Jim McGaw's Blog

Your Best Years

2012-02-17T03:43:00.000-08:00

Your best years are ahead of you.

I may not know you, or have a clue how old you are, but I know I'm right. Yesterday, the day before, and the expanse of days that stretch into the past belong to the ages. Mourn them if you must, but they are history's property now.

But today? And tomorrow? Those belong to you.

In Search of the Unlikely

2012-02-16T13:18:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, when a work of art achieves commercial success, it is described, after the fact, as an "unlikely success".

You can only refer to something as unlikely based on some prior expectation. It was unlikely to be successful because someone deemed that to be the most probable outcome. The person who deemed it to be unlikely, and their reasons for doing so, are supremely important.

Maybe the film didn't have the budget of a major studio, so it was assumed it would struggle to find an audience.

Maybe the author didn't go with a reputed publishing house and instead self-published their work online, and without distribution, it was assumed the work would not be read by many people.

Maybe the politician didn't stand a chance against the incumbent because they had integrity and not a lot of wealthy stakeholders.

Critics will say what they think about a piece of art prior to its release, and they'll make judgment calls about how likely a work is to achieve success. When something they deemed a probable failure achieves success, they call it "unlikely" as a means of saving face. (Who woulda thunk?)

Maybe the critics are usually right, and their devised methods for computing probabilities of success are calibrated pretty well. Maybe some successes are actually unlikely when compared to some arbitrary standard set forth by a critic.

I remain cynical. I think it takes guts to create the unlikely. And now, more than ever, markets are willing to make the unlikely a success.

Disagreement

2012-02-04T22:53:00.001-08:00

There are certain types of debates in which I don't get involved. Generally, this is when a line is drawn and two opposing sides start lobbing stones at one another. This is a pretty good summary of why I keep my distance:

"Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm...When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger."

No, this doesn't surprise me, because everyone (including myself) is susceptible to this kind of behavior. These days, I'm much less inclined to treat a person who's expressing a dissenting opinion to me as a personal attack.

Debating

2012-02-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

Simple question: if there were a proposed change to be made in this country that would arguably leave everyone better off in some important way, but it put you out of a job, would you fight the change?

I use the word "arguably" very deliberately, because I learned very quickly as an adult that 1. almost everything is arguable, and 2. if it's arguable, it will be argued.

Mindless Negativity

2011-09-20T12:15:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's true. There are tons of people out there who are characterized by vapid, mindless optimism.

Yes, they are annoying. They are a turn-off. They don't actually accomplish much.

But it's a massive mistake to correlate their optimism with their vacuous mindsets. Negativity also has the capacity to be mindless. And it my experience, it often is.

Don't be overly negative in an attempt to appear smart. Usually, it has the opposite effect. And it makes you miserable in the process.

"Buy Me Dinner First"

2011-09-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

I had to take my car into the auto mechanic earlier today. When I went into their office, I was given a form to fill out asking for my name, my phone number (information they already had), home address, and email address. Nothing on the form indicated why they required this information, and what they were going to do with it.

"What do you need this information for?" I asked him. He told me they would use my phone number to call me with an estimate, my mailing address to mail me updates and reminders, and my email address to email me service coupons and a newsletter. He was cordial enough about it, but when I gave him my name and phone number and left the other fields blank, he seemed perplexed. He stressed that I really shouldn't be concerned about filling out this form.

They were asking for information that they didn't need for any reason besides marketing purposes. He was a genuinely nice guy, and I could tell he was just following protocol. But when I broached the subject, he seemed surprised that I was being so shrewd about it.

I'm generally okay giving this information to people, but only after I recognize an incentive for me to do so. I wrote on the form "Buy me dinner first" and handed it back to him.

I think I might start doing this more often.

Up Next

2011-08-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

I moved out of Michigan about three years ago. I did so for the perhaps overly-cited "personal reasons". In my case, it happened to be true. The economy was in decline as I left, and it really got about about a month after I left (in September 2008), but that had nothing to do with it.

I left because it dawned on me that I had a ton of unhealthy thought patterns. And a social circle comprised of people that, while they were awesome, mostly reinforced these patterns. I wanted to get away just as a control, to see if I would evolve my way of thinking.

I took the first tech job I was offered and quickly moved. Things got better. In a new city, around new people, a new perspective was forced on me, and I had to look at things in a new light. I had the chance to rewire my brain.

The one downside (and it's actually a huge upside) is that the first job I was offered was in Santa Barbara. It's an amazing city. The high cost of living is the only justifiable complaint I've ever heard about it, and even that is manageable. If this city has one export, I always say, it might as well be positive thinking, because it's difficult to spend time here and not be in a extended, doggedly persistent good mood.

I often wonder where my brain would be now if I had ended up in a more typical city, like Madison or Berkeley. I'm a positive person, and I tend to be optimistic...but it's too easy here in Santa Barbara. It's easier to remain celibate if you're surrounded by nuns in a convent.

I don't know where I move next, but it will probably happen within a couple of years. The true acid test of my optimism will come when I move away from here. Perception is reality, and I hope I can keep choosing to perceive things optimistically.

Why I Do Not Care What The Government Is Doing

2011-08-12T00:29:00.000-07:00

I should preface this by saying that I don't have a dog in this fight.

Not really. I don't really think of myself as a Republican or a Democrat. I'm sure if you psychoanalyzed my dreams you could figure out which one I am, but I don't actually believe that would accomplish a whole lot. I don't call myself a moderate, because that term is essentially meaningless anyway.

But, for practical purposes, I don't vote. Never have, and until someone gives me a good reason, I'm not going to. Unfortunately, it's been eleven years since I sprouted wings and hit voting age, and I don't expect to be given a good reason anytime soon. So it goes. You people who are into politics can keep holding your Kool-Aid parties. I'm unlikely to cause any trouble here by shouting at this wall I'm writing on.

That being said, I had a thought the other day, and I felt the urge to articulate it someplace. I have a friend who I've known for the past three years, and I can say with full confidence that he favors a more liberal agenda. At least, I think he does. I deduced this from hours of him telling me how terrible the Republicans are. By process of elimination, I'm assuming he's probably a Democrat. I may be going out on a limb.

So, earlier this week, he was prattling on about some issue in Congress or something, and he's telling me how terrible the conservatives are. And while he's talking, my mind is doing what it normally does during these discussions: wandering. I think I was working through some computer problem in my head. (Coincidentally, I do this very same thing when my dad is bashing the liberals.)

But as he was talking, my mind thought back to my freshman year of college, when I was enrolled in some "Political Science 101" class. What I learned, in short: conservatives favor smaller government, liberals favor bigger government. I know that's an oversimplification, but that's what this asshole professor taught me, and I've heard it since then, so let's roll with it for now.

Back to my friend, bashing Republicans. I interrupted him and said, "Just a second, I want to ask you something."

"Sure," he said.

"So, you're a liberal, right?" I asked him. He replied that he was. "So, you think government creates positive good in society, that we should have more of it, as opposed to Republicans, who view government as a necessary evil and think we should keep it to a bare minimum."

"That sounds about right, yes," he said, accepting the line I had just drawn in the sand.

I went on. "So, next question: in the past three years I've known you, and you've spent all this time talking about the federal government, have you ever once said a single positive thing to me about what they're doing?"

He didn't seem to have instances he could offer. I honestly couldn't remember a single one, and neither could he.

"All right," I said, "so, if everything that's happening in Washington D.C. is terrible, why would I ever favor a more progressive agenda?"

My friend responded by saying something about (I'm paraphrasing here) hating the playas, but not the game. Which I get; the current Congress is conservative.

But there's a fundamental problem here, and it's simple in concept:

The more liberals complain about government, the more they further a conservative agenda.

I don't care which side is doing what in Congress, I don't care which side is at fault, or what the issues are. Yes, the few of you who are actively involved in politics care deeply about the issues, and you're firmly decided. But the rest of us, the masses you're trying to reach, we're not interested in following along that closely. We're in the nosebleed section of the stadium, straining to get a glimpse. We're just watching the headlines and reading the occasional news article. We're trying to get a sense of how we should feel about things. We're trying to form an impression based on a limited trickle of interest. And based on this superficial, incomplete, fuzzy picture in our minds, we make a decision about what our core values our. And we vote these core values.

And if it's all bad news coming out of D.C., then tell me this: doesn't that mean government comes off as nothing more than a necessary evil? Do not tell me it's a conservative government at the moment! When you say that, I'm not hearing that. I'm hearing, "Government is bad, blah blah. The bums in Washington suck, blah blah." That's the impression you're leaving on my brain. Why should I ever vote to increase taxes if the political system is such a plague on our society? Why should I even care?

Now, I'm not that smart, and I'm not that well-read (politically), so I'm 100% certain that I'm not the first person to recognize this as a problem. But I've yet to find anyone who's doing anything about this.

Even during all of the debt ceiling hullabaloo that happened a couple of weeks ago, I was sure that someone had done something good during all of this ruckus. What it was, I didn't know, but I figured at least one U.S. Senator had introduced and passed a bill giving some aid to some war veterans. Or some tax break for a nail polish manufacturer that was going to be used to hire more workers in Philadelphia. Or maybe legislation helping coal miners with their rights. Something.

I entered "U.S. Congress" into Google News. The first 10 pages of results were all articles about the debt ceiling debate. After that, I stopped looking.

I understand why we always report on what's timely. But I have yet to hear anyone say they were happy with the debt ceiling resolution. Again, all bad news. And if it's all bad news, then once again, I posit: why should I pay attention, and why should I ever favor adding or increasing the size of any government programs? After the 600th or 700th crisis I've heard about in my life, I started tuning out. And for some reason everything is a crisis.

This is a problem. And to be clear, I don't see it as a progressive problem. I don't see it as a conservative problem. I honestly think that civic disengagement is a problem for both parties, because it reduces voter turnout on both sides. I'm pretty disengaged myself, and I've been waiting over a decade for someone to get me to care. Not because society owes it to me, but for another reason entirely: if someone can engage me, they're probably engaging almost everyone else, too. Because I honestly, passionately don't care, but I keep an open mind. So I'm lying in wait.

I've yet to find a news source that consistently looks on the bright side. "Here's what happened in Congress today, and here is why it's awesome."

You do read news stories like this on occasion, but they're usually reporting partisan victories. Republicans defeat a Democrat bill, or vice versa. The problem with these victories is that they aren't mine. They're party victories, and they're celebrated / reported as such.

I have a half a mind to clobber together a blog of my own that would report such things. I would find a few good, positive pieces of news per week that would offer people a more favorable view of what governments, both federal and local, are doing in the United States. (I'd stay away from hot button issues.) I know that each and every day, there are hundreds of elected officials doing small things that matter, and they're not given a voice, because nobody cares. So it goes.

I care. But to be honest, there's a lot of news out there, and every time I've tried to wade through it, it just gets depressing. It seems our whole media is based on "send your representatives an angry email every time you're pissed off", instead of "thank them for the hard work they did last week passing legislation that positively affected you." In light of this, curating the content for such an "optimistic" news site as I'm proposing would be too big a task for me. I'd build some kind of software to crowdsource it, but I figure then people would start submitting stories about partisan victories (e.g. "We passed Prop 8!") and arguments would start in the comments and it would devolve into something resembling YouTube without any videos. A grim prospect indeed.

I actually am optimistic. I don't know what party that means I belong to. I think this country has great days ahead of it. Will there be difficulties? Yes. Is the federal government dysfunctional? Yes. For the 222nd year in a row. They're going to have to try a whole lot harder than they are to worry me, because this "madness" or whatever people are calling it is just business as usual.

But as long as it keeps on being perceived as "madness", the steps we take forward are going to be slow.

Next Generation

2011-08-11T09:35:00.001-07:00

When I was a teenager, there are tons of lessons my parents, my teachers, and elders tried to teach me. Many of these went in one ear and out the other. I wasn't ignoring them. But a lot of knowledge comes from direct experience, not from "Here's the way things are, because I said so." I learned most of these lessons later, on my own, from the world when I became ready to learn them. And it was the world that prepared me.

Teenagers are running around today with their cell phones, texting while walking, so distracted by the device in their hands that they almost run into other people on the sidewalk. They pay more attention to their mobile devices than other things that might matter. They act with a sense of entitlement, which, while it's what they've learned, maybe isn't the best mentality with which to carry yourself.

Grown-ups point to these as indicators that kids take too much for granted, and that they're not grateful for what they have. That's a fair point. But when the teenager asks in response, even internally, "Why should I be grateful?" Well, that's also a fair question. They don't know because they haven't learned. And I'm not convinced that we're always capable of teaching them.

We have created a society that shields (some of) our teenagers from a lot of the uglier side of things. Giving kids a safe environment in which to learn and grow is perhaps the greatest thing we've managed to do as a nation, even if we don't always do it well. But there is a trade-off: we, as adults, have seen and know the real world. Some know it much better than others. Teenagers don't. And as a result, their actions and attitudes reflect their experiences.

I'm not offering parenting advice here. I don't have kids, and I firmly believe it's every parent's prerogative to warp their kids however they see fit. (Provided your kids don't come to school shooting, of course.)

Fun fact: I haven't kept an exact count, but I estimate that the number of middle aged adults distracted by texting on their cell phones who have almost walked into me on the street is about the same as the number of teenagers who have done it.

Stretch

2011-08-02T06:08:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that websites are profiling me.

This isn't a bad thing. Amazon clearly knows my book browsing and purchase habits so well, it does a better job of picking books for me than any of my friends and family. Algorithmically, it's complicated, but they're basically just cross-referencing what I've bought and looked at with other people who have looked at and bought the same things. So when I land on the homepage tomorrow morning, they'll consult the profile they have on me and build the homepage I see based on that.

Provided they aren't sharing this information without my knowledge, this seems like fair use. What they know about me is fairly limited, because they just know which books I'm buying. (I buy almost everything else offline.)

Facebook is a little bit different. It's not an accident that there are now "Like" buttons all over the web. Provided that we're all logged into Facebook in the same browser we're using to surf the web (most of us are), when you load that news page with the Facebook buttons on it, the data about this page you're visiting is sent right alone for Facebook to store.

