music is that holy. I recall driving from Ottawa to Kingston for a rare performance of the 8th Symphony, and driving back in the silent glow of the event.

Even if you don't care to dive as deeply as I have, you should at least hear what might have inspired Hans Zimmer on this soundtrack.

Here's the link to Anton Brückner's Symphony No. 8 in C Minor, Movement 4 (Finale) on the iTunes Music Store. Listen with reverence.

Another rendition conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini on YouTube.

Sixteen Channel Recording Studio in a Volvo

2008-05-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

It had been many years since I did radio spot production and studio sound on analog Neve consoles and Ampex multi-track tape drives, so it was with some worry and excitement I agreed to record my son's 5-piece metal band totally digitally. After researching a bit I bought a used ProjectMix IO since it had both 8 inputs as well a control surface that worked with Logic Studio (I can't really mix with a mouse, and was spoiled by those nice old consoles...).

To get beyond the 8 tracks a rented a Motu 896 from L&M and spent a few hours reconfiguring its MOTU Audio Setup app to send all 8 channels separately through a beautifully thin piece of glass optical ADAT into the ProjectMix to give me all 16 separate input channels into Logic. With that many channels available, I could run 7 mics on the drums, and paralleled DI with mics on the guitars, plus one vocal.

So armed with a few SM57's, an AudioTechnica AT2020 for vocals, a couple DIs, an Apex kit and pencil condensor overheads, I ventured into the practice space. (The Apex DP2 drum mics are just ok, but I was really impressed with the Apex 185 pencil pair for the price)

To say that I was impressed is an understatement. The sound quality I could get from a couple $G's of equipment is amazing, and it all fits in the back of the Volvo (wagon). I didn't imagine I could carry around a 16-track studio in my car and record 13 channels of 24-bit audio onto a Mac laptop.

Having fun, but wonder if I am a n00b or a seasoned amateur now. This stuff was pretty hard to figure out, so even as an electrical engineer with some years of experience it took some effort to get all this to work together - is it easy for other people or hard?

Yellow Pages Beat Google

2008-04-24T12:23:00.000-07:00

I've been in Las Vegas for the past few days for the Kodak Graphic Users Association conference, where we unveiled a new product called ColorFlow (no, not the one Google shows, a new one).

Having a conference during Passover poses a big challenge. Not only did I have to forgo the myriad offers of beer, but the difficulty of getting Kosher for Passover meals was greater than I expected. While the Wynn hotel did make an effort to accommodate my request, they took about 3 days to figure out that Kosher for Passover is not the same as pulling a Kosher frozen meal out of the freezer.

Getting a bit tired of eating fruit, I figured I would use my trusted friend Google and Google maps to find a nearby Kosher restaurant and see if they are open for Passover. But Google maps is quite a letdown, partially for its confusing user model, but more importantly because of a flaw in the web itself - the web gets stale.

First, about google maps. My use-case is pretty routine. I search for the place I am currently at, and look for stuff around there (here) and directions to it. Google maps though has no concept of "I AM HERE", which they need to know is NOT the same as "Home". Hey Google, I know you have orchards of keen, smart, A.D.D. programmers who are looking for cool things to do. How 'bout you take them out of their cubicles, and take them to the mall, and skip the Apple store and Video game shop and show them the map of the mall. See the "YOU ARE HERE" red dot? Google maps needs that. 'Nuff said.

The bigger issue for me was that while google shows 3 restaurants within the radius of the Wynn, and happily will provide the directions to them, all three of them are out of business and no longer exist.

Yet, their web sites continue to expound on the excellent Kosher cuisine, convenient hours, and mouth-watering customer testimonials.

So I turned to the Yellow Pages (tm). Yes, the big book in the drawer of the desk that low-and-behold, was exactly not there. The good thing about the Yellow Pages compared to the web is that it times out. You have to renew your ad every year, and it is expensive enough to be worth your while to keep it correct.

Domain names are very inexpensive, if you can find one at all that isn't 75 characters long. When you buy a domain name, like I did, you often get a few Mbytes of web space, and if you are not web savvy, you get your sister's nerdy son to put up a web page for you. Like most things, domain names are cheaper the longer you commit, so it's typical to buy a domain for 3-10 years.

There are likely hundreds of thousands of web pages that are obsolete, or stale, or forgotten. But Google will serve them up according to its patented backlink techique with complete disregard for whether the page is real, updated, or dead.

Google folks, let's get back to your core competency - the world's best search engine. Stop for a minute figuring how to add more ads to every page, and think about search. I'll give you a couple ideas;

1. Time

2. Space

These things have been around for a while, like about 13 billion years, plus or minus.

Time: Let me rank the Google hits by how recently the page has been modified.

Space; Show me sort Google results by proximity in earth-space. Google maps could help.

At least, now am home in the warmth of my family, and can get matzah when I need and hugs aplenty.

A moment for Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clarke's soul has moved on to its next step in the great journey. He is best known for writing 2001:A Space Odyssey, which I saw in amazing 70mm Cinerama in 1968. Less well known, he promoted the fact if satellite were placed in orbit around the earth at a height of about 22,000 miles, it's orbital period is about once a day, so appears to be stationery compared to a point on the earth's surface. Now there are so many satellites there for media and rebroadcast (and spying) that they threaten to bump into one another.

For me, I will remember Arthur C. Clarke more for the first book I read of his in school: Childhood's End. I think this book planted the mind-seeds of both my interest in science but also in mysticism. The book alludes to an OverMind, a much less personal conciousness that pervades the universe than I had learned about in Sunday school, and one that continually resonates with me when I see the amazing diversity, complexity and interdependency of the universe.

Thank you, Dr. Clarke, I hope you are part of the OverMind now.

Take the Blue Pin...

2008-03-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, I said "Pin" not "Pill". You are not going to be transported into the Matrix, you're just going to find out where Google maps thinks you are.

And damn if they aren't right.

I coughed up the $20 for the new iPod Touch apps and hacking around showed a "My Location" button in Google maps. "Ha!" I mocked, "That's only for iPhone users whose phones can then triangulate from the nearby cell towers. That would never work for a device like this that ONLY has Wifi!" So I pressed the button anyway, expecting an error message.

I didn't get an error message. Instead, I got a blue circle completely pin-pointing our house. Freak me out! How could they know that?

A few frantic minutes of googling later, I found Skyhook, who seem to have created an entire database of locations of what must be millions of wireless routers. Somebody had entered our Airport into Skyhook's database. Without my permission! "Well, what can you expect?", I berated myself, "You decided to broadcast your network's id. You didn't click the little 'make my network private' button that would have hidden its identity from roaming Skyhook trolls."

But it is pretty useful to get Google Maps to draw my route to a destination from wherever I am. Means postponing that GPS gizmo I was going to buy...

A Grook

2008-01-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

This term was coined by Piet Hein for his clever poems that provide the kind of pure and simple insight that both delights and educates.

I came across one I wrote about 30 years ago:

It came to me in a twinkling,
That I'd never really thought about thinking,
That the things I believed
Were merely conceived
Just before I required their inkling.

Bad Trailers and Great Movies

2008-01-03T11:26:00.000-08:00

Interesting perusal of my iGoogle pages today. On one hand, David Pogue pointing out a new completely bogus practice of including shots in a big-budget action movie trailer that never appear in the actual movie.