So, Facebook is trying to figure out who I am. They're profiling me by compiling a history of every page that I've visited. And, of course, Facebook isn't the only company that's trying to do this.

Should we be worried about this? Maybe. Me, I've been aware of this for quite some time, and I have a little trick that I use to throw them off: I try to look up information about everything.

It's one thing to read a news article with a liberal bent, then to seek one out with a conservative one on the same topic. I do that, but I try to take it further. I look up articles on pottery, sewing, marketing, mathematical models for stock market investing, software for managing a dental practice, computer science, criminal law, publicity, civic engagement in city governments, sales training, the educational system in Europe, urban planning, botany, US companies moving their manufacturing from China to the US, how fireworks are made, how to take care of a firearm...etc.

I would do this anyway, since I'm a pretty curious person. It doesn't necessarily make me smarter, but I hope that it makes the signals I'm sending to Facebook a little bit noisier than they might otherwise be, and make it more of a challenge for them to pigeonhole me.

This is one of the reasons I blog. I try to obligate myself to find new ideas and share them with others. I hope this has the side effect of getting people interested in other random disciplines, and gets them browsing about a few random unrelated tangents. Maybe they in turn blog about a few of them, and the serendipity spreads.

Does this actually happen? I have no idea. In life it's often difficult to tie the effect to its associated causes. I think that's what we're all trying really hard to do: be the cause, unseen or otherwise, of the effects we want to see in the world.

The Age of Privacy is NOT Over

2011-08-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

In late 2009, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt was asked by CNBC about Google's policy regarding privacy. He responded with a somewhat alarming quote: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Whenever he's asked about it, Mark Zuckerberg seems to take the stance that the age of privacy is over in a world permeated by Internet connectivity.

That the heads of these companies don't seem to respect the privacy of their users is an interesting thing to note here...but it isn't the real story. The posture of these companies seems to be an attempt to remain objective in the face of the legal reality that privacy laws don't cover Internet activity they way they protect what you keep in your home. That they don't seem to be pushing to maintain the privacy rights of their users also makes for interesting discussions, but it's not the real story here, either.

The Fourth Amendment is one key piece of U.S. law that regulates how law enforcement agencies conduct investigations against citizens. It protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures" by government without warrants issued upon probable cause. This amendment was created in an age without much technology. Government investigated individuals by physically entering someone's home, so protecting against "searches" was sufficient.

In 1928, in the landmark case of Olmstead v. United States, federal investigators sought to convict a notorious bootlegger by tapping his phone lines, recording hundreds of hours of conversations, and incriminating him using those conversations. They got their conviction, but Olmstead appealed on the grounds that his phone conversations were recorded without a warrant, and therefore in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed with him, claiming that there was neither search nor seizure involved in the wiretapping.

This would be a dangerous precedent for the age of the Internet, but it didn't stop there. In 1967, the FBI sought to convict a man named Charlie Katz for violating federal gambling statutes. Katz made calls to his bookie in a phone booth outside his apartment. The FBI bugged the phone booth, and eventually, they accumulated enough evidence to arrest him.

Katz was convicted, and like Olmstead, he appealed. The Supreme Court heard the case , but this time, they reached a different conclusion than they had in Olmstead's case. Regarding the case, they said:

"The Fourth Amendment protects people, no places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."

In essence, the Court now applies the "reasonable expectation of privacy test". If a person acts with a reasonable expectation that they're actions are private, they should be protected.

Let me repeat that last part, because you have dozed off in my tedious recounting of this history: if there's a reasonable expectation of privacy in a person's actions ("reasonable" being defined by society's expectations), those actions should be protected by the Fourth Amendment.

With that in mind, I'd like to quote the headline of the article I linked to above:

"Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over".

This headline, by itself, is creepy. Why is that? The more they erode the public expectation of Internet privacy, the more they erode the case to be made for privacy law to apply to the Internet.

Regardless of Facebook's privacy policies, the fact that this is the sentiment that Zuckerberg echoes almost every time he discusses privacy and Facebook is troublesome. I'm picking on him because he's easy and his name is well-known, but he's certainly not alone. It's a familiar story in Silicon Valley: that privacy is simply a thing of the past. We've entered a new technological age, in which the online privacy rights of citizens are deterministically going to vanish. There's nothing we can do about it, they claim, because the forward march of technology further and further into our lives is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it.

This is an easy thing to accept. And it's tempting to accept it, because if that's the case, we don't have to do much. But it's a dangerous mindset.

It makes sense that companies like Google and Facebook would want us to think we, as a society, have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Even ignoring the effect this might have on future legal precedents, it keep would keep us from demanding more control over the data and information that we're providing to them. It frames the issue in a way that suggests that any future harm that befalls an individual based on these companies irresponsibly sharing that person's data is the fault of that individual, and absolves the company itself of any responsibility.

The age of privacy is not over. As a matter of fact, it's more important now than it has ever been in the past. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you should let anyone tell you otherwise. Your right to privacy online might depend on it.

Muddy Sight

2011-07-31T06:18:00.000-07:00

So, it's early on in my sophomore year at Michigan State University, and I go into my counselor's office one Monday morning to declare my major as economics. I had recently enrolled in the business college, and was about a couple of weeks into my first macroeconomics class. I thought it was fascinating.

The next day, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

Now, we all have our bouts of superstition. This was one of mine. My feeble human brain correlated the two, so I kind of freaked and decided to switch majors. Which worked out in the end, because as it turns out, the honeymoon phase ended quickly for me and economics, which ended up being an even worse academic topic than philosophy. (Philosophers may comprise a large chunk of the unemployed, but at least their actions are never responsible for mass unemployment.)

I gravitated towards accounting after that, figuring that it was a general skill that I could take anywhere I wanted. If, for some then unknown reason, I ended up wanting to go to Indonesia as a volunteer to help small businesses when I turned 40, I figured that accounting would help me. Or if I wanted to get rid of annoying people at parties, I could bore them by talking about GAAP.

Shortly after I did this, the accounting scandals at Enron and Worldcom broke. Oh well.

I stayed the course, so I ended up in a lot of different accounting classes. And since it was timely subject matter, almost every professor talked about Enron. And all of them had the same take on it: everyone should have seen it coming.

They clues were all there, my professors said. They were buried in reams and reams of financial statements, but the truth was there for anyone with enough savvy to dig for it. Even if you checked their financial ratios, an easy enough thing for anyone to do without much financial training, things seemed out of whack. A healthy company should be leveraged at about 40%. Shortly before the cards tumbled down, Enron was leveraged at around 98%.

Now, even back then, I accepted that much of this was probably human ego and hindsight bias. Of course all of my professors saw it coming. To suggest otherwise might imply that they weren't good at their jobs. But of course, that isn't necessarily true...there are a lot of publicly traded companies, and the MSU accounting department professors aren't responsible for monitoring all of them.

Last year, I read one of the articles in Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw. He had an article in the New Yorker about the Enron scandal in 2007. The article chronicles a Dallas reporter getting a tip in 2000 about Enron's earnings. And to investigate, he asked for help from, among other people, a Michigan State professor in the accounting department named Thomas Linsmeier. According the article, they spent about a month digging, and determined that something very fishy was going on.

The things my professors were telling me started to make more sense. Of course they all knew, because one of their own was involved in the informal investigation that started the slow and public unraveling of the company. It must have been a topic they discussed with one another at university functions. Or something.

I'm not assigning any blame here. But I do find it very odd, and more than a little tragic, that many highly educated people were aware of the Enron problem over a year before the company ended up finally collapsing. And yet, despite this, so many employees at Enron, who had their life savings tied up in a single stock (a bad idea, by the way) ended up losing their shirts.

The knowledge was there, but the dissemination of this knowledge to the parties that might have benefited from it never happened. Or didn't happen in time. Or once it was published, it wasn't given enough credit.

To anyone interested, I'd recommend reading Malcolm's article if you haven't already, and you have 15 minutes of rapt attention to spare. It makes some good points. And I believe that Malcolm's footnote to the story (which is in the book) is right: we didn't learn enough from the mistakes of Enron to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis.

So it goes.

They're All Going to Laugh At You

2011-07-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

Of course, if you try something, and you fail, then everyone is going to notice, everyone is going to ridicule you, and nobody will forget it as long as you live.

But that's not really true.

There are some spectacular failures that get a lot of press, like New Coke. But for the overwhelming majority of things, failure is an event that goes unnoticed, and is quickly forgotten.

The day Apple announced the iPad, it was derided endlessly by nerds, and the speculation was that it would be a miserable failure. Let's imagine they had been right...Apple would have moved on, and the name "iPad" would be all but forgotten.

Remember when companies tried to create tablet PCs back in the 1990's and they failed to make them take off? Right, exactly...almost no one remembers that.

Even getting away from lofty examples using Apple, it took me years--years--to learn that if you opened your mouth in a social situation and nobody responds to what you say, it's not the end of the work. When someone else says something, and no one says anything, it's not a big deal. The comment just passes, unnoticed. It just feels different when it us.

People won't laugh at you for trying. They'll do what they usually do: ignore you. You should take comfort in that, because it's actually liberating. When no one's looking, you can take a lot of risks.

The hard part is figuring what kinds of risks you're going to spend your time taking.

Privacy Policy as a Selling Point

2011-07-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

I joined a company a couple of years ago as one of their programmers. Their idea? Enter the online personal finance space.

At the time, our biggest competitor was (and still is) Mint.com. Mint.com makes no secret about the fact that while they're giving you a convenient web interface to budget, categorize, and track your bank and credit cards transactions, it makes money by analyzing your spending habits. Then it targets offers for bank accounts or loans that it thinks would be beneficial to you, based on your spending.

To my knowledge, they don't analyze individuals. They aggregate all user data and discover broad trends. The offers are based on these trends.

This isn't a problem. For most people, it's worth the trade-off of revealing your financial transactions to an outside company in exchange for helpful offers. But I think there's still a shortcoming in this area, because we have no comprehensive privacy law for the Internet user.

If Mint.com gets your spending history, there's nothing stopping them from sharing or selling the information with whomever they choose. There are no safeguards in place like in Canada or the European Union. The law in the U.S. simply hasn't caught up.

Returning to this company I started working for: Mint.com is free to use. They don't make money from customers paying for service. They make money by data mining and then targeting marketing offers to each user. The company I was going to work for, on the other hand, charged a monthly fee, but we promised never to mine your data.

Now, I'm not saying this because I felt our company was better than Mint. That's not my point here. I bring it up because our marketing department had to figure a way of making this "We Don't Mine Your Data" an appealing selling point. And you know what? It's very hard to do.

The start of any discussion about our product compared with competitors usually began with, "Why should I pay for yours if the other ones are available for free?" The reasons mostly involved our lack of data mining, but how do you explain that to a person? Most people aren't really aware of data mining, and once you bring it up to them, they get uncomfortable.

Imagine a woman asking a man why she should date him instead of another guy. The guy replies, "Well, that other guy has a terrible sexually transmitted disease. But me? I'm clean?" This doesn't make the woman want to date this man. It makes her want to swear off dating altogether and become a nun.

I'm not saying Mint.com's data mining is akin to an STD. It isn't. It's not by itself a bad thing. Again, I don't see the harm in Mint doing what they do. I'm only saying that you can't easily use the "no data mining" as a selling point for an online product, because the conversations are difficult to have with consumers.

This means that the free market is unlikely to resolve the online privacy problem for us. There are several businesses currently competing for different niche audiences in the online personal finance sphere. There is the world of social networks. And so on. In any given market space, no company wants to sacrifice a core competency that all of their competitors have, because you'd lose a competitive edge. The only reason any company would do this, of course, is if giving up the core competency actually gives them a competitive edge over everyone else. And with online privacy, I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

The conversations are just too "dirty".

This is why we need to have a comprehensive online data privacy law. I trust companies to do a lot of things for me, and for these, I'm grateful. But I don't expect them to exercise the best judgment when they make decisions about whether, how, or to whom they disseminate the information they've collected about me.

I don't think this is something we need to worry about, but awareness is helpful. As technology moves forward, I expect to see more court cases arise surrounding online privacy violations. Precedents will be set by these cases, and I'm hopeful that when they do, they fall on the side of the consumer.

There Are NO "Little People"

2011-07-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend's mom has a trick she uses when sizing up candidates when they come into the office for job interviews: after they leave, ask the receptionist for their thoughts. How did they treat them when they came in? How did they act? Were they polite?

Everyone's nice to the hiring manager or the head of the department in an interview, but it's revealing to see how they treat a "little person" who doesn't hold any sway over whether or not you'll get hired.

If I were hiring someone, I understand the advice, and I use it in other situations when I need to get a sense of a person's character or integrity. But as a human being, I hate it. It's still good advice, but it acknowledges and reinforces in our minds that there is a hierarchy amongst the people around us. Receptionists are down below, and the people who sign the checks are up above.

A hierarchy works in an organization. It might even be necessary. But when it comes to common human decency, there IS not hierarchy. There are no "little people".. Period.

You're polite to the receptionist because he's a human being, not because there's a chance she'll further your career.

You respond politely to the customer that is clearly poor and doesn't have a lot of money because he's human, not because they might have rich friends or a diverse social network.

Everyone deserves your respect, unless they happen to clearly demonstrate to you that they don't deserve it. And even if they do, you still treat them with respect, but kindly part ways.

Be kind. And do it sincerely.

Hi and Hiatus

2011-06-25T23:17:00.000-07:00

Went to go see a concert last night, but when we got to the show, it was sold out. My friend and I walked around West Hollywood to find a good place to eat, and we stumbled across a steakhouse that contained, among other things, a mechanical bull.

The novelty drew us in, but I became a fan for one simple reason: the service. The manager was making the rounds getting to know the patrons, making good conversation (which was a far cry from the bland "How is everything?" you get at Chili's), and the servers were all very attentive and polite. All of this on a Friday night in a packed steakhouse where almost everyone was stumbling around with a drink in hand.

On our way out, I pulled the manager aside and told him, as quickly as I could, "I know this job can't be easy. And I'll bet you get to hear all about things from customers when they aren't going well. But, I have to tell you that you and everyone here did a great job this evening. Thank you."

He was clearly very happy to get the compliment. I share the story not because I'm interested in demonstrating what a swell guy I am. (I have my good moments, and my bad ones, I'm sure.) I offer it because I firmly believe that if human behavior is going to change for the better, in any situation, no matter how small or large, then you praise the good and you let the bad roll off your back without uttering a syllable. Reinforce the positive! Pay no mind to the negative, it'll pass!

To those interested: I'm taking a brief hiatus from writing on here to manage the aforementioned Kickstarter project. We have a ways to go money-wise, but we've managed to get quite a few pledgers who seem to really want a Swoop the Owl. The way I see it, I'm in their debt and on the hook for making it happen, so that's getting as much of my time as I can spare right now.

To all backers: thank you! I hope not to let you down.

The Sand

2011-06-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

There is a story that has come to my attention from several different people. (It takes place in Texas, and I don't know a soul in Texas.) Quick question: what do you do when you're running a movie theater, and ticket sales have been falling?

The answer is likely "better marketing". And how do you do that? By taking a stand. By drawing a line in the sand. And that might involve publicly firing some of your worst customers.

They might take it personally. Let them. It's called "positioning" for a reason, and people have been doing it for decades because it works if you do it right.

Privacy Policy (Offline)

2011-06-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that technology has rapidly outpaced the privacy laws governing it in the past couple of decades.

Privacy policies, on the other hand, are often better spelled out on websites. Sure, they're often way too long for a person to read through, and they often contain unintelligible gobs of legalese, but at least they are available to anyone who cares to read them.

I popped a question yesterday online about those "contest jars" that take business cards by cash registers...if you're tossing away someone else's business card, why not enter them into a contest for a free lunch?

An astute friend pointed out that companies often sponsor these so they can collect people's data for spamming purposes.

I believe him, but the thought didn't occur to me, because this wasn't posted anywhere. There is no "terms of use" for this jar. I'll concede that people are opting in because they're giving up their business card, but they're doing so without the whole story. And an opt-in based on incomplete information isn't consensual, so it's still spam.

I often attend functions for charity that require me to sign in. Along with my name, they also ask for my email address. In these situations, I'm generally more shrewd and ask the person attending the event what my email will be used for. Usually they shrug; "I just work here", in other words.

If there's no good reason for them to have my email, I don't offer it.

It's much harder to spell out in plain text how you're going to use someone's information if you're capturing it offline in the real world. And it's generally impossible to obfuscate your real intentions by burying it in heaps of text. (Offline, people will get suspicious and just leave.) But that doesn't give you the right to offer no information and then use it without consent. Offline privacy law seems to have its hiccups, too.

Empowering Points of Light

2011-06-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Rick shared this page with me today. Play with it a for a little while, it's amazing. I'll be here when you get back (if you can tear yourself away.)

About it, Rick said, "This is inspiring. You create something, so that people can make something beautiful out of it."

Well said. Most people build successes not by creating something awesome, but by creating something that enables other people to be awesome.

Followers != Following

2011-06-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Marketing advice that I got second-hand from the Advanced Search Engine Optimization conference, in a nutshell:

If you want to get a thousand fans on Facebook really quickly and cheaply, start running ads in a foreign country that has an extremely low GDP. The ads cost less per click and people's Facebook pages haven't been saturated there yet.

This isn't bad advice if you want 1,000 Facebook fans, pronto. But it also illustrates the supreme futility of playing the numbers game. Sure, you end up with a bunch of faux fans, but what does that really translate into? (Maybe it looks good on an executive summary for an investor, but that's about it.)

Having followers doesn't mean you have a following. And a following, while it takes longer to build, is infinitely more valuable.

Car Code Readers

2011-06-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

My check engine light came on the other day. This is the first time this has happened since I jumped onto the yuppie bandwagon and purchased an iPhone for myself.

As I opened the trunk to get out my OBDII code reader, I immediately thought to myself: "Why hasn't someone created this idea for iPhones?" The earphone jack on the iPhone can take raw binary data as an input (this is how the Square app works), so why not create the ability for the car to dump its error codes onto the iPhone and have an app tell you what they mean?

Of course, I did some googling, and there are a few people who have done something like this. But my real question when I have an idea that sounds new usually isn't "Why hasn't someone done this?", but instead "Why hasn't the person who is doing this managed to bring it to my attention?"

Opinionated Software

2011-06-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

I went looking for a good scary movie to watch last October on Netflix. You'd think this would be easy, since they have a massive online repository of movies you can rent, and it spans just about everything that's ever been released on DVD. I started with one horror movie I had heard of, then started leaping through the recommended similar movies.

You'd think this would take me down a pretty big rabbit hole. But I ended up seeing the same few dozen movies over and over again. Even if I went back and started with a different movie on the fringes, I would always eventually wind up seeing the same few dozen movies again.

There's probably a good reason for this, and I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that Netflix makes more money on people who just watching streaming movies on Instant Play as opposed to people who get the movies in the mail, which require a physical copy of the DVD that must be purchased, then mailed each time. So, they've probably architected their system to steer people towards the movies they have available to watch instantly.

People regard software as being impersonal and soulless. 99% of the time, if the business people and programming people are communicating effectively, it isn't. There's usually some logic that's intended to push people in one direction or another.

Maker's Accounting

2011-06-06T06:09:00.000-07:00

I spent four years in college learning accounting which, in summary (to spare you the gory details), basically means I spent four years learning "the equation":

Assets = Liabilities + Stockholder's Equity

It sounds fancy, but it isn't. The sum total of a company is what's owned plus what's owed. If you have a company worth $100, but $50 of that is on a credit card, it means half of the company is leveraged.

This makes for a great snapshot of the worth of a company is at any given point in time. When you look at how it performed in a certain period, you turn to the income statement. Sales - Cost = Profit, in a nutshell. That's the income statement.

As far as the accounting equation goes, there is no equivalent expression for the income statement. Personally, I think there should be. One simple reason: in every sale a company makes, there is a liability. There's a debt. Maybe it's one of gratitude, but the customer is behind the sale. It doesn't matter how much work went into the sale...the customer made the decision, and the company has a liability. It has a debt. It has an obligation.

It's when companies forget this simple fact, and start playing tricks with the numbers, that they start getting into big trouble.

It's An Interesting Story...

2011-06-05T07:43:00.000-07:00

I imagine that Lorne Michaels gets a lot of email.

Maybe not him personally, but his office. And I'll bet it comes from group of people who are all claiming to be "the next 'Lonely Island'".

The Lonely Island, for those who don't know, is Andy Sandberg's trio that started making comedy songs out of an apartment and ended up getting featured on Saturday Night Live a few years ago. They're quite famous now.

Naturally, along with any kind of notoriety comes the rush to copy. So I'm guessing there are tons of comedy duos and trios making videos in an effort to get discovered by someone in the media industry. There are a couple of problems with this:

1. The rags-to-riches story of The Lonely Island is one that other people tell about them. To my knowledge, they don't go around telling it about themselves.

2. It was an interesting story when it happened to The Lonely Island because it hadn't happened before.

Three amateurs getting discovered by Lorne Michaels and joining the Saturday Night Live lineup is a pretty good story, but these kinds of things wear on people. If you hear a remarkable story, whether it's group-based discounts (Groupon), online video hosting (YouTube), or social networking (Facebook), the truth is this: once that story has been told, it's taken, so it's no longer interesting when you decide to tell your own it.

This is why imitation rarely works. It's tempting to copy someone else who's made it because, hey, it worked for them. But very few people copy their way into greatness.

You Have An Audience

2011-06-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

There's a group of people out there who are interested in what you have to say.

It's no secret that like-minded people come together and hang out with each other. And these clumps of people, even if they are distributed across multiple cities or even countries, are determined to find each other and connect.

Somewhere out there, there is a group of people who want to hear what you say. There's a clump waiting for your message. It might not be a huge clump. Maybe it's just 10 people in just as many states, but they're anxious to hear from you. And they're so anxious that they might even pay for the privilege.

I write a lot of posts on here that say something to the effect of "the Internet makes everything easy for the rest of us." It takes a lot of forms, but what I basically mean is that the Internet allows anyone to do 3 things:

1. Find out if an audience exists.

2. Determine whether or not this audience can be reached.

3. Figure out how to connect with them.

Nike didn't just start selling running shoes 30 years ago. There was a latent group of running enthusiasts that Nike spoke to, and that brought people out, and brought people together. Even if there never was an annual convention where they all congregated, everyone who bought the shoes became a part of something. Call it self-expression via consumption, if you'd like.

This phenomena works when you're able to reach the audience in a cost-effective way. Granted, most of us don't have Nike's budget and can't spend billions on advertising to the masses. My solution: don't start by saying something that's meant to be heard by the masses. Pick a niche and speak to them. And (thanks to the Internet) you don't need millions in order to say it.

What makes a rock band or musical act work is when the audience for the music comes together. Marilyn Manson didn't invent white goth kids in grade school. He just figured they were out there and started performing, giving them a place to hang out in their city where they might not be judged for their odd attire. (And, yes, he sold a few million albums...but that's the cart after the horse.)

The fact that what you're saying has been said before is a poor excuse. Very little is said, and very few things are produced, that are completely novel and new. Things get recycled, usually inadvertently, as a natural part of the creative process.

Maybe your audience won't like what you say as much as how you say it.

There's something that you want to offer. I can't say what it is, because I might not know you, but you have something to tell people, sell people, or to make people feel. There's something you can make people experience.

If you're not out there, put yourself out there. Make yourself discoverable. Let the audience find you if you can't find them. But I know that they're out there, ready to listen to you, if you reach for them.

Kevorkian's End

2011-06-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

I found out this morning that Jack Kevorkian died last night, and I was more than little sad to hear the news. A small handful of my friends already know this, but when I was living in Royal Oak, MI, after college, Kevorkian moved into the apartment across the hall from me shortly after he got out of jail. He was my neighbor for about a year.

I spoke with him a few times. In person, he was a genuinely nice guy; certainly not the incendiary pundit that he made himself out to be in the limelight. He shared with me his love of Einstein's philosophy, Bach, and of music in general.

He also gave me a piece of advice that I've never forgotten. It's a prototypical maxim from an old man to a young one, but it stuck with me when he said it: "If there's anything you want to do in life, do it now, while you still have the time."

Shortly after he moved in, I found out that he released a jazz album of his own composition shortly before he was incarcerated. I had to pay $30 on Amazon for a copy of the disc, but I found it as enjoyable as any jazz I've heard. Here's one of the tracks...somber, but soothing (and yes, that's him on the flute):

We'll miss you Jack. Thanks for everything you did.

"I Get That Question All The Time"

2011-06-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'll ask someone a question that I think is interesting or insightful, and I get this reply.

I met a UCSB graduate about my age, and I asked him, "How did you ever manage to concentrate, study hard, and graduate from a college with such a gorgeous campus right on the ocean?"

I come from the Midwest, and the college I attended was landlocked and snowy most of the year, so this question seemed like I was stepping outside of my own skin and asking something from his point of view. He started with, "People ask that a lot..."

And in my own mind, I make a mental note: if a particular type of person gets a question all the time, don't ask the next person you encounter matching those criteria that same question. Ask something else.

I try to keep the conversation interesting, not dreadfully predictable.

My First Kickstarter Project

2011-06-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

I read a Stanford study last year that said 75% of iPhone users sleep with their phones. Not just on the nightstand next to the bed, but actually in the bed with them. People said that using their iPhone was the last thing they did before they went to sleep and the first thing they did when they woke up in the morning.

I thought this was surprising (I didn't own an iPhone back then), but it did give me a thought: why not make a stuffed animal that would act as a holder for the phone? For the last few months, I've been working on a side project to make it happen. Today, it launches on Kickstarter. I'd like to introduce you, dear reader, to Swoop the Owl:

We're interested in testing the marketability of the idea. For the last month or so, I've been running around town with the Swoop prototype in a pink shopping bag asking people to give me their opinion of him. (I imagine from their perspective, I must look quite silly.) So far, everyone loves the way he looks, and most people have said they'd certainly consider buying one. Teen and tween girls have been particularly enthusiastic about him.

You can find him on Kickstarter.com here. Any thoughts or feedback on the project are certainly welcome and appreciated here. And, if you know anyone who might be interested, please pass it along.

(P.S. Tara helped me out a great deal with the project, even though the video barely gives her any credit. It's our idea, not mine. I consider her an equal partner in this, since I couldn't have done it without her.)

The Hardest Part

2011-05-31T07:25:00.000-07:00

The hardest part of starting up the first Starbucks wasn't in renting a location in Seattle.

It wasn't buying some coffee machines and installing them in said location.

It wasn't making sure the place was up to code so the health department would give them a pass.

It wasn't making sure the design of the coffee in the bags was appealing enough so that people would buy them.

It wasn't getting the money in line, making sure that there would be enough money to pay the bills in the first few months.

That stuff all takes work, and none of it is easy. But the real difficulty behind starting the original Starbucks was in recognizing the potential of a new idea, and having the guts to test that new idea even in the distinct face of the possibility that it would fail.

People who think all that other stuff is the hard part are the types of people who raced to follow in Starbucks' footsteps after they were successful. And this is the reason that they're forever doomed to operate in Starbucks' shadow.

Our Groceries

2011-05-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

I installed a simple app on my smartphone a few weeks ago, and one that has proven to be immensely helpful: it's called OurGroceries.

And what does it do? It lets you manage shopping lists, which can be shared amongst multiple mobile devices. That means if I think of something I need to buy, I can just grab my phone, type it in, and whoever is doing the shopping this week will end up with it on their own phone as well. Simple, but I've been waiting quite a while for someone to build a workable version of this idea.

The most obvious question: why on earth didn't Ralph's, Wal-Mart, Meijers, or any other grocery retailer make their own? I think there's an unmistakable opportunity here: if you were tracking not only what people bought, but also what they intended to buy, that seems like very valuable information.

For example, if I put Charmin Ultra on my shopping list on June 1st, and on June 3rd, I end up purchasing Cottonelle, wouldn't that information be of pretty good use to the grocery store? Why did I change my purchase decision? Was it because the item was on sale? That would at least let the corporate HQ know which types of products, and which brands, for which I'm either price sensitive or insensitive.