On the other hand, Sol showed us Once, and like many thousands of others fell in love the with timeless story, the genuine (and well-recorded) music, and the great sense of possibility created not just by the movie's story itself, but by the fact that John and his mates made this movie for a low cost, on digital video.

That's a good news story.

A Wii White Christmas

2007-12-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Elia (13) we co-bought a Wii system months ago, when a shipment of them came into Best Buy. Having already a dreaded xbox and the annoying repetition of a gamecube, I was sold on the idea of a controller that responds to moving some part of the body other than your thumb to take action. Turns out it was a good sale.

We have spent many hours playing virtual tennis and bad golf, but the Wii has been a welcome addition to the house. Now though, it has attained stellar proportion.

Guitar Hero III came out, and after meeting a guy in a secret location with a wad of cash, we are blissing out to screaming guitar solos, that I only dreamed of being able to play (and of course, still can't) but can PRETEND to. The Santana and Who tracks are comforting to play, as is Foghat's Slow Ride which I recall being able to play even in high school. The new (to me) tracks from Weezer, Priestess, and Eric Johnson are amazingly fun to play.

And when I tired of trying to beat Tom Morello's doppelganger, I can try to make the Wii controller into a virtual whiteboard tracker...

Rogers finds clever customer-hostile technique

2007-11-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

Rogers has reasonable coverage in the Vancouver area, but I get a dropped call 90% of the time on the same spot in Burnaby - the 29nd avenue dip between renfrew and slocan. I always called the 611 service to complain and always giev me the assurance that they would not charge me for the call. Got a lot of free calls that way.

Rogers new approach to getting people to stop calling to complain is amazingly brazen, and clever in a most diabolical way. They tell you they can't provide service for you if you are calling from YOUR CELL PHONE! No, even though they did it for 10 years, now they want you to pull over to the use the Telus pay phone, of which there are, let me see...carry the zero, Zero left. Oh, but I can always just wait to get to the office at which time, do I really want to queue up on the wait list while I should be working? - no.

You have to admit, it is an absolutely brilliant strategy if you want to stop customers trying to get assistance, which is of course the underlying desire of poorly-managed businesses who never learn that they could reduce service costs and increase customer loyalty by actually delivering good products at a reasonable price - something the cell phone carriers have never learned.

Good thing work pays for that account - I would have cancelled it there and then. But then I have to wait till I can get to a land line...

Don't Save the Planet!

2007-10-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

I am getting very tired of the "save the planet" mantra people trot out when trying to convince other people to drive smaller cars than themselves.

Let me tell you - you don't need to save the planet. Earth is doing fine thank you very much.

It's people that are at risk.

Regardless of the sources, climate change will not cause the earth to explode, or wobble on its axis (any more than it does now), or burn up and become a cinder falling into the sun.

It's much more likely that an increase in CO2 will make it hard for many people to breathe, or that sea levels rise and wipe out the billions of people who live along seashore, or allow the next ice age which would clear out most of the countries in the northern hemispehere.

So let's cut the chatter about saving the planet. I saw a bumper sticker once: it said "Save the Humans"

Now that's what it's about.

iPod Touch/iPhone Remote

2007-10-09T12:46:00.001-07:00

How to use ipod touch or iphone as a remote control, not quite air tunes but getting there

read more | digg story

I've Got the Touch...

2007-10-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

My iPod Touch arrived just the other day (with that engraving, so no one can say it's not mine (and a hats-off to Peter Gabriel)). I don't really need another iPod, but I really want to use a couple things that I think will become widespread.

1. multitouch displays
2. hand-held browsers

Since we have pervasive 802.11 in the house I like being able to find a wikipedia entry at my fingertips. The pinch model for ui interaction is a bit awkward, but workable, and the gesture of "flick" as they call it, which I first saw on google earth is pretty sweet.

Two things missing: Bluetooth stereo headphones. Airtunes to beam to my music to my Airport-express-equipped speakers...

This Just In...

After googling "ipod touch airtunes" I came across this site for an app called "Signal". Signal runs on the your computer with iTunes (Mac or Win), uses the iTunes API, and shares a nicely-copied web browser interface that you can connect to from the iPod Touch/iPhone that makes it feel like your music is local.

While there are a couple user interface glitches, Matt Stevens was kind enough to reply to my feedback, and it looks like Signal should be on its way to being a killer app for iPod Touch, since many its users will have their master library on their mac anyway.

Canoeing on Bowron Lakes

2007-08-01T14:17:00.001-07:00

Last week I took Elia (age 12) with me as we canoed the 60km of the Bowron Lakes in the Caribbo region of BC.

Eight days: no cell phone, no computer, just hours of paddling, setting up camp each night, and good sleeping, good water, and good exercise. Well, mosquitoes too..

For a high tech geek, this was an almost perfect holiday, to remind me of what it is to be in nature 24 hours a day, in natural beauty, and where awareness and muscle are mor important that cleverness.

Pictures here.

Bar Mitzvah Flashback

2007-05-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

As I approach my 49th birthday, I gave a little thought sketch at Or Shalom this morning.

I imagined that I was once again 13 years old and looking out at the congregation at my Bar Mitzvah, seeing my parents and friends in the pews, and an older gentleman who looked strangely familiar, but a little weird. After the service, this guy approached my younger self and introduced himself to me as myself, myself at 49. The older me seemed pressed for time, but felt the need to explain all the amazing, sad, wondrous, and important events to come in this pudgy teenager's life, and watched for the reaction. After a few moments thought, the youngster replied, "Cool," and excused himself to go see his friends. "Just before you go, some advice," I told myself in the little cone of silence that seemed to be keeping us separate from the bustling friends and family. "In the 80's, when interest rates are like, 25%, it would be a better idea to save than to borrow."

The weekly portion (parasha) for my Bar Mitzvah "Behar" - on the mountain, starts talking about a period of 7 years, and 7 times 7 years. According to the Torah, farmers are supposed to let their fields lie fallow every 7 years, like a Sabbath for the land. After 7 cycles of these 7 years, the year after is called "Yuval" or in English "Jubilee". I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty smart to build sustainability into God-given rules so that people follow wise rules even when they are inconvenient.

I've always liked the number 7, and it has great significance in Judaism. Now that I am 7 times 7 years old, I'm looking forward to a great year. Forty-nine, is called a "perfect square" because it is formed by multiplying a number by itself. There are lots of significant perfect squares for me this year. Six times six is 36, which is the number of years between being 13 and turning 49. Five times five is 25, which is what interest rates were when I should have saved more. Four times four is 16, which is the age of our oldest son, Sol. Three times three is nine, which doubled is 18, known as "Chai" or "Life" by the sum of its letters, and is the number of years Tilly & I have been married. Two times two is four, which is the number of people in our immediate nuclear family, and One times One is One, which is what I always seem to be making out of two things, and what I think the world is about.

iPod Infinity

2007-04-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

(inspired by The Book of Sand by one of my favorite authors Jorges Luis Borges).

Since its introduction in 2000, subsequent versions of Apple's iPod have been getting physically smaller, while their capacity has steadily increased. Following these trends, it is just a matter of time before Apple introduces - iPod Infinity.