Those loyalty cards from grocery stores must be good for something, though I've yet to see what that is. None of the marketing offers I get seem to be targeted to me based on my past purchases.

Changing of the Receptionist

2011-05-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

The job of a receptionist is never an easy one. At any given time, it seems like there's at least two things you need to be doing: both the work that no one else in the office wants to do, and handling the influx of people both by phone and coming in the door. Not only do they have to handle this, but they have to do it with a smile on their face.

For this, you need two virtues: not only hard work, but patience as well. A very tall order.

It always displeases me when I see a receptionist sitting there taking an earful from a customer. Meanwhile, the doctor, lawyer, or other professional is hiding in their office, avoiding the confrontation and letting the receptionist act as the gatekeeper for this discontent.

I have a lot of delusions, and one of them is that maybe, one day, I'll be a VERY IMPORTANT GUY in charge of some VERY IMPORTANT THING, and I'll have an office, and so much work to do that I'll need a receptionist. When that happens, my goal is simple: have the receptionist do the work that is required of them.

But, as soon as an irate customer shows up, I don't use the receptionist as a shield. That's precisely the point at which I would step in and act as the shield. If a customer has a problem with something I'm doing, and they need someone to listen to, then it's probably my fault, so it should be me.

Or, if it isn't me, or if I'm really too busy to handle these kinds of things, then I'll make sure it's someone else. But not the receptionist; that shouldn't be part of their job.

Anti-Audience

2011-05-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

I like any idea, no matter how crazy, that seems to have an audience. If it speaks to a group of people, whether small or large, having an audience receptive to what you have to say is important if you're interested in having people listen.

What I like even better, though, are ideas that have not only an audience, but an anti-audience as well. The pet rock certainly had its share of detractors after it came out. "You're paying for a rock in a box? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard."

The value arises when members of the audience and the anti-audience find themselves in the same room as each other. This is the stuff that gets conversations started, when people start debating the merits of your idea. And debate is infinitely better than an idea that nobody is discussing.

Flack is flack, period. You just have to be ready to take the bad with the good.

Digital Liner Notes

2011-05-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Song lyrics to your favorite albums are an interesting mess right now.

Digital music makes sense to me. But digital booklets accompanying digital music, much less so. I don't understand them.

If I google the lyrics to any song, they come up right away, but more often than not, it's a site filled with ads and popups that is trying to sell me ringtones. Means to an end, but an unpleasant one.

The liner notes to an LP or CD make sense because they're a physical good and bundling them adds to the experience of an album. They create a connection to the artist. But now, I have the music as MP3s, and if I want to feel connected to the artist, I look them up online.

This still feels like an unsolved problem to me. If you're a musician releasing music online, I say that finding a great solution is an opportunity.

Friends and Family

2011-05-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's my own personal strategy when using social media: I represent myself.

That's it. I'm dumb and probably come off as a goofball, but if you're friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, that's basically what you get: me.

I've come across more than one company that asks its employees to use their own personal social media accounts to promote their product or service. I understand the thinking here...if there are large networks of people you can reach through your employees, why not tap into them?

There are lots of reasons. I carefully guard my social networks. When I have anyone's attention, whether it's in person or online, I make a very concerted effort not to waste or abuse it. We're all short on time, so I try not to say too much. I'm not one of those people that posts 10 links in a row. Information glut isn't something I feel a need to contribute to.

A company that asks me to tell my friends and family about their product or service has a problem, and it's not going to be solved by me telling my friends and family about them. When tapping employee's social networks becomes a core part of the marketing strategy, then it's definitely time to go back to the drawing board.

Naturally, if an employee chooses to share something about you of their own volition, that's great. I'm not opposed to that. But if you have to ask them, then that's a desperate plea.

I have a friend down in the LA area who opened his own custom body shop and graphics auto shop. He created a Facebook page and asked me to "Like" it. I think it's absolutely great that he started a business, and I'm rooting for him. Honestly, I am. I'd refer anyone I knew in Los Angeles to him if they asked me for a body shop recommendation. But most of the friends I have on Facebook are scattered throughout the country (not in LA), and to my knowledge, none of them are that enthusiastic about their cars. Me clicking "Like" on his page isn't going to have the desired effect. (Assuming, of course, that drumming up more business is his goal.)

Marketing is about connecting with people who might be interested in what you're selling. Social media isn't always the answer for everyone.

Well, It's a Funny Story...

2011-05-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

I was walking through an outdoor shopping mall earlier today when I was stopped by a guy with a rubber bracelet. "Are you interested?" he asked.

I looked down at the item in his hand. "What is it?" I asked, since I was curious.

Turns out, the answer to that question took about 5 minutes for him to get out, and it included a demonstration involving my participation in order for me to "get it".

The product itself involved a good deal of pseudo-science ("Now with snake oil!"), and that's a problem in and of itself, but the bigger problem is that I didn't get it by looking at it. The learning curve for the product was a little bit too steep.

For the sales pitch, I'd always favor the simplistic and jejune over the flashy and complicated.

Provisional Patents

2011-05-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I spoke to a patent attorney recently regarding some intellectual property. The meeting itself was somewhat costly, but well worth it. I learned about something very interesting: provisional patent applications.

(Note: I am NOT a lawyer, especially not a patent one, so none of what follows is legal advice. But I found the information, even just at face value and as a mere possibility, to be useful. For these reasons, I'm sharing it here.)

Early on during the meeting, I'm pretty sure the lawyer did some cold reading and made a quick capsule determination about the two of us. In a nutshell, here's what he most likely (and correctly) concluded: "Little to no money." Granted, if that's what he was thinking, he gave absolutely no visible or verbal indication of it. (He was professional about it.)

His advice to us: file a provisional patent application.

Before 1995, if you wanted patent protection, you had to jump through all of the hoops, and as most people are well aware, the patent process is neither simple nor cheap. It's time consuming, and you have to be very methodical. It's a drag to go through the process and spend the money on an idea, especially an idea that might not be a profitable one.

So, about 15 years ago, the US Patent & Trademark Office created the provisional patent. They're relatively easy to prepare (you write one up in plain English, instead of the legalese), you can use photographs of your idea (instead of the patent diagrams, which must be drawn), and it's relatively cheap. ($110 filing fee, at the time I'm writing this.)

If you file a provisional patent, a few things happen:

1. You get to put "Patent Pending" on your stuff. Even though what you've produced isn't actually protected by an actual patent, this might discourage casual thieves.

2. The filing is an official record of when you created your invention. So, if someone else invents your idea next week, your application qualifies as "prior art", which is fancy IP lawyer talk for "they beat you to it".

3. You have a grace period of 12 months to file an actual patent, during which time you can test your idea in the marketplace and see if it's actually worth going to the hassle of a full patent.

Again: NOT legal advice. I've never done this, so I can't offer my own success story as a precedent for the reason why you should consider doing this. If you've got a great idea and have the money, you should hire a lawyer. I think it even pays to hire one to do the provisional patent for you, because then it's less likely you'll screw something up.

But, if you're operating on a shoestring budget, it might be something worth looking into. For general guidance, I found this book to be extremely informative. (It's also an extremely readable look into the way that IP lawyers think about intellectual property.)

The Labor

2011-05-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

"Everyone is already producing anything that anybody could possibly want." This mentality kills the entrepreneur in all of us.

"Everyone already has everything they need, or want and can afford." This mentality kills the salesman in all of us.

"I'm not confident that I'm right, so I have no place nudging people in any particular direction." This kills the leader in all of us.

Out of necessity, we are, at the core of nature, each and every one of these things. And we're each of these mentalities in school because they make it easy to be happy just being "labor".

Back at the Beginning

2011-05-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

"There is no reason for nostalgia. Everything is still happening." -Devin Townsend

I've found myself dwelling on the past quite a bit lately. This means one thing, and one thing only: I don't have enough interesting things to occupy my time.

Disconnected

2011-05-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

I was born in 1982, which means that, depending on who you ask, I'm either a very young member of Generation X or an old member of Generation Y.

People born around this time are two things (according to people who study these sorts of things):

1. Old enough to remember a time before our lives were saturated with the Internet.

2. Young enough to be as comfortable using the Internet as a so-called "digital native".

On a day-to-day basis, I'm pretty wired in, but I can still remember being in high school and spending hours just staring out the window, doing nothing more than letting my mind run wild.

I still make an effort to do this on a regular basis: go stare at the ocean, or take a hike in the mountains. No phone, no computer, no video games, no iPod...just me and my mind.

I don't think technology is evil, and I'm skeptical of every "technology is making us stupid" type of argument, but I do think that the ability to step away from technology and just be (in the zen sense of the word) is still massively beneficial to us.

Demanding Payment

2011-05-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

According to a Wired article this month, Netflix movies streaming across the Internet are now taking up more bandwidth than BitTorrent.

This doesn't surprise me. In the large group of people who downloaded music without paying for it, there were very few people I ever met who said they were downloading music because they didn't want to spend money, or because they hated capitalism. On college campuses, Napster just meant you didn't have to haul your butt to the record store to get music. The fact that it was free, and that all of your friends were doing it too, was really just a bonus.

The biggest mistake the music industry ever made was not seizing this as an opportunity. Netflix is great, largely because it's easy...much easier than buying a DVD and wading through the previews they still stick at the beginning. People will willingly pay for things when convenience or belonging is a factor.

Musicmakers

2011-05-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to the album "Fallen" by Evanescence quite a bit as of late. Honestly, on the whole, the album feels somewhat contrived, but it does have its moments, and it is pretty catchy. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Amy Lee's voice or lyrics, but there are times on the album when everything comes together and just seems to work.

As someone who has tried to record music, I can appreciate music that has decent production, and that's way more than the music. Ten years ago, just recording your music and making it sound good was much harder than it is today. But that doesn't mean that it's actually easy.

For me, good music is about a great aesthetic experience that's much, much greater than the sum of its musical parts. On the aforementioned Evanescence album, there's a track called "Hello". At the very beginning of the track, before the piano comes in, there's a brief haunting sound introduces the track. Or on "My Immortal", right after the first time she sings "all of me", there's a few very chilling seconds where the piano is enveloped in an indescribable ambience.

Like them or not, these are the things that make good music, and they're not the kind of things you can plan for. You can write all the music you want, but the additional elements that really "make" an album are born of the result of trial and error. You take music into the studio, record some stuff, try putting it together different ways, and test, test test. You see what works and what doesn't. When you happen upon something that evokes the mood you were looking for, it was probably an accident.

Music might be technically easy to produce, but it's phenomenally difficult to make interesting. You can't skip the part where you do the sonic experimentation to find what you were looking for...you just have to put in the hours, learning the software and blindly stumbling around.

There's a struggle in every worthwhile endeavor. ProTools and GarageBand make music production seem easy. And they do, because it makes serendipitously stumbling upon a unique sound for your music much easier. But those little things still aren't easy to perfect.

Rosetta

2011-05-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

I once encountered a man who had spent the better part of his life dedicated to translating the Holy Bible into a language that could be understood by a particular region of Africa that spoke a certain dialect.

You can sign up to volunteer for Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic. You read textbooks onto tape, which are freely made available to those with little or no eyesight.

There are lots of ideas in the world already, and if you're a book lover, you might not need to write an altogether new book. You could just take ideas that are already here and make them accessible to others.

May the Winning One Win

2011-05-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

At the turn of the last century, the battle was on to perfect the technology that would power the automobile.

A few different means of powering cars were attempted. Naturally, gas-powered engines were one of them. Amongst them, though, was an electric car and even a car powered by a steam engine. (Early inventors seemed to regard cars as "little trains".)

The electric car didn't take off because, at the time, a battery that could fit into a car couldn't hold a charge to travel great distances. And steam engines were too large and bulky to work in an automobile targeted at the average consumer. By process of elimination, Henry Ford started mass producing cars that ran on gasoline.

The interesting thing about this is that there was no central authority that reached this conclusion. No one sat down around a conference table and made a decision. No one weighed the pros and cons of each particular idea against one another and then used that information to arrive at a logical conclusion. What happened simply happened, as a part of the gradual process of the rising demand for automobiles. And the results of this process have struck around for more than a century.

What happens next in the realm of automobile propulsion will probably be based the same messy, inexact, mysterious process of the market moving slowly over the next ten years.

The Market Is Broken

2011-05-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

Blogger appears to be having problems. The entries for the last few days didn't get published as hoped and a few I had stowed up got deleted.

Problem? Maybe...

If you talk to someone who works in the video game industry, they'll tell you that Angry Birds is not that challenging of a game to make. It has its strengths, like the cutesy graphics and sound effects, and it tells a story, but from a strictly technical perspective, it's not that tricky of a game to create. They just used an out-of-the-box physics engine and game framework and have enjoyed runaway success, while some developers who are busy rolling their own physics libraries have yet to see a single dime of revenue.

I imagine there are chefs running restaurants preparing excellent food who wonder why on earth people settle for Subway and won't spend the extra $8 a person to eat his great food.

An author pours her heart and soul into writing a book that perfectly mirrors the human condition, but nobody buys it because they're busy scooping up the last volume of Harry Potter, which J.K.Rowling didn't seem to put any effort into writing or promoting. How unfair.

To the frustrated professional, the market looks broken, because people are supposed to act a certain way, in a rational fashion. And most of us that produce work that doesn't attain a massive following have brains that trick us into thinking that rational people would buy what we're producing, instead of something else. (The ego says, "I'm the best choice.")

If you want that job, or want to make a video game, or want to write a book, maybe you should accept that the market is broken and work to fill in the cracks. It's a waste of time and effort to try to fix it.

The Non-Obvious

2011-05-15T06:11:00.000-07:00

One of the factors considered in whether or not an invention or an idea is patentable is the concept of non-obviousness. That is, could someone in your profession have conceived of the same idea or been able to solve the problem without a lot of thought?

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not terribly interested in dwelling on legal matters, but I like the implications that the term "non-obvious" belies. I think that good ideas are always out in the open, but no one's found them because no one's gone looking for them.

Some obvious ideas:

A mobile app for passengers for commercial airline flight tracking.

A retail store that sells sports apparel for big-league teams.

A coffee or cupcake shop.

A New Age store that holds Yoga classes in the evenings.