Not only does iPod Infinity have infinite storage space, but iPod Infinity comes pre-loaded with an infinite amount of stored songs, (saved in uncompressed aiff format since you have no limit on storage space). Just think what that means, iPod Infinity ships with every song ever recorded, and all the ones that never were! Hear the original performance of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto, performed with original instruments at a time that no recording equipment existed! Hear the basement tapes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and all the songs they never had a chance to compose. Listen to Janis Joplin singing live with Bono, and hear Jim Croce's cover version of Metallica's "Seek and Destroy."

Imagine it. With iPod Infinity, you never have to run out of storage space to put your movies, videos, and music. iPod Inifinity always has room for more. Ipod's new double-up feature moves all the tracks from track 1 to 2, from track 2 to track 4, track 3 to track 6, etc. and this creates room on all the odd-numbered tracks on the infinite disk, allowing for an infinite number of new downloads. Sorry, gift cards in the amount of infinite dollars are not available at this time.

Plus. if you buy now, you will receive every song that has not been written yet. You'll be able to hear Avril Lavigne crooning jazz standards from recordings she wll make in 30 years, and the next 100 years of Billboard hits.

One warning; because of the infinite capacity of the iPod Infinity, it is unlikely you will ever find the same song twice, creating the most awesome shuffle ever. Sadly, some users have reported frustration at hearing several versions of a song, varying by only one note. The most serious drawback has been that the song titles for all material consists of a random string of characters, so that Bruckner's 9th Symphony perfomed in Munich in 1932 has the unfortunate name of $F63896A6383745E5638683462A3. Hopefully 3rd parties will upload meaningful song labels as they are discovered.

Enjoy your iPod Infinity!

Traditionally...

2007-03-20T14:29:00.000-07:00

I'm amazed at how often I see the word "Traditionally..." used to describe a way things used to be done. It's not inappropriate, it's just that it USED to mean, like 50 or 100 years ago, but now the time-scope for using the the term seems to be about 3 years, and shrinking...

You are coming to a sad realization, Cancel or Allow?

2007-02-07T22:59:00.000-08:00

The I'm-a-Mac-I'm-a-PC commercials were getting a bit tired for me, and was thinking it was time for Apple to just move on, until I saw this week's new ad about Vista ( see the one marked Security). For the first time in a while I had to laugh out loud. The writing is bitingly poingnant, and the performance by the square-jawed security dude is perfect, right down to the ear-tube and the constant horizon-scanning behind dark glasses.

On our metabadge project, we ran into this kind of crazy windows pseudo-security. Microsoft seems to confuse inconvenience with security (or maybe that's true for the U.S. in general when in comes to homeland security), by making users answer questions they are not qualified to answer, and the very software that should help them make the decision, withholds the very essence of what they need to know. In our case, the metabadge control software queries exchange for your appointments so it can turn them into speech and download them onto your wireless metabadge. When this happens, in spite of you installing the application yourself, and in spite of it following the micorosoft api, and in spite of it authorized under your username and password, Windows puts up a dialog, saying that "an application" is attempting to access outlook, Cancel or Allow? The dialog does not even name the application that is trying to make that access, even though clearly the application you just installed is probably allowed while "crazyviralspamgenerator" might not be on your list. Even if you say "Allow" , it gives you a time limit of NO MORE THAN 10 minutes so you can delightedly make that decision every 10 minutes of your work day.

This pseudo-security is so annoying and so widespread that some person we don't even know created an application that does nothing more than wait for that dialog to appear, then presses the "OK" button for you.

Have you come to the same realization? Allow.

Rediscovering Stephenson

2007-01-01T13:54:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about winter break is being able to catch up on my reading. I breezed through my new copy of iWoz with a bit more insite to the Wozster than I had before. FInding a place for it on my bokshelf reminded me to dust off my copy of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle. The fact that I love Stephenson's books should be no surprise to those that know me. They are rich in nerdy detail, convoluted in plot and double-clickable in character; that is the characters have enough depth to be interesting and sometimes unpredictable.

I often pick up Cryptonomicon and reread favorite passages: Randy's encounter with the Dentist, and his breakthrough moment in the jail visiting room with Amy. Avi's confrontation with Goto Dengo as to the source of WWII gold in the Japanese-built crypt in the Phillipines; Lawrence's spontaneous performance of Bach on a questionably-tempered pipe organ.

Picking up Quicksilver finds me in a very foreign literary land. Not having a degree in English, names like Pynchon mean little to me, so trying to plough through this type of literature dulls the blade of my skimming reader pretty quickly. Like my universtiry textbooks, there are pages that I finish reading and then stop, realizing I have no clue as to what they said. Then I have to trudge back to the place I took my first mis-step, align both visual and mental acuity, and attack the text with persistent vision leading to - usually - comprehension.

I look forward to finding the story of wootz, the makings of hardened steel. Stephenson makes this sound like a discovery that changed the face of battle in the entire world. Maybe he's right.

Wii Consider the Implications...

2006-11-19T11:33:00.000-08:00

I've never been a fan of console games, in spite of the kids having bought an xbox and borrowed a friend's gamecube. But this Wii thing looks interesting, since it actually requires you to move something more than your digits.

One thing that always kept my interest in arcade games was the quality of input devices. Driving games like OutRunner that slam you to the side when you turn hard, and a game I spent (too) many quarters on Hard Drivin', the first one with a decent physics engine and a steering wheel with force feedback. More recently, I like to play Police 911, with the excellent interface that detects your body position and uses that to control the point of view of the camera. (Konami has brought out a PlayStation 2 version of it, I haven't played it).

The Wii looks attractive to me both as a player and as a parent. The idea that a kid has to get out of his chair and move around to use the Wii's wireless motion-detector controls has got to be a step in the right direction, both in terms of game play, but more in the realm of actually developing some physical skill and expending some calories. If that looks promising, it might be the first video game console we have in the house that the parents are actually happy to buy...

In the Beginning...

2006-10-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

Our younger son Elia is starting to study for his Bar Mitzvah, and today's group class was about how regular people can read and interpret the Torah without having to be scholars. The first five lines of the Torah cover the few (microseconds? millenia?) of the creation of the universe. As we discussed whether this refers to creation of earth or the entire universe, and what the authors might mean when the story says light was created the first day, but the sun was not created until the fourth, another thought occurred to me.

The story of Genesis (B'reysheet in Hebrew) can be thought of fundamentally by the numbers, zero, one and two.

What was before the universe? Some would say - nothing, or zero. Hard for most of us finite beings to think if nothing existing, and perhaps rather than nothing, there was only one thing - what the Kabbalh calls "Ein Sof" - without end. Rather than zero - nothing - the Ein Sof is one. United in its one-ness.

It's only when creation starts that the one-ness of the Universe gets split into two. And forever more, this universe wrestles with duality - light & dark, good & evil, heaven & earth, body & mind. B'reysheet introduces the beauty and tragedy of the world - it is created by splitting the one into two. As someone who seems to have spent a lot of my adult life trying to bring diverging things together that I think belong that way, whether they are human struggles, product messaging, or user interfaces and underlying computer systems, the struggle to return to the One seems to pervade many aspects of my life.