Some (maybe) not-so-obvious ideas (ignoring any implications for patent-ability):

A device that helps senior citizens manage their daily medications.

A [something]-gram that could be sent to men. (Men don't like getting flowers delivered at work. Make it something different.)

A coffee or cupcake shop which, by design, accommodates people with all major allergies or other dietary restrictions.

Software for a golf course that helps manage caddies. Or that matches up a golfer's schedule with that of his/her favorite caddy.

A point-of-sale system for restaurants, which includes portable devices that let each server send orders to the kitchen, then charge a credit card and capture an on-screen signature right at the table.

Digging for Revolution

2011-05-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote I saw painted on a door at a local community college. I've heard it before, and chances are good that you've read it several times before as well. Doesn't matter if you've read it 6,000 times and this is the 6,001st time you've seen it, here it is again:

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution." -Paul Gauguin

Now that's brilliant in its brevity. I don't care whether or not you even consider yourself to be an artist...the work you do, whatever it might be, could benefit greatly from figuring out how Gauguin's words apply to it.

How's My Driving?

2011-05-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

People never respond well to criticism of their actions.

There are some people with the patience of saints who will hear you out if you start telling them what they're doing wrong. They might even listen to you. But in response to nothing but criticism, they'll probably end up not liking you, even secretly.

Why on earth, then, is it standard practice for people to call and complain to a manager when they have a bad experience with an employee? Is this going to improve things?

I have a "bad" customer service experience almost daily. Some interaction with a human being, either by phone or in person. My strategy in these situations is the same 96% of the time: completely ignore them.

You might have a bottle of water with some mud at the bottom. Provided you don't stir up the contents of the bottle, you can drink the water without getting any dirt in your mouth.

The posture in these situations should not be to find the bad and try to stamp it out by mentioning it. When we experience good customer service, we take it for granted and accept it as expected, but I think when someone exceeds or even meets our expectations with a kind attitude, that's when we ought to be demanding to talk to the manager.

"This employee was extremely helpful and brightened my day. Thanks."

(It just might have the power to create good vibes, on an otherwise unlucky Friday the 13th.)

Dispensable Income

2011-05-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

After paying for taxes, rent, food, and other necessities of life, the money you have left to spend is often referred to as "disposable income".

The insinuation of this widely pervasive phrase is simple: that you should dispose of it. This smacks of an inclination to be a consumer: go down to the Sharper Image and buy the vibrating pad for a chair that massages your butt.

I have no problem with electric butt massagers, but it seems like we could change the phrase to set people's ambitions a little higher. "Savable income", perhaps? Or maybe "dispensable income", implying that it could be allocated to parts of society where it's sorely needed.

Words are small, but they can have a massive impact.

Company Mission Statement: The Serenity Prayer

2011-05-11T23:45:00.000-07:00

When I first got to college, Napster was all the rage. It was around that time that Lars Ulrich came out and started publicly deriding the company for letting people download their music, or the music of any other artist, without their consent and without paying for it. At the time, I heard the question a lot: "Is it wrong to download music?" I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the wrong question. It was, at best, a distraction.

Lars and the rest of his Metallica buddies didn't read their history books. When the radio first became widespread in the 1920's and 30's, the music industries faced a similar panic. Suddenly, people had a device in their homes that would allow them to get music streamed to them invisibly through the air. Predictably, the companies producing hard copies of music were worried this would dampen sales. They started putting a sticker on their music: "NOT FOR RADIO BROADCAST". They fought the legality of broadcasting their music in court. Legally, they lost the battle in a Supreme Court ruling.

What they didn't realize until a little later was that the radio, as a platform, was actually the best promotion tool to come along in years. It was the best possible way to get new music in front of an audience, increasing exposure and potentially increase the sale of hard copies of music.

First takeaway: popular technology is riddled with inevitability. After the Napster floodgates were opened, it was naive to think they could be litigated shut again.

The world is much different now than when the radio first came onto the scene, and things are changing much quicker than they were back then. My brother plays bass in a band, and given the current state of the music industry, it's unlikely that he's going to be "discovered" by a music industry executive anytime soon. Is this a tragedy? Hardly. He's a smart kid, and he (and others like him) are going to figure out how to leverage the world as it is to pave success for themselves.

Borders is slowly bleeding to death in public as e-readers seem to be taking over the market. Does this mean that bibliophiles (like moi) aren't going to a physical location to spend money on books? The independent bookstores that have been cowering in the shadows for the last 10 or 20 years now have to plot their next move.

Watching movies is a good deal more comfortable at home, and with the technology now, the quality is comprable. Just because you have a large screen, projector, and a movie that I won't be able to buy on DVD for another few months is no reason for me to pay 10 dollars. (But: I do have 10 dollars to spend on something more compelling.)

The radio is a reality. Fight it at your peril.

Shuffle

2011-05-11T06:44:00.000-07:00

True randomness doesn't always feel random. People swear up and down that their iPods, when placed on shuffle, favor certain songs over others.

This isn't device error, but user error. The iPod doesn't keep track of the songs it played before. After each song ends, it just scans the list and picks another track at random. Since it's ignorant of which song played five songs ago, that song is fair game...as are any other songs off of the same album or from the same artist. When that happens, the user detects a "pattern" that isn't quite there.

It's definitely happened to me. I only have a single song by the 1970's band Slade on my iPod, and yet it seems to play with a disproportionately high frequency when I've got my iPod in shuffle mode. I know it's just coincidence, but the part of my brain that's inclined to avoid black cats and walking under ladders suspects otherwise.

I'm really surprised that Apple hasn't made shuffle mode something that isn't truly random. Why not keep track of the shuffle play history and space out the tracks by artist?

The biggest challenge of technology, any technology, is to match its performance with the (reasonable) expectations of the user.

Half and Half

2011-05-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

I learned the following "fact" several times while I was in school: in the first year of your life, right after you're born, you are capable of learning a certain amount of information. With learning to walk and motor functions, there is a lot to take in.

In the second year of your life, you can only learn half that much. And the year after that, in your third year, half as much as the second year. So, the amount your brain is capable of learning cuts in half each year, becoming an asymptote as you hit middle age.

I don't believe this for one second, and I really don't care how much scientific evidence there is backing it up, I don't buy it.

For one thing, I don't believe in telling people they have limitations. The more you tell someone they're incapable of doing something, the more likely they are to believe you and accept that they are, in fact, incapable. I think that spreading the notion that once you reach a certain age that you're stuck where you are is irresponsible. (I know that once someone hits the age of 85, they may very well be stuck where they are, but I'm not talking about people that old.)

It is not good practice to build resignation into middle age. This does more harm than good. Better to tell people they have a fighting chance if they try than to discourage them from trying at all.

You'll Be Fired in One Year

2011-05-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

This is, of course, not the kind of lead time that we get when we lose our jobs. Whether you're being let go because management thinks you're longer a good fit for the position, or if you're laid off because of lack of work, or if you're terminated just because you're an incompetent boob, it doesn't matter. We don't get a lot of time.

It happens, suddenly. And only when it happens do we start to think about our next job. We start to panic, and realize that getting the next job is going to take a lot of work. We weren't ready, because it was unexpected.

The time to panic about your next job is not when you suddenly lose your job six months from now. (And it could happen to almost any one of us, in these times.) The time to panic about it is right now, before you need to panic.

Far be it from me to be dolling out life advice to anyone who might be reading this, but I've always been wary of comfort. I get uncomfortable with being comfortable. Life isn't supposed to be easy. A lot (not all) of the stories I hear about people caught off guard happened because they let their guard down in the first place.

I think if you manage to go an entire month at a job without feeling any pangs of stress, you should let it worry you.

Of Like Minds

2011-05-08T06:42:00.000-07:00

Mirror neurons are serious business.

At least, that's the way you should be looking at it. Hanging out with boring, dull, predictable people who are unable to shut up for more than 10 seconds might be annoying, and it isn't likely to cause you to instantly act like them, but...

...but over time, though, you do absorb the qualities of the company that you keep.

This is an immensely important piece of information, because we all care a great deal about how we come off to others. Since this is weighted so heavily on the people we associate with, this small tidbit of social psychology should guide every major life decision we make. (Career, personal network, friends, mate.)

It probably means that first impression, that "vibe" we get from people before we let our heads get in the way, is something that we should be paying attention to. More importantly, probably wouldn't hurt to work religiously on the first impression you give off.

20% Time

2011-05-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

There's a policy at Google that insists that their engineers spend one day per week, on company time, working on a personal project. If you look at this from the perspective of a bean counter, that means 20% of their engineering budget is allocated to letting their engineers hack on technology, whether or not Google stands to benefit from it directly.

The reason they do this, as any person who appreciates the creative process already knows, is that they're chasing serendipity. Creativity is non-linear. Getting good ideas from your employees is more likely to happen if you disband some of the structure of your organization instead of re-structuring it.

So far, it's worked pretty well. Google News and Gmail were both started as small projects conceived of and developed during 20% time. Both of them have worked out well for Google.

A lot of companies are inclined to scoff at this. "Why should we pay to give people time and space to learn new things or improve themselves?" They regard this sort of thing as something that should be done off the clock, but the employees on their own personal time. Especially given the very real fear that the employee will eventually leave and go work for someone else?

To that question, I'd pose another: is it worse to incur the expense of letting someone grow and then losing them as an employee, or to avoid the expense of self-improvement altogether and keep them around?

Kickstarting X-mas

2011-05-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend told me about an excellent idea she had. Actually, there are two, but they're to be taken together:

1. Start your Christmas shopping now (before the rush.)

2. Do your shopping on Kickstarter.com

I think this is a great idea. I've been telling everyone I meet about Kickstarter, and that everyone should be planning something to get crowdfunded using the site.

But using it for shopping, especially for gifts, makes a lot of sense, simply because it brings together so many wacky ideas by creative people. If you're looking for something unique and interesting for your aunt, that's unlikely to be mass-produced and sold at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for your aunt, you can probably find something both quirky and up her alley on Kickstarter.

They make such interesting gifts because you're not just buying a thing...you're also buying the story that goes with it.

Acquire a Skill

2011-05-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

Here's the one-line summary of the directive in today's post: acquire a useless skill.

Daymond John, the founder of the FUBU clothing line, was able to successfully launch his own line of clothes (and become a millionaire) because he knew how to sew.

I'm willing to put good money on the fact that while he was growing up, there was very little reason for him to learn to sew. It was just something his mother taught him how to do. He learned it, even though there was likely no good reason for him to learn how to do it at the time. As a matter of fact, for most males growing up in this country, there are lots of decidedly "good" reasons not to learn to sew. (To avoid being made fun of, etc.)

And yet, he did it anyway, and it worked out very well for him. Lesson learned: the skills you have in your arsenal matter a great deal, and to any budding entrepreneur, no skill is 100% useless. It's applicability might be not be immediately apparent to you, but the further away any skill's domain lies from your own, the closer you should look at it.

Limps and Bounds

2011-05-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

In the early nineteenth century, a British inventor by the name of Charles Babbage designed a massive fifteen-ton device which he called a Difference Engine. Comprised of 25,000 mechanical parts, it was designed to solve calculus equations.

He didn't end up finishing it, but what Babbage envisioned was basically a very large version of the modern computer. And he did it almost a century before computers started being produced. I think this is crazy: in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, he tried to build a computer, in much the same way that you might have gone about constructing a steam engine, by assembling a lot of large mechanical parts.

He didn't succeed not because he had a bad idea, but because the world wasn't quite ready for it. He aimed to jump too far ahead of the rest of the world, and the limits weren't with what he was able to conceive of, but what the technology in the world at the time would permit him to do. If he had been around 50 years later, he might have been able to make a dent. (Makes you wonder what some people are creating today that are good ideas, but we're not ready for them.)

One friend told me yesterday about a tablet touch-screen device that Apple created back in the early 1990s. It completely flopped in the marketplace, probably because people were still getting acquainted with personal computers and the Internet.

For many years, people were slow to adopt the use of MP3 players. Digital music made a ton of sense, but there just wasn't a singular compelling reason to get rid of your Discman until Apple succeeded in marketing the iPod. This made people comfortable with the notion of carrying around a squarish device containing digital music, which likely made the world more ready to accept the iPhone when it emerged years later. And the iPad likely owes much of its success to the presence of the iPhone.

It's a common myth that innovation happens in leaps and bounds, in large wild steps that nobody sees coming until they actually happen. There are probably exceptions, but most innovations aren't a giant leap from the present. They happen because they've built slowly, bit by bit, on the things that came before.

Order of Operations

2011-05-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to talk to people about what non-profits or causes they support, and the reasons why. Some people feel that efforts should be directed at reducing human suffering, by combating hunger or poverty. Others believe that we should combat human suffering by finding cures for diseases, or supplying people with the means to prevent disease. (Think mosquito nets.) And many others feel that the environment should come first, because that affects everyone on the planet...it won't do any good to feed hungry people if global warming is going to fry us all, so to speak.

The kinds of things people choose to support is telling about their priorities. We all know that we live in a world where aid to the needy is scarce. You only have so many dollars to give in a year. If you give a dollar to support clean water initiatives in the third world, that's one less dollar that can go to cancer research. We weigh the trade-offs, and make our decision based on what we think is most important.

The reasons vary, and they're usually based on personal experience. Regardless of the reasons, there's an awful lot of generosity in this world, especially amongst people who aren't even wealthy.

The Social Moviegoer

2011-05-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

I was working in the office late one night a couple of weeks ago when I got the urge to watch a scene from one of my favorite movies. Since I didn't have the DVD handy, I found the entire movie was posted in 10-minute segments on YouTube.

And so I watched the whole thing on there. It wasn't the most convenient thing in the world, to be clicking a new video every ten minutes, but I found that it was interesting to read the comments for each section of the video. While I was watching something I had seen dozens of times before, I was reading what other people were saying about particular scenes.

This experience isn't really available anywhere that I know of. I got lucky, in that someone happened to have pirated the entirety of the movie I wanted to watch and stuck it online. And on YouTube, a lot of the comments were posts by anonymous trolls (a redundant phrase) who were just trying to start arguments about unrelated matters.