Google Shortcuts

2006-10-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

I saw a great sign of simplicity in the last few months with the Vancouver CJA campaign "Live Generously." Rather than put a complete url on a billboard that people race by every morining on the way to work, they did something simple and remarkable. They bought the ad words "Live Generously" from Google AdWords, and then put the phrase, "for more information, google "Live Generously"

Now that "googling" has entered the list of verbs in common use, this is very effective technique to quickly and easily map a catchy phrase into a complicated url.

Neon's Gone Generic

2006-10-18T16:58:00.000-07:00

I see them everywhere now. Stop reading this or you'll see them too.

No, not Starbucks, although those things are multiplying like rabbits. I'm talking about the inescapable trend of neon (and now faux neon) open signs that hang in many store windows. They follow the same prescription: red neon for open (actually all neon signs are red, the other colors use other gases, Argon for blue, Krypton for white, Xenon for purple)

Now don't get me wrong, I love neon signs. I have a similar affinity and nostalgia for them as I do for coffee but maybe there is a link between neon open signs and Starbucks after all.

Ya, that's it - it's another niche thing that has gone mainstream. While many more people now can drink espresso, and can see a neon sign in their neighborhood, part of the cachet, the magic of it is lost. Neon signs have had a Vancouver history, whimsy, and a night-time celebration during our long, dark winters.

Sadly though, the blue-red open signs that dot the street fronts now are so commoditized and generic that they actually might create a negative wave, an anti-nostalgia for this once briliant commercial art form.

Apple's iPhone - Can't be Soon Enough

2006-10-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

The growing momentum about the not-so-secret iPhone adds serious cred to the idea of Apple introducing its own phone.

This is great news for the ease of use of cell phones, and a death-knell for the Blackberry users who think obscure knowledge of how to turn off their ringer is somehow a badge of honor.

Dave Pogue's most recent public rage against the cellphone user interface is one signpost along the path, and even mac-agnostic Joel Spolsky delivers a bitingly critical review of a free Samsung phone he was sent. But of the Apple iPhone, you can count on a few things for certain.

1. The iPhone will sport an iPod like user interface, and be like an iPod that you can make phone calls with. It will be a humble phone.
2. The integration with iTunes will be superb, scrolling through the store and listening to previews like the web experience.
3. The iPhone will sync contacts with Address Book (and Outlook on Windows?), and hopefull iSync will finally be useful.
4. It will have Bluetooth and the awesome feature, of having the id of the caller appear on your computer without having to unleash your phone, will become ubiquitous and indispensable.
5. You'll be able to access your phone book and reach anyone on it will take less than 5 seconds, 2 scrolls, and 1 button press.
6. The iPhone will support both the bluetooth wireless headset and stereo specs. so your experience of listening to tunes and switching to take an incoming call will be apple-smooth, getting to choose whether the music pauses while you take a call, dims to background level behind the conversation, or mixes in with the call so your caller can hear what you're listening to.

Several other vendors have apparently created small network brands, buying a share of bandwidth from the larger cellular coverage networks, but this might be Apple's Achilles Heel in the venture, for as good as the user experience will be with the iPhone, if the carrier reception is poor or easily overloaded, listening to the cool tunes will be cold comfort.

Coke Blek

2006-09-24T22:27:00.000-07:00

My love affair with coffee didn't actually start when my folks allowed me my first cup at 16. Think of it as an engine on idle, awaiting the lead foot to stomp down on the accelerator. The seeds of my coffee-love were planted many years before, on entering the now-lost Java Shoppe in downtown Edmonton in the 1960's. The exotic aroma of newly roasted beans, cinammon, and espresso settled into a deep place in my hind-brain, and got all connected-up with a nurtured indelible memory of a sunny Saturday morning adventure of a 9 year-old with my Mom & Dad. In those days, espresso was a rare indulgence, and the machine to squeeze out those precious drops of super-concentrated coffee essence were the size of a 50-gallon drum, usually encased in copper and brass, with a perched eagle on top in full wing flight. I had no desire to drink the stuff, just the smell, the dark interior shot with beams of sunlight, and the alternating wafts of coffee and cigarette smoke made the whole experience surreal and memory-misted.

Italy took me to another coffee level in 1977, when I backpacked through Europe on my pre-university Eurail-Hostel sojourn. We took the night-train from Roma to Firenze, arriving at 6am Sunday morning. Stumbling off the train after the conductor gave us a 2-minute warrning to get up, dressed and packed, we stood on the platform looking up at the morning sky, and watched the stream of people heading for the cafe. There, the animated waitress was slinging the "cappuccio" and a bar full of bleary-eyed travellers were being transformed from zombiehood to several rungs up the evolutionary ladder. Two spoons full of sugar, and that small cup solidifed a feeling of well-being (and settled an uneasy stomach) that monks have to spend years in meditation to achieve.

Of course, twenty years later, Starbucks has commoditized and packaged that experience, but it still retains much of its original allure. But whether or not you think Starbucks is over-roasted crap or a good cuppa, we can certainly find lots of REAL BAD COFFEE. Real Bad Coffee (RBC) can most likely be found in the following places:
1. school cafeterias
2. coin-operated offee machines
3. offices that pride themselves at providing their employeess with "free coffee"
Real Bad Coffee has some basic characteristics. It comes from robusta beans; high caffeine; high acid acrid chunks of brown stuff. It has been dripped from tap water through water reservoirs and taps that haven't been cleaned since they were installed. The check-out people wouldn't drink it even if it's free.

Coca-cola, on the other hand, is also part of my growing up experience, and while it doesn't carry the semi-spiritual patina that coffee does for me, it is up there in list. Coke would like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke, and the Real Thing, and all that, and who cares what the taste-test says, I ain't drinking Pepsi (ha, Brand Autopsy tells me I'm already doin' that, if Frappucino is bottled by Pepsi!). Coke is the pickup, and man, nothing cuts the grease of food-fair chinese combos than a can of Coke.

So when I heard about Coke Blak, I dreamed about what it might be like. My two favorite black liquids - together. I imaged a bottle of frappucino, with a coke twist. I imagined classic coke, with a shot of sweetened espresso dripped into it.

So, after cruising ebay for a while looking for the early versions, Sol brought a bottle he picked at 7-11. After leaving it for a night in the fridge to settle, I popped it open today. It is so bad, I can't hardly even write about it. Imagine Diet Coke, then you took the worst cafeteria coffee you could find, boiled it down, and poured it in the bottle. Unintegrated, vile, caustic. Unbelievable.

Well, they totally missed MY demographic. Perhaps someone will like it...

Peace It Together - The Movie(s)

2006-08-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Creative Peace Network Society is proud to present…
Peace it Together 2006!
Reel Perspectives by Palestinian, Israeli and Canadian Youth

Please join us at the world premier screening of seven short films about the Middle East through the lenses of 30 young people.

The films will be the result of a two-week program called Peace it Together. In partnership with the UBC School of Music's Young Artist Experience, chamber musicians will add some beautiful interludes

When: Sunday evening, August 20, at 7:00 PM
Where: Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, 2750 Granville Street
Tickets: $15.00 (general admission) at the door
www.ticketmaster.ca 604 280 4444
Arts Club Theatre box office 604 687 1644

For more information, contact info@creativepeacenetwork.ca
See our website http://www.creativepeacenetwork.ca

Day 1 - Mohammed arrives

2006-08-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

Our Palestinian guest Mohammed Shaqura arrived yesterday and after adjusting to his jet lag, seems to be getting a bit more at home in our house. They flew by way of Jordan, Amsterdam, then Vancouver so it's not hard to see why fatigue was the dominant feeling as they arrived. So far, we're concentrating on communicating, and connecting on our most common themes - tech, coffee, music, and movies. Starting with the basics - shower and sleep, and moving on to rechargeable batteries and ac adaptors. It was great to see him "perc-up" after this morning's double-latte and I got to listen to some contemporary Lebanese music. Sol & I watched the DVD "Promises" late last night and about halfway through it, Mohammed woke up (about midnite our time) and came downstairs so we watched the end of it together.

The Canadian, the Israeli and the Palestinian

2006-07-31T23:17:00.000-07:00

Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but in our case it's true. We'll be housing two teenagers, one from Jerusalem and the other from Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, as part of the creative peace network. This was all set up months before the rockets starting landing in Israel, and the invasion of Lebanon, so what looked at the outset as chance to open an initial dialog has taken on a whole new level.

Still, it's all going ahead and we'll head out to the airport this week to pick up Mohammed and Nadav, and see where that all goes.

Apple's Unnanounced Gem - TrackPak

2006-06-15T23:07:00.000-07:00

Apple is usually terrific at promoting new capabilities of new software and hardware offerings, but I stumbled across this one, that I had not even heard about, at the San Francisco Apple store last week. It's not an Apple product per se, but it is so cool, I'd have thought they might promote it.

Being from Vancouver, I love San Francisco, and need no more than a mention of a chance to go there for a quick trip. Last week's American Advertising Federation was my latest excuse. In for a couple nights at the small boutique Harbor Court Hotel and a wonderful dinner thanks to my colleague Mark from Adobe (thanks, Mark!) at the Ozumo experience (they don't even call it a restaurant!).

With a couple hours to kill, I walked down Market St. to O'Farrell and past the (sadly) now-closed FAO Schwartz to the newer toy store, at Apple. Wondering around the new macbooks, climbing the green glass stairs, perusing the racks, I saw what looked like a new Jam Pack, those collections of loops for making songs in GarageBand.

But no, this wasn't yet another collection of tubas, oboes, and funky world-drum beats. It was TrackPak, something I had only dreamed would be offered one day, but a dream come true for guitarists old enough to remember when Eric Clapton played with Cream.

TrackPak is a digital version of some of the Master Tracks of various themes. I bought the Classic Rock version with tracks like Sunshine of Your Love, Smoke on the Water, and Sweet Home Alabama. These are songs I spent hours with, my guitar on my lap and picking up the needle on records to pick out every note of the solos. They are slightly mixed down from the master tapes, but you can still solo out the lead and rhythm guitars, drums, and bass.

For musicians who want to hear the detail on these classic tracks, TrackPak is a great deal. It will also make a great addition to our GarageBand remixes, where we can now sample a snippet from a solo without having to pull in all the other tracks as well.

Sub-ether Hotel Networking

2006-06-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

A little known fact for mac users in hotels with wired internet access.

iTunes music sharing and iChat work even if you haven't paid for the internet access.

Sure, if you want to google something you need to pony up the $10 to get outside the firewall, but sitting here in the Chicago Westin for a conference, I have access to a bunch of excellent iTunes playlists to engage in that most esoteric of hotel-bound, stuck-in-your-room-doing-email, people-sports; what's in YOUR itunes list?

Websites as graphics

2006-06-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

The fact that website are hierarchical structures is obvious, but what isn't obvious is how beautiful a site can be when its representation is abstracted away from the html into the tagged structure itself. Such is the result from Websites as graphs. Above is a picture of this blog site. Sala has some fine examples. Now if I could just get the url for each node so I could decipher the back links...

Secrets of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2006-05-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is true, I have seen the vision of the final book in the Potter series. I'll tell you about it if you promise not to say anything to anyone else...

1. Dumbledore is not dead. Snape and he set it up to allay suspicion. See North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock.
2. Snape is actually a good guy, who was redeemed from death-eater status by the the love he felt for Lily, before she became Harry's mother. Dumbledore knows this, and they have worked together to manage his appearance as a double-agent.
3. The fact that Harry has "his mother's eyes" is a reminder to Snape of his responsibility to protect him.
4. Voldemort is destroyed by the thing he never understood - love, sacrifice and friendship.
5. Harry will have to die to kill Voldemort, like Neo and Smith in The Matrix.
6. Hermione and Ron get married and have wild kids with curly red hair - ok, maybe not.
7. Petunia is committed to protecting Harry because Dumbledore has enabled it to protect him, and out of shame for how she treated Lily.

MacBook Pro can Safe/Deep Sleep (Hibernate)

2006-05-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

I have both an IBM Thinkpad running Windows XP/Pro and a MacBook Pro, so spend lots of time hoppin from one (the PC for scheduling and Office, and some Explorer-only websites) and my MacBook, for Creative Suite and Flash testing. Hopping from one to the other gives me lots of opportunities to appreciate the integrity of the Mac OS, things like being able to actually copy and paste reliably from any application to any other. Once in a while, there is a cool thing in Windows that I like that is worth mentioning and eventually, it moves across to the Apple side as well. The best known one of course is the Alt-Tab application switching, but another one I came to depend on was "Hibernate". Hibernate is a power-saving mode that copies the contents of RAM onto the hard drive, then shuts down. Starting up is much faster than rebooting Windows, and it was essential given that sleep mode on my IBM laptop would exhaust the battery in about 3 hours.

In Mac OS 10.4.3 and later a hibernate mode has been enabled, but apparently won't be official for a while yet. Still, I've been messing around with a little Dashboard widget called Deep Sleep that lets you deep sleep your Powerbook/Macbook. Andrew Escobar has a very clear description of how to set this up from your command line. I prefer the hibernatemode 3, which puts the mac into your standard sleep more, and when the battery gets low, automatically goes into the deep sleep.

I like the deep sleep mode not so much for the reboot/wakeup speed, since OS X boots up pretty quickly, but that I don't have to relaunch my applications and can leave documents open.

Sims 'R Us Pt. II

2006-05-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

They were all dead.

Well, as dead as you can call a simulated life form.

A quicksort of the full entity list showed that every one of them had kicked out of their event loops, that is, they were without the event thread that animates them - the causal agent that triggers the repeated loop of micro-introspection of a sim - am I happy? am I fed?

Tailing through the history log showed they all stopped from exceeding their pain threshold index. They'd been murdered. All of them. All but one. There was one remaining thread, a single sim that was left, running a basic eat/sleep cycle. Was this the murderer? What motive could he have had? Sol ran the regression playback and looked for clues. But without the chronology, the clues were lost, the trail - cold.

Cold. That definitely described the feeling of looking at the aftermath of this simuation run. Something very cold happened here. But where does the warmth come from? What prevents people from actually doing this - destroying everyone ouside their family group. Isn't that just what survival dictates? Sure, he could add an altruism factor to each sim, and crank it up to the level where they all put the interests of their neighbors ahead of themselves, but that seems as artificial as this mass extinction. What are the balancing forces in real life he can convey to his newly-enhanced sim world?