But this doesn't exist on Netflix. There are reviews, but not inline comments from other people like me that are available to me as I'm watching the movie. For those who remember the show "Pop-up Video" on VH1, being able to see little comments while I'm watching the movie sounds like it might be an interesting experience. (As long as it's an option I can turn on and off.)

This isn't like watching a DVD at home. It's not really like anything I can think of, but I think it would be a good social experience for even the casual moviegoer.

Another idea: let people choose their favorite scenes from the movies they like and share them with others. Other people can "up vote" these selections, much like on social bookmarking sites like reddit.com or digg.com. The items with the most recent votes are displayed in an ever-shifting "Top 20" list that everyone can click to watch the chosen scenes.

Maybe video is still relatively young on the Internet. I'll bet we see these things crop up somewhere in the next five years.

"It's Not Worth It"

2011-05-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

This is the platitude that's best known for breaking up bar fights.

The other day I was walking down the street and witnessed a car approach an intersection to turn right a little too hastily. In the process, they nearly hit a pedestrian crossing the street. Fortunately, they managed to stop in time without anyone getting hurt.

Five years ago, I think this would have made me angry. It's a situation that I wasn't involved with, nothing bad happened (although it could have). And even if something bad had happened, my getting angry wouldn't have helped the situation any. If I chose to intervene, it likely wouldn't affect the driver's future behavior and it certainly wouldn't get the paramedics on their way to help.

This time, I didn't get angry. Not worth it.

This phrase is a question that should become a personal mantra: "Is it worth it?" We should get comfortable asking it, and asking it often, before we do anything.

You've only got so many hours in the day and so many days in each week. How many do you want to spend watching television? I don't mean to pick on television, but: after how many hours does television stop being "worth it"?

What is your time worth to you?

Dale and Me

2011-04-30T06:24:00.000-07:00

One of the best books I've ever read: Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People.

To anyone reading this, the reputation of the book is surely preceding my mention of it here. So I'll keep this very, very simple: required reading in all public schools in the country.

I read lots of books in English classes as a young whippersnapper, and not a single one of them make a dent in my thickish skull half as much as this one did. To this day what I read in it still drives what I do from day to day. I can't say that much for F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Sorry, Scottie.)

I read it when I was 20. This was lucky. I was young enough that the words in the book were assimilated into my everyday mode of thinking. But younger still would have been better. I say make all 9th graders, all freshman in high school, read it. The whole thing. You have to demonstrate that you read it and learned from it, either through a test, an essay, a series of Twitter posts, or maybe having to go down the the bus stations and convinced five complete strangers to purchase something from you. You don't get to go on to 10th grade until you've done it, no exceptions.

If you're a little bit older and you've never read it, you're behind. Go find a copy and read it, not once, but once every six months until it starts to stick.

There is an entire education in this book, and it's one that a lot of people I meet have never learned...even if they happened to have read the book.

A popular criticism of the book, in so many words: "It teaches you to be a phony." To these piping Holden Caulfields, I say, the solution to this problem is simple: after you read the book, don't go out into the world and be a phony.

You'll waste a lot of effort and get frustrated quickly if you spend your time smashing your head against human nature (or rather, the nature of people). Much better to learn to accommodate its idiosyncrasies. Dale will happily tell you how.

Netflix Personas

2011-04-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I share a Netflix account. By mail, this probably happens a great deal: a couple or a household of people share one account, all getting movies sent to them.

Netflix held a contest that awarded $1 million to any person or team that could improve the quality of their recommendation algorithm by 10%. That is, given any particular individual's viewing history and the viewing history of every other person as inputs, can you tailor the recommendations to this particular individual in way that increases their delight?

There are some "simple" ways of doing this. Take, for example, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (nerd alert!), which plots data on an Cartesian graph and gets the distance between the preferences of two users. Compare every user in the system to every other one and you can match the closer viewers together.

The biggest problem lies in the second input: everyone else's viewing history. Because, for a family of four sharing a Netflix queue, the viewing history isn't a single point on the chart, but the murky haze between several scattered ones. I'm no math guru, but this is bound to screw up the margin of error when making comparisons between families, couples, and individuals.

Someone won this contest. And my guess is that the winning algorithm took this into account in some fashion. Maybe it made guesses about how many individuals were using the account based on how scattered the viewing history was for each account.

But about a year ago, we hooked up Netflix to our Wii and started watching a lot of stuff on Instant Play. The Netflix delivery has become digital. More importantly, the Instant Queue that my girlfriend and I share has become cluttered with each other's items. Let's ignore for the moment that the Queue itself quickly grows very large. I get recommendations for the television show "Table for 12" and she has to see the recommendations that result from my watching "South Park".

Even between the two of us, the recommendations we're getting are cross-contaminated. And I guarantee that even though the demographics between the audience for "Table for 12" and "South Park" barely overlap that it's affecting the recommendations for all of the people who watch either show.

Simple fix: take a cue from the Wii console itself, in which each user can create a "Mii" (this of it as a cheesy avatar) that looks just like a cartoon version of themselves.

Netflix could do this. When you first start up the app, you can go to your own personal Instant Queue to watch stuff and to get recommendations. You can put your name in, and there's an omnipresent "switch users" option at the bottom right of the screen. If I log in and it's under "Tara", could just switch to "Jim" and be taken right to my own personal Instant Queue.

I haven't done any exhaustive research on this, so it's pretty likely someone at Netflix has thought of this, and they're probably building it. This small addition wouldn't involve any scary mathematics. If not, I'm willing to bet that this simple addition to their app would probably boost the quality of their ratings by at least 10%. Wouldn't it?

If nothing else, it would make their engineers' job easier, as well as make the experience of using their service better for me. I think it's a win-win.

Encouraging Words

2011-04-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

People don't set out to do things that are hard.

Usually they don't. It's not normal behavior. People do things that are easy, and if they set out to do something difficult, they take it in small, manageable chunks, in an effort to make it easier.

This is why I have trouble when people come to me with great ideas. The better the idea, the harder it's apt to be. I tend to err on the side of telling people to "go for it" even if it seems that they have a massive struggle ahead of them. Sometimes I feel as though my encouragement is "puffing", or at best it's a lie of omission, but we only start things when we've tricked our brains into thinking that it will be an easy task.

I really think that good ideas need encouragement, and not a reality check. Let reality check itself.

2011-04-27T06:24:00.000-07:00

Late at night, a police officer pulls over a car for going a little bit too fast. It's a regular traffic stop, and the officer doesn't work in particularly dangerous neighborhood. So, as far as the officer on duty is concerned, it's a pretty routine thing that he's been doing for well over ten years.

And yet, he approaches the car with caution. As the driver rolls down his window, the officer is using all of his senses to look for suspicious signs of a threat. He looks for weapons. He watches every move the driver makes as they reach for the glove box for their registration. They're prepared, at the drop of hat, to pull their holstered weapon in self-defense.

The problem with being a police officer, and with several other professions, is that you have to assume the worst of people. 99% of the time (hopefully), you don't get it, but you have to go into every situation with your guard up and the assumption that something bad might happen.

This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, because it makes a great defense mechanism. But assumptions drive expectations, and when you learn to expect something, you start to see it everywhere, regardless of whether or not it's actually there. The people around you, your friends and family, don't get any worse, but you start to see the worst parts of them amplified, at least in your own mind.

Expectations are immensely powerful because they influence perception, which is (our) reality. But if you, like me, have a job that allows (or even requires) you to expect the best of people, you can add that to your list of things to be grateful for, because great expectations are a powerful force for making the world seem better.

The Reputation

2011-04-26T06:29:00.000-07:00

There's one aspect of the art community that's sorely lacking from other industries, and it's the reputation of the master.

Was walking down the street with a friend of mine the other day, and he said, "Over here, behind this building, there's a painting on the wall. I'm pretty sure it's a Banksy."

You hear this in art museums all the time. People refer to the work of an artist as a singular piece of them. ("A Picasso." "A Rembrandt.") It's the mark of an accomplished artist with a distinctive style that's instantly recognizable.

You don't hear people say that sort of thing about video games. Or craft jewelry being sold on Etsy. Or children's toys. Consumer goods are typically branded by a company name instead of the name of the individual.

Since we live in an era when anyone can own the means of production (all you need is a laptop), it makes a lot of sense to strive to make your own work referred to as "a [your name]".

The Simple Rule of Delegation

2011-04-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

It's wrong to assume that business management principles can be applied to the problems of public education.

First of all, a lot of business management philosophy is flawed; it doesn't work out in the business world. A lot of common sense in the business world that people take for granted is broken, but they don't know it because, hey, they're taking it for granted. And the reason why you'd take broken rules from one domain to try and fix another is idiotic.

Here's one management principle I strongly agree with: don't delegate something to me if you don't trust me to do a good job of it. If you don't like what I produce or what I have to say, please do it yourself. I'm interested in continually learning to improve myself, so I will pay attention to my own mistakes, but I won't take exact directives.

By the same token, if you know exactly how you want your kids to be taught, then the solution is simple: homeschool them. If you choose not to do this, and instead send them off to public school, don't be overly critical of any of your child's teacher's methods.

Go to parent-teacher night, keep your mouth shut, and listen. Offer questions or suggestions where you feel it's necessary, but respect the boundaries of the parent-teacher relationship.

If you're trusting your kids to the teachers of the public education system, let them do their jobs. If you're going to delegate, then you don't get to issue orders.

It's All Been Done Before

2011-04-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

Read a book about social media marketing and you'll probably get a lot of the same old ideas. Here's a perfect example: if you have a hair salon, take "before" and "after" shots of your customers when they come in, friend them on Facebook, and then tag them in the photos. The idea is simple: you build a photo album of customers, and each time you tag one of them, each of their friends get exposed to your business when the photos appear in their news feed.

It's not a bad idea, but the effectiveness of this kind of strategy wears over time. I imagine that the first humorous beer commercial ever to air on television had quite an effect on its viewers, but when the next beer company that decided to make one too, it didn't work as well. With each copycat, the effectiveness of any particular strategy degrades.

Somewhere, hundreds of advertisers are trying to replicate the success of Old Spice's The Man Your Many Could Smell Like. The reason it worked was because it was new and outrageous. That means when you try to copy it, it's not outrageous and it doesn't work.

There is no formula for getting people's attention; not like there is a formula for computing the Price-Earnings Ratio. It makes sense that you can go to school and get an accounting degree. But marketing? The reason that it's in the business college in most universities and not a liberal arts degree is something I'll never understand.

A good reason to mistrust anyone who claims to be a "social media expert". Even those who come close to expert level are still working it out.

Something To Worry About

2011-04-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take too long to recognize that people respond to things that elicit fear.

We're barraged with gobs of information, day in and day out, and we can't possibly acknowledge all of it. So we're selective about the things to which we grant our attention. And the things that are victorious are those things that make us uneasy or afraid.

And so it is that everything becomes a problem. And not just a problem, but an urgent one, at that. If your job is to raise awareness of animal cruelty/homelessness/the environment/politics/etc, then your job is to paint that thing as an urgent problem that people need to worry about.

My strategy for the last few years has been to ignore the people who are trying to get me to worry. I don't think the world is perfect...not by a long shot. I think there are lots of problems that could benefit from our attention, if we paid more attention to them.

Here's the big problem: problems are not solved by our attention alone.

It's only when that attention translates to someone else, like a monetary donation or personal action, that a problem might be solved.

And so I ignore people who are trying to give me something else to worry about, because I don't want to give them the satisfaction. I don't want to let them think they're correct in trying to elicit fear from people. Mongering fear is at best a short-term strategy, and there's not guarantee that this helps solve problems over the long haul.

Instead, what I choose to respond favorably to are the people who are taking personal action. If you're doing something, and you're not trying to rope me in by trying to scare me, then I'll stop and watch. These are the people who get (and I think deserve) my attention.

Actions might speak louder than words, but the people listening are more likely to respond to words than actions, simply because it's easier.

The Universe Is Indifferent; the Internet Is Not

2011-04-22T06:13:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, Google fundamentally changed something about their search results: the ones you see are based on who you are.

If you have a Google account under which you do lots of browsing, try opening another browser or go to another computer where you're not logged in. Try doing a few Google searches when you're logged in as yourself, then as an anonymous user not logged in.

It make take some trial and error, but eventually, you should see some disparities in the results. Google is tailoring the results they're giving you based on your own tastes, preferences, and what you clicked on in the past.

I'm certainly not going to dispute the convenience of this, and as far as Google is concerned, it makes a lot of sense. Their mission has always been to provide people with quality results, so giving each person their own custom results for any given search makes logical sense. (Also, it would be immensely more difficult for Bing to scrape these results and offer them up to their own users.)

In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing, but the Internet itself is increasingly driven by commercialization. In the advertising world, marketers studying people's behavior and trying to figure out how to get people to buy things is nothing new, but this is probably the first time that technology has the potential to put each individual inside of a bubble that has the potential to be divorced from reality.

How do you feel about global warming? Are you politically conservative or liberal? There's a good chance the Internet knows. And there's a good chance it will eventually be willing to serve up results and content that reinforce your own beliefs, instead of showing you everything. The incentive to do this is clear: feeling as though you're right feels good, and people who feel good (especially about themselves) are more likely to buy things.

Granted, this is nothing new. One of the key features of the Internet is that you can easily go looking for whatever information your heart desires. People creating their own bubbles is a function of their drive to reinforce what they know, not the quality of the information available to them.

But this is probably the first time that reinforcement will be technologically possible by means of push instead of pull. When you go searching online and off, you are pulling information towards you, and you're well within your rights to decide what kind of information that should be. But when the medium you're using to poll for information develops a brain (e.g. Google's neural networks) and starts pushing the kind of information you want towards you, a kind of feedback loop is created that strengthens the effect of the reinforcement.

This wouldn't be a big deal, except for the perception of objectivity that people have about Internet search results. The change in Google's algorithm to tailor search results to each individual user happened without most people knowing it, and this part of their search is being updated and refined all the time. It's shifting under everyone's feet, largely without them knowing, and this is where the crux of the issue lies.

What happens when the Internet becomes our own personal "yes man"?

Overachievers and 4.0s

2011-04-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

The two seem like they might be mutually exclusive, don't they?