Start with the basic externalities, he thought as he cracked his knuckles and launched the editor. Drive to survive, need to reproduce, compulsion to protect offspring. Maybe a couple more; babies are really cute, and health needs a good environment. That might do it. Round two, file, save, open, start. Sit back.

Sims 'R Us

2006-04-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

It seemed like a minute ago that he had cracked the wrapper of his new Sims 10 game chip, and thumbed his print to unlock the copy protection, but after 12 hours straight, Sol Hackmer looked in disbelief at his flex-screen, seeing at a glance how to make this game way more interesting than even the AI that had replaced Will the Maker had intended. There before him, softly glowing on his lap in organic led luminescence, was the core values matrix template for the autonomy engine, the controller core for the hundreds of microdecisions each Sim can make. "Hundreds?" Sol mused, thinking that was woefully inadequate to describe the behavioural matrix of a human, why it was hardly enough to motivate the thousands of simants that he steered into the great Ant War of 1993 when his hand was smaller than the mouse he used to play the game. The cvm was very simple - love, fear, satisfaction, hunger, bladder size; just enough to make these little puppets manipulable, but not rich enough to make them well, interesting. "Let's see how interesting these things could get," he mused as he coded up a complex web of interrelated, but somehow, more primal, values into the matrix. Starting with the basics: need to survive, nutrition, sensual index linked to physical limits, he started the more intricate code for recursive and iterative loops; pineal balance controller, pituitary regulator. He paused, hours later, stretching his fingers, reaching back to pick up another Dr. Pepper Zero, and the classic text by Norman and Litwack from his pre-med classes. Suddenly all that started to make sense to him, how the thoughts, motivation, and state of self-awareness and satisfaction could be modelled so completely by the hormonal interplay in the bloodstream. The further he worked into the night, the simpler the code became, but the cross-linkages held the complexity. The network was the system. The sun snooped over his shoulder as it rose and shone through his apartment window, and he thought it might be good enough. Randomize the parametric variations, initialize normal Gaussian distribution, and he was done. Time to set them going. He created a few thousand enhanced Sims, and set them about their day, as he set out toward his own. What he'd come back to later that day would be etched in his mind forever.

iPod battery bad? Might not be the battery.

2006-03-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

Lithium Ion batteries are pretty impressive for having much better performance than NiMh or NiCd, but they have an inherent problem of not being able to charge to the same level over time. While there are many sites that decry Apple's handling of the battery issue, other pages focus on the hardware issues around the batteries.

I beg to differ.

Whatever problems are endemic to lithium-based batteries, the problem is compounded by Apple's poor battery management hardware and software, a problem I am familiar with that seems to to have gone unresolved by subsequent iPod software versions.

You might ask, who are you to accuse Apple, the greatest user interface design company in the entire known universe, that their software is less than prisitine? Well, a few years ago, a small group at Creo built a little pda-like device we code-named metabadge, which was powered by a lithium ion polymer battery, and we learned some stuff about battery management that Apple should know.

The first is to know that when you build a device that uses lithium batteries, you need to include room for the battery management hardware - a complete tiny microprocessor system whose job is to allow this battery to get charged without exploding, and discharge without burning up. This is a good thing to have.

The second thing to know is that is takes a bit of time after you start up to assess the battery condition. Unfortunately the iPod software appears to decide way too quickly what the state of the battery is, and then (sometimes) catches up to reality. You know this is a problem when you wake up your ipod after charging and it shows a very low battery level. How can that be? It was charging overnight! If you are lucky, then over the next few minutes, the battery monitor will start to show the battery having a growing amount of charge, even though the charger is unplugged! If you're unlucky, then the dreaded "Your ipod battery is out of power" screen comes up.

Many people are replacing their ipod batteries, and some of them may not be neccessary, or even provide better results. Until Apple fixes the battery management system, users may be misled into thinking they have reached the end of their battery's life-cycle when in fact the battery is fine, but the software is telling them different.

Shaw Digital HD Review - mostly sucks

2006-03-10T13:57:00.000-08:00

Last year I bought a shiny big LCD TV that was not just HD-ready, but has a built in HD tuner. This is a feature. Unless you are Canadian, in which case it appears that you have wasted your money.

The friendly neighborhood state monopoly of Shaw cable insists that you buy yet another huge outboard space hog from Motorola. While the CRTC allows cable companies the option of supporting the tiny cable card, or the gargantuan and expensive outboard digital cable box, Shaw only chooses to support the latter. I'm looking for a petition to join.

So having exhausted all the alternatives, of which there are, let me see... none, I dragged home this huge package and hooked it up to my tv using the 5 wires of high-quality component video and stero pair. What do I find? Well, of the 9 stations that broadcast HD, most of the programs seem to be HD but not 16:9, instead taking the familar 4:3 ratio.

What's much worse, is the standard 75 or so channels look TERRIBLE! They are washed out, full of moire, and subjected to smoothing then "sharpening" that makes every face look wrinked and every edge wavy. When you plug the same cable plugged straight into the analog tuner, there is no comparison - the analog signal is far better quality. The only advantage to watching the stations on digital - you can see the show name and episode summary. That's a high price to pay for low video quality.

It's suprising and disappointing that the digitization and compression that Shaw is using to send digital cable compared to analog degrades the signal so much. The repair technicians will say it's not a problem with the equipment, the help staff will tell me no one has ever complained about that before, so I will go back to analog cable on my HD tv set, and once in a while when there is something in true HD on one of the several 3xx channels, I'll dust off the HD digital cable box and watch.

King Solomon and the Tim Hortons Cup

2006-03-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Today's CBC story from Quebec about the Roll up the Rim cup is a pretty clear example of unclear thinking about ethics, and the conflicts we get into when money colors our values of doing the "right" thing.

A 10-year old girl picks up a cup from the garbage and when she finds that she can't "roll the rim" she askes her 12-year old friend for help. When they see the cup wins a $28,000 RAV4 they take it to their teacher who calls the parents. The mom of the 12-year old claims she deserves it. The dad of the 10-year old was going to claim it and share some.

All the pointers on my ethical compass go with the finder. The 10-year old is the one who identified the potential win, and put her hand in the garbage can to retrieve the chance. Everyone else is a help. Her helpful friend did not find the cup, which is the key point. No more than the teacher can claim a piece because she made a phone call.

When you read that the 12-year-old's mother called a radio station for "legal advice" it seems pretty clear (albeit from this one article's representation) who is being a "mensch" and who is grabbing for cash.

The Mac Mini Media Center - Where Is It?

2006-03-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

Ok, Apple, listen up. We've drunk the kool-aid, we have our iMacs and iPods, I even keep the boxes because their designed to be prettier than my office chair, and you can show them off to your friends.

But you have to help me out with the media center thing. It's driving me nuts. There aren't many companies on the planet who could get this stuff together, and G-d knows you may have Steve and 173 engineers working on it already, so maybe this is old news, but - I need a really elegant solution to the living room media center. I even know what it looks like, and what the heck, I'll tell anyone.

I just want one box by my tv. One small box. Oh, and it has to be pretty. And have a simple remote control. Y'know, the Mac Mini gets close. But it is missing one thing. It doesn't do cable.

Yes, I know it is messy and frought with peril. It might even put you at odds with Motorola, that communications giant that in spite of great hardware technology can't build a user interface, an iTunes phone, or a remote control as simple as Apple's. The convertor box they want to put in my house is huge and ugly. Who needs buttons and displays on the thing - cable boxes should be unseen and unheard.

But at least it's easy to say what the Apple Mac Mini Media Center has to hook up to. The DVI connector might get augmented to HDMI so I don't need audio cables as well to my nifty HD LCD TV, but most of all it has to have an f-connector, and a slot for the cable card, once Shaw catches up to the 21st century and moves to renting cable cards instead of selling behemoth ugly black boxes.

Then, and only then, might you be able to start positioning those great Apple LCD monitors in the same room as the flurry of Aquos, Brevia and assorted devicia flowing into the living rooms of the world.

David Emerson and Canadian Politics

2006-02-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

I didn't anticipate adding political content to this blog, but then I didn't anticipate such a close-to-home scandal that would upset me so much. David Emerson's defection to the Conservative party of Canada after serving as a Liberal strikes deeply into the meat of the Canadian political carcass, and shows us how broken the political machine is in the 21st century.

Let me first reiterate that David Emerson seems like a smart and intelligent person. That he will do generally good things for Vancouver, the 2010 Olympics, and our dispute with the U.S. on softwood lumber, there seems to be a sense that he is a good person for these jobs.

The problem as I see it is that it appears opportunistic for Emerson to change parties after the election. If he was so sure it was the right thing for the consituency and for Canada to be with the ruling party, maybe he should have just said that what was what he was going to do during the election campaign. Instead, he joined the "anything but the conservatives" tirade the liberals were proposing.

The solution then is about fixing the Canadian political party system. It's just broken. Forcing people of good concience to vote against their better judgement in order to be affiliated with a political party is a compromise in integrity I for one don't want to see people striving for integrity in government to have to make.

If David Emerson is the best man for the job, he should go back to being a Liberal, as he was elected, and Steven Harper should have the courage to be a prime minister who can appoint a cabinet minister from the opposition. That would be integrity.

Completeness vs. Consistency

2006-01-26T16:48:00.000-08:00

In the spring of 1982 I read a book that changed the way I look at design. The book was Douglas Hofstader's Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It came out while I was in university and I promised myself I would take some time one day to actually study it, and do the exercise it describes. I indeed had that chance, thanks to my folks, during a week long retreat in Banff, where I booked into one of the log cabins on Mt. Rundle (now replaced by luxury condos) and alternated between days spent hiking the trails around town, and evenings drinking strong coffee and studying GEB. Hofstader tied together many threads that I had briefly encountered through my undergrad, linking computer concepts of recursion to their parallels in art and music, in a way that captivated my imagination.

Recently I've been working with designers and developers on a new application, and it's been instructive to reflect back to Gödel's Theorem, although of course I am probably using it totally out of context, and incorrectly, to boot. Anywho, the idea that stayed with me is that a formal system of logic can either be complete, or consistent, but not both. As it turns out, mathematics is one of those formal logic systems, and it is consistent, but not complete. That is, it does not have any contradictions (if you find one then you have only proved your premise is incorrect), but there are some mathematical truths that we can't discover.

While this fact doesn't keep me awake at night worried about unprovable truths, it did strike me today that when we are designing user interface systems for humans to use, they very much prefer systems that are consistent than ones that are complete. Few people have the expectations of gadgets or software doing everything, but there is a high expectation of consistency, that they should be true to an underlying model. The best systems have an underlying model, or metaphor, that resonates so strongly with users that they call it "intuitive".

What does an intuitive user interface mean? I believe that it presents a user illusion of an underlying metaphor that is analogous to some other activity in users' lives, and provides clues that reinforce the learnability of that metaphor, and functions that act in accordance with it.

As designers we should choose consistency over completeness ("let's just add this one extra feature...") and as users we should demand it.

metabadge - wireless, voice pda

2005-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

A small group of hardware and software engineers put together a prototype of a new kind of pda - one that completely used voice, with no stylus, and no display. What we found about people's use of PDAs was surprising, and showed a market gap still waiting for a commercial solution.

A wireless, voice-controlled pda. Crazy? or Visionary?

When we began the metabadge project and started to show the prototype, a frequent question was, "Why doesn't it have a display". The answer is simple - you don't need one.

This was 2002. Every pda, every existing version on the shelf had a screen. Yet our research showed people typically had one or two simple queries -

Where am I supposed to be right now?
Am I free Thursday at 2:00?
"Book an appointment, Friday at 10:00, Meet to discuss online help"
What is Dan's phone number?

metabadge enabled anyone who could speak or listen to answer these questions with as little as one button click. That's simplicity. That's ease of use.

The Creo metabadge - Top things people want from a PDA - without a display.

Top Issues Users had with PDAs

Size - PDAs are too big to carry everywhere. If it's sitting on the desk, it's not personal enough.
Sync - Care and feeding of a PDA was a leading reason to not use them after a few months. Simply too much bother to cable up and sync.
Data Entry - Users ended up treating their PDA's read-only, since entering data was too cumbersome
Complex - More features meant more clicks to do anything at all, even simple things.

metabadge Key Features

small enough to fit in a pocket
Airsync - Bluetooth® enabled, metabadge syncs automatically anytime it can or needs to
Simple - one click tells you the time, and your next (or current!) appointment.
Scroll - one scroll takes you through you future appointments or phone contacts
Listen - voice synthesis plays your appointments and contacts so you can keep your eyes on the road
Speak - uses Microsoft Speech Recognition, one phrase can book an appointment in Outlook

Creo's metabadge prototype was demonstrated publicly in 2002, but not commercialized. Yet.

Firmware - Quietly Running the World

2005-10-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

Firmware is everywhere. If the joke about how your appliances will have IP address and chat to one another while you are at work is slightly worriesome to you, you should be very worried about firmware.

Firmware is not about underwear with wires and foam. Firmware is the netherworld between hardware and software that, like duct tape, just might be holding the world together. Except firmware isn’t as sticky.

Firmware is everywhere, burned into rom chips in cars, fridges, ovens, expensive toasters, house alarms, sprinkler systems (can you tell we are new house owners?), pda’s, audio equipment, cameras, watches, timers, and of course, computers.

Writing firmware is hard, and debugging it is even harder. Firmware runs in real-time, that is, it has to respond quickly to real-world events, like temperature sensors, switches opening and closing, as well as really slow events like waiting for someone to press a key (I imagine PC’s spend 99.9% of the time awaiting human interaction). Debugging firmware is hard because it runs in a resource-poor environment, where interaction with the hardware is the programmer’s main source of feedback. Since firmware is another form of software, we can expect it to be plagued with all the same problems we have come to expect from software.

A few years ago (pre-iPod) we bought a RioVolt cd/mp3-player. Not only did this cd-player play cd’s but it also played ISO-9660 disks of MP3 files. So this means we could compress 10 or so CDs onto a single CD-R and play about 10 hours off one disc. Cool.