Managing to get through four years of high school or college with a flawless GPA of 4.0 is an accomplishment. There's no doubt in my mind about that. Someone who works that hard to pull that off is definitely an achiever.

But an overachiever? I'm not convinced.

At the heart of the GPA (or SAT/ACT scores, for that matter) is the term standardization. I don't think there's anything wrong with standardized tests, but the education of the individual suffers when standardized tests become the focus of the educational process instead of merely a benchmark. And even in the best case scenario, when they are used only as benchmarks, there's a limit to what they can measure. They are quantities, not qualities...the only quality of an individual that good test scores offer is that they've figured out how to play the game.

Is that the person you want to hire? The individual who will never initiate or innovate, but follow orders? The person who will figure out what you want to hear and then tell it to you? The person who figures out how the system works and then games it, instead of trying to re-invent the system or re-write the rules? If the answer is yes, what kind of company are you running?

I don't cling to personal vendettas, but in my time at college, there were three separate classes where I would, on occasion, challenge the professor and what they were telling us. They hated me for it. And I'm pretty sure that the grades I got in those classes reflected the fact that I was being a big pain in the butt. The people who got 4.0s in the class were jotting down notes and spewing back the same information at the professor via tests and essays.

Yes, I'm probably a little more difficult to manage. (But to my credit, I don't engage in workplace gossip.)

I'm not claiming I'm an overachiever, because I'm my own worst flatterer. What I think is that overachieving is a process, not an event, and an overachiever is someone who lives that process. You strive not to follow in the footsteps of those who came before you, not to follow the map they hand you when you enroll in college classes, but to create your own map that will lead you someplace new.

If you're a student, shoot for the 4.0, by all means, because it can't possibly hurt you in the long run. There will never be a shortage of employers anxious to swoop in and give you a salary to do exactly what they tell you. But if you're sifting through a stack of resumes as a hiring manager, don't look at the 4.0s...look at those who fell short, and try to determine why they fell short. There's might be an interesting story to be heard.

For the Worse

2011-04-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

I've written several times before, and I still believe very firmly, that everyone ought to have a blog. (I'm not flexible on this.)

The reason is meta-cognition. Yes, I'm aware that most blogs are and will continue to be exercises in self-indulgence on the part of the person writing them. That doesn't matter; the value doesn't lie in the content, or in the size of the audience, but in the act of writing.

When you commit it to paper, it's not what you think, it's what you can defend. It's what you can explain. And even if you do nothing else than put your own thoughts into works, the very act of writing about your own thoughts makes you more aware of them and forces you to articulate them.

I'm not saying anything new here. Most of the dreaded blogs about blogging on the Internet discuss these points at length. But I think a case (and a reasonable one, at that) can be made against this line of thinking.

I know lots of people who won't blog because they're sternly against putting their own ideas out there for people to criticize. They're firmly situated in their convictions and have absolutely no interest in debating them with a bunch of strangers online.

If you believe in something, then dammit, you should believe in it, and push forward as hard as you can. There's always the risk that you'll end up crawling so far up your own butt that you lose perspective on things. But if taking your ideas online, for public scrutiny, is going to instill in you so much self-doubt that you lose sight of your own vision, then there are probably very compelling reasons not to let your opinions out into the open.

I work very hard, each and every day, to not be head-over-heels for my own ideas. Me, I think it's healthy to force yourself (and allow others) to question what you think you know, no matter how you go about trying to do it. But perhaps I lack conviction. And maybe that's a fault of mine that's largely responsible for those bouts of time in my life when I feel as though I've lost my way.

DODOcase

2011-04-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

I don't think the world needs any more iPad or iPhone cases. At least, not without a little bit of innovation.

It's a mistake to think that Wal-Mart or McDonald's are businesses that exist in the middle of the bell curve. As far as audiences go, they are somewhere in the middle, but as far as strategy goes, they are on the fringes, and they're key selling point: cheap.

Cheap doesn't mean mass, cheap doesn't mean a good idea, and cheap doesn't even mean profitable. (Would you rather have a business with $200,000 in sales and $50,000 profit or $500,000 in sales and $10,000 in profit?) Cheap is one way of standing out, but certainly not in a market that's saturated.

One of my favorite success stories is DODOcase. Yes, they make a product that you can get anywhere else, for cheaper and faster. If you order a DODOcase, you don't get it in a few days. You pay more for it, and you have to wait a few weeks before they ship it.

So why do it?

Because of the story. Because the cases themselves are made by artisans here in the United States, in San Francisco. When you order one, they haven't started making it yet, and after you do place an order, they get to work making one for you. You can see videos on their site that feature their workshop, which looks like a far cry from the impressions people have in the backs of their minds of factories in China.

Works for iPad cases, but is that only because Apple is a superbrand? I don't think so. I think it could work for almost any product or industry. What about yours?

The Answer You're Looking For...

2011-04-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

...probably isn't where you've been looking for it.

The best "aha!" moments of my life have come from answers to questions that I didn't ask. The come from the fringes, from a collision of ideas from two different domains that I never would have put together using logic or reason.

A lot of joy and insight has struck me while I've been parked in front of computer because, hey, that's where I spend most of my time and that's the activity that brings me the most joy. But that modus operandi doesn't work 100% of the time, even though my experience has positively reinforced me to keep doing it. If I find myself feeling uninspired browsing the web or writing code, I've found the best thing I can do is step away and start doing more of something else for a while.

Would it kill you try something else?

Free Coffee

2011-04-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Trader Joe's closest to my house offers something very small that makes a big impact: free coffee. If you go in there to shop on any given weekend day (it might be any day, for all I know), there's a caraffe of coffee brewing at the back, and everyone is free to help themselves to a small cup that they can nurse as they wander around the store.

There was a Superbowl commercial about 14 years ago that I really liked. A man is being dragged around a department store by his wife when he's suddenly yanked into a rack of blouses. Inside, three men are crouched around a television watching football with a cooler of beer. It's a place to kill time while the wife shops.

The coffee reminds me of this. I don't mind going grocery shopping, but it's nice to be able to wander away from my girlfriend, grab a cup, and wander through the aisles with it. It's so nice that it begs that obvious question: why don't other grocery stores do this too?

Entering

2011-04-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

There's one reason that I know my car, apartment, and underworldly possessions are most like safe from theft: they're all very small targets.

My car doesn't have a high bluebook value, so it's unlikely anyone will risk driving off with it in the middle of the night. That's protecting it far more than the car alarm is. And I know that my deadbolt is pretty much worthless. A dedicated cat burglar could bypass it without breaking a sweat. But I know that what I keep in my apartment is not worth very much.

Security is all about the incentives involved. Provided the security measure adds enough inconvenience or risk to any would-be attacker, as long as it's greater than the potential payoff, it works.

I've known people who don't lock their front doors when they leave their homes. You could call them foolish, but they really just don't think that having to carry around a house key is worth the amount of protection they're getting. They figure if someone wants to get into their home and take some things, then that person will find a way to do it, one way or another. If they don't lock their door, at least they won't have the expense of replacing a broken door or window on top of whatever else was taken.

It's not just front doors. Do you secure your home wireless network, for example?

Overall, I believe that most people are good, honest, and under normal circumstances, don't pose a threat to me or my own personal security.

(P.S. Along these lines, any avid users of FourSquare or Twitter should have a look at this.)

Mine is Yours

2011-04-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a Canadian business in Toronto that rents bicycles via automated rental stations posted throughout the city:

Vélib'

This would be 20 times more difficult to replicate in the United States than simply publishing another diet book, but the idea is way more than 20 times better than the latter.

Not Showing Up

2011-04-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

There's an old expression that 90% of life is "showing up".

Not that all you have to do is wake up, drag yourself to work, and sit there the rest of the day. That's not 90% of the way there. But once you've woken up, prepared for the day, dealt with the morning traffic, and situated yourself at work, the rest of the day kind of falls into place.

It's acknowledging that you've heard what someone else has been saying to you the whole time. That's 90%. Your response is not as critical.

It's getting your workout clothes on the in morning and starting to jog. Once you've got the momentum, the workout goes fine.

Just as critical, I think, is to figure out where you should NOT show up. Showing up isn't as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, it's a downright drain on your time and energy. Best to figure out what isn't worth the effort, and then stop showing up.

One Shoe Minimum

2011-04-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

A friend tells me about an Australian shoe retailer that instituted a new policy in their store: if you try on shoes in the store, but leave without buying anything, they charge you a fee of $50.

That's one way to do it. I'm never adverse to the idea of a business firing a portion of their customers, particularly the 20% of them that are probably taking up 80% of the businesses time or money because they're very high maintenance.

It will have an effect...but probably not the desired one. The problem here is that this store doesn't know which customers they're punishing. It will keep lots of people away, to be sure, but it's hard to distinguish people who are trying on shoes at your store and then running home to buy them online (which is dubious) and people who wander in, try some shoes on, but don't buy anything on that particular day.

Online commerce is little more than a substitute for traditional retail. But for people who are price shopping, buying stuff online makes more sense. 30 years ago, if you owned a small shoe store, you would probably get some business if you had a decent location for your store. Substitutes change things. It's no longer enough to just have a store, and hope that people will understand how important your business is and support you simply because you exist.

The goal should be to make yourself more appealing and the online substitutes less appealing. Taxing the casual browsers in your store has the opposite effect.

Disposable

2011-04-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

I heard a statistic that said the number of women-owned start-up business ventures outnumbers those started by men by a factor of 7.

I'm not sure if this is 100% percent accurate, but it makes sense to me, for one reason: biology. In the animal kingdom, females are the necessary gender for raising and nurturing the young. The males, on the other hand, aren't as critical to the process. Once they've given up their seed, nature gets rid of them (think praying mantises), unless they're needed by the female to help care for the offspring.

To my fellow men: this is our lot in life, and we know it. This is the reason that we insist on working at jobs as employees, where our talents and labor are exploited, and when we're used up, we are disposed of. Why do we put up with it? That's what nature has in store for us!

Women, on the other hand, have been smart enough to realize that running an industrial manufacturing plant is not the lifestyle they want, so instead of playing the corporate game, a lot of them are running off and trying to create their own game.

Creating your own game, with your own rules, is probably the best way to avoid being disposable.

Strategic Listening

2011-04-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

Saw the new movie Limitless yesterday. Not a bad little flick, but it's not the first movie I've seen with a miracle cure that turns an unmotivated dolt into a super-confident genius. These movies always have one thing in common: the protagonist becomes a big talker. Given their newfound knowledge, they start talking the ears off of everyone around them. And because they're so smart (presumably), there is no shortage of people standing around to listen.

Not sure this is actually how it goes. The smarter someone gets, the more inclined they are to listen, and to listen well, at that. I'm still astonished that I went through four years of high school and four years of college and never, not once during that time, did I ever have to sit through a class that taught Strategic Learning 101.

This is a prerequisite for everything...everything...in life. That we aren't formally taught it at any point in our academic lives is beyond reproach.

Is It Good Enough?

2011-04-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

This is a question I struggle with at least once a day.

I'm come on here and write something (excuse me for being self-referential for a moment), and before I post it, I question whether or not I really ought to. Before I put a song I've written up online, I wonder whether it's worth the time of the person who might happen to stumble across it and hit the "play" button.

I'm not going to debate whether or not there's a lot of useless sludge on the Internet, because it's an unassailable fact. Sure, there are diamonds in the rough, but when I'm looking for diamonds, I don't rush to the rough. This is why offline media won't be supplanted by the web, and why traditional publishers and record companies will always have a place in the world. (It might be a different, smaller place, but it's still there.)

But still, writing on here once a day might be overkill, particularly if people reading it think that I only hit upon a good idea once a month. Or every two months. If this is true, why not just write once a month and leave the dross unpublished?

Two reasons for me (and they probably apply to you as well):

1. Most creators can't separate their gems from the dross.

2. The gems are born of the dross.

The second one is immensely important, because most people will tell you not to bother until you've got the talent to do nothing but great work. And this mentality is probably the leading reason why the potential for a lot of great work ends up getting squandered.

2011-04-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Here's an elevator pitch that I've heard several times from many people since I moved to southern California: healthy fast food. Set up a drive-through where people can get nutritious meals on the go.

It's really not a bad idea: offer convenience in the health food market. (It doesn't necessarily have to take the form of a drive-through.) The problem is that people who are eating healthy are trying very hard to distance themselves from the fast food concept, so trying to win them over with that pitch might be futile. And for the droves of people who eat fast food, they don't have a fast food problem: the burgers, chicken sandwiches, and salads work just fine. And the food itself has been commoditized, so it's cheap, and it might be difficult for a place serving vegetables to compete on price.

In my mind, here's the springboard for this concept: a drive-through juice bar. There's enough people who frequent smoothie and juice bars to make it a viable concept, and getting a glass of liquid to go is only a stone's throw away from a Frappicino at a drive-through Starbucks.

I'm sure that several of these exist, but I'm not aware of one in my own town. Is there one in yours?

Demanding

2011-04-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

A statistic that I've heard a few places: if all Americans started eating the alloted daily recommended quantities of fruits and vegetables every day, our agricultural system does not currently have enough land allocated to fruits and vegetables to meet the demand. (I can't verify if that's actually true, but I'm inclined to believe it.)

Reputedly, Wal-Mart is a leader in stocking their stores with organic produce. They did this because their customers asked for it. Because Wal-Mart is a company that holds a tremendous amount of bargaining power with their suppliers, they were able to get organic produce for cheap. And several of their competitors who also stock produce decided to follow suit, partly because Wal-Mart brought the cost of fruit down and because it raised the bar for customer expectations.

I'm not a pure libertarian, because I don't think a free-for-all market for businesses is always a good idea. But if you happen to believe in less government, I think you should be writing letters to businesses in lieu of your representatives.

First, Do No Harm

2011-04-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

A co-worker of mine made an interesting point yesterday: ten years ago, socially responsible consumers were looking at the clothes they were buying and trying to determine if they were having a negative impact on the country where they were produced. People didn't want to buy sneakers if they were put together by children working in a sweatshop somewhere in Asia.

The problem with this is that while this might prevent some undue suffering by nudging the invisible hand, it does nothing to propel the products being produced in a better direction. A much more common trend these days is people looking not only for products that do no harm, but ones that actually generate a positive social impact. Tom's Shoes is probably the best example of this kind of a product with the giving built in.