No sooner did we get this puppy home than we checked out the web site, where I was informed there is an update to the firmware on this device? What could you possibly get wrong in v1.13 that you have to correct on 32KB of ROM? What else- new features. Better song sorting, easier ways to navigate the complexity of your disc and directories. Ok, fine. Now how do you actually go about updating the firmware of a CD/MP3 player? In this case, very cleverly. I expected some serial port/USB hack download utility. Forget it. You simply download the firmware upgrade file, then burn a CD with the upgrade firmware on it, and stick it in the player. It starts up, recognizes this upgrade file, and rewrites its own brains. I had to turn it back on by hand after. It now sports new features and a glowing v2.0 splash screen.

A year before, we had a rash of firmware upgrades for our laptops at the office, and it was a study in how hard and how easy a firmware upgrade can be. The guys using the NEC laptops had to upgrade from sloppy disc, a process that took two electrical engineers several hours to perform. On my Apple G3 powerbook, I downloaded the app off the web and ran it. It told me it would have to restart and the screen would show the upgrade process, then reboot. I clicked and watched. Sure enough, the application did something mysterious for a while, the machine restarted, and a very simple gui appeared showing the progress bar of the upgrade. Remember, firmware is right above the hardware layer so there is not a lot of operating system and graphics-card level resources for it to play with, so showing anything on screen came at the cost of someone poking pixels into video ram. After this 30 second upgrade was complete, the reboot took me back to the real world of operating systems, and one that could properly handle firewire again.

Upgrading firmware is always going to be a grungy task, since it is by definition low level. As systems get more complex, so does the firmware. I blew up our convection microwave oven by pressing keys in an order that I thought would convect but in fact nuked. A more disastrous case was the Therac-25, which left open a chance for a technician to perform a sequence of keystrokes that delivered 100 times the regular dose of x-rays to a patient.

As designers, we have to keep in mind the phrase I learned at a CHI (Computer Human Interface) conference years ago which was “Know Thy Users for they are not You.” Firmware will continue to be a critical component of a microprocessor powered world, and making it easy for mortals to deal with devices, as well as the ability to upgrade their firmware is another responsibility we should take seriously.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my refrigerator just e-mailed me complaining about the trashy language coming from the garburator…

CBC and being Canadian

2005-09-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

The dispute between mother corp. and the Canadian Media Guild seems to be lasting longer than I had hoped or expected. Perhaps it is, as one guild member suggested to me, that CBC management won't feel any urgency to settle until hockey season starts and they can't snap up that big commercial revenue that supplements the fed money that keeps cbc going.

My sympathies weigh in with the on-air talent, but I have to admit that it makes some sense that the corp. needs to be able to change programming to keep up with trends and competition. You can read the blogs and make up your mind.

One effect of the dispute is that cbc is playing "best of" shows from as far back as 2003, I guess trying to keep many of us from permanently drifting off to commercial radio as a lifestyle choice. It'll work for a while, at least for me, and at least for as long as the level of conversational tone on Vancouver rock stations remains at high school level. But there have been a couple recent events that together have really made me reflect on what it is to be Canadian.

It's lame to fall back on defining ourselves by our differences from the Americans. What are our distinctive Canadian values and society? The two glimpses I saw this week: 50 tracks replays on CBC, and the 25th anniversary of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope. Fifty Tracks is being repeated in thr 5-6pm drive time, not a bad choice. In this slot various media and music people nominated the most significant songs of a decade. Then the audience weighs in. Typical of the critics, they select the seminal bands and tunes that defined a musical genre, and the rest of us just pick the ones from the top 40 that bring a smile of recognition and remembrance. The insight that it offers as a gestalt of Canada is this - what kinds of Canadian artists and songs are our contributions - Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who, Neil Young, Stan Rogers, The Tragically Hip, April Wine. Our artists play it straight - straight from the heart, and straight speaking. We're generally a country of plain speakers, who love our stories, and respect the storytellers without making them pedestal-tippy icons, or reveling in their human foibles.

Which takes me to Terry Fox. This year 10,000 schools across Canada ran various races to raise money for cancer research. It has been 25 years since Terry Fox started on his cross-Canada trip, trying to raise $1 for every person in Canada, which at the time was around 25 million. Since that time over $360 million has been raised worldwide in his name.

Terry was a hero in the core sense of Canada. He set out to do something hard, he endured pain that many of us would not choose to endure, and he took each day one step at a time, each run one step at a time. He didn't aspire to greatness, he just wanted to do something significant on as large a scale as he could with whatever time he had.

As should we all.

Cars are amazingly heavy...

2005-09-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

In both senses of the word. I had the chance last summer to see and hear Dean Kamen talking about - what else - the Segway Human Transporter. While I haven't bought into the Segway vision, or for that matter, an actual Segway, Dean pointed out some facts about cars, especially SUVs that once you hear them, makes it hard to think of them the same when you see them on the street. Dean compared the weight of a person, say 150lbs, with an SUV, of about 6,000 pounds. Hopping into the SUV to drive to the store to get a liter of milk is like Cleopatra getting carried in her sedan chair by 40 slaves. Disturbing analogy. Try this one - try to push your car, especially up a gentle incline. Because car engines are so powerful, we lose the sense of how much power it takes to climb hills, and turn corners. We just push a little pedal, and a stream of liquified dinosaurs burns up and drags this huge hunk of steel and plastic around.

So, I'm starting to ride my bike to the store for milk. My wife has some foolish argument this is a better use of heart, lungs, and money than buying a Segway HT (with yellow fenders). Dang.

Film Directing and Product Management

2005-08-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have two lives. Now, before you run off to tell my wife, calm down. But really, I have two lives. One of these lives is described on the left side of the piece of paper that is my resume. The other life is on the right side. One of these lives has a future, the other does not. The question is - which one?

The left side is engineering centric. I knew when I was about 12 years old that I wanted to be an electrical engineer, and that aspiration has been achieved. Several years of software design, hardware hacking, working on a Lisa and Mac, worked on a new kind of pda. Most fun has been being a product manager - bringing a product from fuzzy notion to shipping product, and an experience I've had the privelege to repeat with Creo's Virtual Proofing Software, Prinergy, and metabadge. What makes Product Management so attractive to me is that it is applied storytelling.

The right side is full of small, amazingly fun things that have to do with music, video and film. I've done live mixing for bands, and recorded basement tapes of a few. I've shot super 8, and gotten high on the splicing cement. I've been a boom man for college projects, and shot a few videos to learn about non-linear editting. After taking the Director's course at the Vancouver Film School, I came to this conclusion:

Directing film/video is very much like product management. Maybe that's why I like the both. Look at the similarities. 1) You are the leader of a team, of various skills and abilities, who you need to work together to achieve a common purpose. 2) While technical potentials tempt you at every turn, it is your job to stay focussed on the story. 3) Your team works better if you collaborate rather than rule, but sometimes the team looks to you to just make a decision. 4) You are telling a story, and the integrity of that vision is the primary reason behind all the tech.

So, there it is. I'm ready to direct. Where to start?

Time to Start

2005-08-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

The ship is sailing, but I've hopped into the trusty kayak and paddled out to jump on.