A sign of the times. And a promising one, at that.

Direct Mail

2011-04-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

I gave a small donation to my local food bank about six months ago, in response to reports that they were falling on hard times and were possibly going to start cutting their programs.

Shortly thereafter, I got a solicitation in the mail from them, asking for more money. I wrote a note to them telling them while I was extremely grateful for their service to our community, and while I was happy to help when I could, I wanted to cease any further direct mailings from them.

Six pieces of "junk" mail later, and I now know they didn't listen to me.

Problem is, I've talked to some people about this, and they tell me that while the direct mailings from charities are spammy, they work. If you send out envelopes to people asking them for money, enough of them come back with checks in them to make it worth doing. Junk mail, it would seem, is the price of funding a lot of a major non-profit organizations.

But until someone devises a better system that doesn't have to be fundamentally flawed in order to work, an opt-out system would be nice. Think of it this way: if you give past donors the option of never hearing from you again, you save on the postage it would cost to mail that person. Call it another donation, if you're prefer.

2011-04-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

I saw a movie about five years ago called Art School Confidential. I thought it was a great flick, even though I have a particular distaste for those places where art meets academia.

I have a friend who studied Art History in college who tells me that, based on his own experiences in art school, the film was very much true to life. It resonated with him, to some degree of accuracy. Despite this, the film itself is a work of fiction. Like most stories, it's someone else's fantasy. So, it can be dismissed with the catchall "That would never really happen."

Someone recommended that I see a movie called Exit Through the Gift Shop (Netflix link), which begins as a documentary film about street art. I believe that nothing ruins any piece of art like someone trying to verbally explain its meaning or significance, and that goes double for the artist who created it.

Ergo, I'll leave it at this: it's a good film. Watch it.

Little Things

2011-04-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a sign that was spotted hanging in the window of a Borders that's closing soon:

It's strange, because the public restrooms at Borders seemed to be a massive bone of contention over the past ten years. As the company started doing worse and worse, the employees seemed to put a squeeze on the bathrooms. Sometimes they were locked. Sometimes they were out of order for days at a time. Usually there were signs posted telling you not to use them unless you were a customer. (When does a patron become a customer?) And if they were open, you could count on them to be pretty disgusting. It wasn't quite like using them restrooms at a rock concert, but it wasn't far off, either.

The experience of a Borders store was not often terrible, but that feeling always fell flat on its face as soon as you started dealing with the bathrooms. It was the clear the policy handed down from on high at Borders HQ was to try and keep the riff raff out of the bathroom, and when budget time came, it seemed like one of the first things to go. The reasoning for this is pretty obvious: they didn't want their stores to turn into public restrooms that happened to have a book section.

Cutting the costs here seems easy enough, but for every homeless person or person that pops in off the street for no other reason than to use the john, there were probably ten other people who were just there to shop and needed to use the bathroom at some point. Trying to squeeze out the drive-by pissers by letting the bathrooms go to hell probably isn't going to work as a strategy, and at its worst, it annoys the best customers.

If it had been me, the bathrooms probably would have been the first thing I would have changed as soon as Borders encountered rough economic waters. I'm always amazed how much money some companies spend on ads to make their retail store seem great, but the restrooms are atrocious. In these cases, I just consider myself lucky that I'm a male and that I have the option of the urinal.

Well Spent

2011-04-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

Two things you can do as a writer (that is, when you're not writing):

1. Look for a publisher.

2. Build an audience.

Time was, you had to do the first one in order to do the second one. Nowadays, I think you should focus all your effort on #2. It's not easy, but if you pull it off, #1 will take care of itself.

2011-04-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

Here's one guiding principle I try to keep in mind every day: the true nature of a person's character doesn't lie in the merits of what they believe, but in how accepting they are of someone else who holds an opposing viewpoint.

Limits to Starting

2011-04-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

In the movie Apollo 13, based on the mission to the moon that took a turn for the worse, the astronauts were up in space with plenty of oxygen, but due to the damage to their vessel, they were left without sufficient filters to get rid of the carbon dioxide they were slowly exhaling into the air. On the ground, NASA engineers are tasked with solving the problem: create an air filter out of the limited supply of spare materials available to the crew in space.

There's a great scene in the movie where someone dumps a bunch of boxes of random junk onto a table and says to everyone in the room (to paraphrase): "We have to solve this problem using nothing but that." To emphasize his point, he gestures to the pile of stuff on the table before them.

The idea of doing this appeals to me. Most of us are constrained by certain things, usually by time or money, and while this hampers a lot of people, I'm always inspired by stories of people who started with very little, evaluating what they did have, and then putting it to good use.

Clearly, given a million dollars, there's a lot of things that most of us could do. There's a lot of things that most of us want to do. Much more interesting to try and solve a problem given the means you have access to.

Someone Else's Shoes

2011-03-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that one attribute of good writing is that it lets you see the world through someone else's eyes. It lets you walk a mile in their circumstance and start to understand things as they understand them.

This is the power of story. You can say things without saying them.

In all this, there lies an opportunity for those who are teaching English classes. That's the lesson we can learn from books we're forced to read in high school: empathy.

Much harder to teach, and much harder to evaluate with a standardized test, but I think it's far more important than focusing on themes, foreshadowing, and onomatopoeia.

QR Hunt

2011-03-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Do you know what a QR code is? They're the funny looking boxy UPC things. Here's one:

If you scan one of these with a smartphone barcode reader, it will read out the information. The one above contains a URL to a website, but they can contain just text or an image. They've been heralded as the next big thing for marketers, but in the United States, they haven't really caught on.

There are a few reasons for this. First, it suffers from the same issues as the CueCat, in that it doesn't really solve a huge problem. They're mostly used for hyperlinks to product pages, so at most it saves a few keystrokes in a browser's address bar. And most people that I've met aren't even sure if they have a QR code reader on their phone.

But one of the main reasons probably has to do with the fact that QR codes have largely been appropriated by marketers. The only places I've ever seen them is on promotional posters and in store windows. Television might be driven by advertising, but there are other aspects to the medium that make it a worthwhile invention. QR codes won't get picked up as a tool if they're used for little else than enabling companies to hock their wares.

It would be interesting if someone did something a little more imaginative than try to sell something with it. Think of geocaching. What if someone constructed a puzzle of several pieces, made QR codes of each one, and hung them up in a single town around office buildings? Imagine passing an unlabeled, lonely QR code every day on your way into work? How long before your curiosity got the better of you and you tried scanning it?

I think there are lots of interesting ways in which they could be used, none of which have anything to do with selling things.

By Invitation Only

2011-03-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

It seems that initiation is not so much about internally developing a vision of something over a long period of time, and then persuading people to think you're right.

It's more like standing up and announcing to a sea of cubicles, "Hey, I'm going to get Middle Eastern food for lunch. Anyone else want to join me?"

It's standing up, saying something, and seeing if anyone else follows you.

(The analogy is even more realistic if you imagine that half of the people you're asking have already told you they hate Middle Eastern food.)

Scareware

2011-03-28T06:58:00.000-07:00

Scareware is software that is installed onto a user's computer and makes the user think that they've been infiltrated by a computer virus or a worm. At the same time, it offers the user the chance to clean their computer by purchasing a computer program that will scan the hard drive and remove all threats. The threat is fake, but it can seem real enough to get people to put in their credit card numbers and purchase the "solution". In these cases, the creator of the malicious software manages to make a quick buck from a frightened end user.

In one case, the creators of the scareware had infected and collected money from over 1 million people, all of whom payed $40 for the solution. In December of 2008, the FTC brought charges against the company in the amount of $8 million dollars, which was set aside to go to the victims who were duped out of their money.

I'm not a super savvy business person, but doing something that brings in $40 million and only costs you $8 million seems like an awfully high profit margin, even for a software product. I'm not sure the FTC is going to be putting a stop to these kinds of shenanigans by issuing what seems like little more than a financial slap on the wrist.

Meeting and Defying

2011-03-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Director David Fincher gave a talk a couple of years ago that I attended, in which he shared a story about the release of his film Se7en. As a promotional tactic, the production company did a screening of the film shortly before its release. It wasn't widely publicized, but a poster was placed outside to drawn in people to watch the film. According to Fincher, the poster said something like this:

"Do you want to see Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy) and Brad Pitt (Legends of the Fall) in a new movie?"

If you've seen these three films, or at least familiar with their style, you understand that this poster was a terrible mismatch in terms of bringing in an audience. Needless to say, reactions to the film at this screening were incredibly poor. Fincher concluded his talk by saying that he felt it was important for an audience to have a rough idea of what they're getting themselves into before they go to see a film.

He's right, but at the same time, all of the movies, television shows, and music that has wowed me has been something akin to what I was expecting, but it blows my expectations out of the water. Early on, people told me to watch "Lost", and offered me a vague description of its premise. The summary was enough to pique my curiosity, but the show itself definitely surpassed any expectations I had before I started watching.

I think there's a lesson here, and it lies in setting up people's expectations, and then both simultaneously meeting and confounding them at the same time. Giving people exactly what you told them to expect is probably not enough to thrill them.

Children and Time

2011-03-26T06:33:00.000-07:00

I tend to act differently around people that I know are parents.

As much as I try to treat people equitably, I can't get past this one. It has a lot to do with someone that lots of parents have told me: "Having kids changes everything in your life."

I don't fully understand it, but I think I have a cursory grasp of what they're saying. Having kids shifts your priorities. It changes the way you see the world. It changes the way you act and what you value most in life.

It's something that I don't understand, so I respect it. And the best strategy I have for dealing with these people is this: shutting the hell up. The best I can do by talking more to a parent is make myself sound stupid.

But one thing I have noticed is that a lot of parents are supremely productive people. Again, I'm not a parent, but I can only imagine that kids take up a lot of a parent's time. Despite this, I know lots of people with kids who still manage to accomplish a lot with their time. I'm taking a class right now, and my professor is a parent who is the chairman of the college department, holds a full-time job, does side work, attends game programming conferences, and teaches classes. And he's got kids.

I know people without kids, and without full-time jobs, who aren't nearly that productive. (e.g. me) This leads me to believe that having kids, even though it consumes time, makes the parents more mindful of the time they have left over in the day, and forces them to manage it. Whereas if you're like a lot of people, you have ample time, but you tend to squander it.

2011-03-25T06:12:00.000-07:00

"Every revolution destroys the old before it brings the benefits of the new." -Clay Shirky.

About three months ago, the city where I live lost both its Borders and Barnes & Noble. They were both located a few blocks from me, right across the street from each other. They both shut down in the same week. This sent me shopping to the one Borders left standing in our area ten miles to the West. Earlier this week, they announced that one was closing, too.

The sad thing is, almost everyone saw the Borders closures coming many years ago. The whole thing has been felt like a large, public accident that's happening in very slow motion. The only thing that's really surprising about it is that it took this long for it to happen.

Things that happen overnight tend to get a lot of publicity, but the rise and fall of most things that matter in our lives are closer to the rack than the guillotine. The whimpers herald things to come, not the bangs.

The Problem with Demanding Evidence

2011-03-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

Amanda Hocking has been getting a lot of ink lately. She's a self-published author of fiction on the Kindle. She sells her little e-books for $1, $2, or $3 each. The latest news is that she's making millions of dollars without having ever gone through a traditional publisher.

If you were looking for evidence that this is even possible to do, there it is.

I've been telling everyone I know, with all my fervor, that if you're a writer, there's money in the Kindle. Most people shrug complacently; they don't disagree with me, but they're waiting it out. They want some assurance that it will work for them before they commit any time to things.

That's usually a good strategy because it conserves energy, but it shouldn't be the rule for everything. Most people demand evidence, and while they're waiting for it, the people with the passion to make things happen aren't waiting for evidence, they're executing. And they're the ones that win because they'll get there first.

The Kindle as a publishing platform is relatively new. It's possible that selling books through it was a bad idea two years ago. It's possible that it will be a bad idea two years from now, or whenever the market is saturated. But right now, now, there's possibilities. Not guarantees, but the possibilities are big ones if you figure out how to do it right.

If you have a book, however short, format it for the Kindle and put it out there.

Go.

More Than a Feeling

2011-03-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

Here's something that I figure is at least partially true: in terms of government and most larger businesses, transparency is not complete.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, because I'm not being specific. And I'm not saying it's entirely a bad thing. But I think that, in general, there are some things we don't hear about. They might be defense plans, it might be accounting fraud, or any number of things, but I don't believe the picture is clear. This is often intentional.

I've met enough people in my slowly lengthening time on earth to know that I'm not the only one who feels like this. So let's assume I'm not entirely wrong, but that I'm just not sure of the details.

This thread that permeates our culture is responsible for the proliferation of gobs of misinformation. Conspiracies about the events of 9/11. UFOs. I saw a small portion of a terrible documentary on Netflix the other day claiming that if you removed processed foods from a culture's diet, all tooth decay disappears and dentistry becomes completely unnecessary.

Those are the details. People with a story, who rush to fill the gaps. And it works because people want to fill the gaps. We need the story to make sense of our surroundings.

Yes, the pharmaceutical industry is full of people and companies who are dishonest, and they gouge when it seems morally reprehensible at times. But that alone doesn't mean that Kevin Trudeau and his "natural cures" aren't one big swindle.

This is the power of a story: contradict a wrong with enough finesse, even with another wrong, and there's a good chance people will believe that it's right.

Making the Cut

2011-03-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

After bassist Cliff Burton of Metallica died back in the 1980s, the rest of the band started holding auditions for his replacement. One of the people who auditioned was a guy by the name of Les Claypool.

Les Claypool is the lead singer and bassist (how often do those two things go together?) of a band called Primus. In terms of alt-rock bands of the 1990's, Primus achieved a great deal of success. Every rock bassist I've ever met in my age range absolutely worships the ground that Les walks on; they look up him both as a musician and an innovator.

And yet Metallica didn't hire him. By their own admission, it was because he was "too weird". They just didn't think his style of playing was a good fit for their band. And undeniably, it had nothing to do with Les' lack of talent, because it abounds in his music.

Something to keep in mind next time you get a rejection letter from a prospective employer.