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So it turns out I am a release manager on a product. A product I can't talk about right now, but a product nonetheless. I've been extremely fascinated with the entire process so far and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of software development. But the process has also been a bit bittersweet as well. I have been such a long time fan of elegant user interfaces that when I moved over to my own product, I envisioned creating a product that not only felt exactly what good user interfaces should feel like, but really strived to think about what the user would do NEXT and work to deliver that as well.

However, now that I'm mired in the process of shipping a product, I find it amazing that the challenge in doing this seemingly straightforward task is enormous. I'm not sure if this is a software only thing, but the permutations of what can actually be done in any given situation is absurd! Let's use an example not from my product. Let's say you were responsible for handling the security features of writing to a folder. This seems to be straight forward, you allow people to set the security of the folder and you're done. You could even envision a very elegant way of showing people what the security was and allowing people with the correct permission to change it. Perhaps you would change the context sensitive menu such that you would only display the functionality that people actually COULD do would be displayed on the menu. That'd be pretty nice.

Unfortunately, then it comes to the implementation. What happens when someone is writing the file and you right click on it? What happens if another application changes the permissions once you've already right clicked? What happens when the file disappears by another process? What happens if the user is an administrator, but only running as a standard user just for security reasons? Suffice it to say it becomes an endless morass of complexity. And even the majority of this complexity can be addressable, but once you're done coding it, you have to test it. Imagine trying to test every possible scenario of these things occuring... it boggles the mind. So suffice it to say you can do this, but almost never within the time frame of shipping.

We've all heard of that old axiom pick two: fast, cheap or good. The additional component to throw in there when you're shipping software is flexible. Because every ounce of flexibility added ends up costing so much on the back end. This is one of the reasons the Mac was so successful for so long. By limiting the flexibility, they were able to maximize the user experience. That's not to say my product won't deliver a great user interface or be flexible... just that it certainly won't be as "good" as it could be because we want to ship "fast" and we want it to be "cheap". However, there should come a time when flexibility really does sacrifice at the altar of respecting the user. In a lot of ways, I'd love to see a real revival of this kind of thinking.
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My favorite bit of research recently is basically to just draw a big circle around an anomaly and figure out what it is. The problem, of course, is that this leads to a lot of correlation without causality, so I offer this up with no analysis whatsoever.

<tbody> <tr> <td width="186">

City (Mayor)

</td> <td width="172">

Crimes Per Population

</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Springfield, Ma (D)</td> <td width="172">0.331</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Reno (R)</td> <td width="172">0.318</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Columbus (D)</td> <td width="172">0.241</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Richmond (I)</td> <td width="172">0.234</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">St. Louis (D)</td> <td width="172">0.215</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Columbia, Sc (D)</td> <td width="172">0.204</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Orlando (D)</td> <td width="172">0.204</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Little Rock (D)</td> <td width="172">0.203</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Birmingham (D)</td> <td width="172">0.202</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Memphis (D)</td> <td width="172">0.200</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Rochester (D)</td> <td width="172">0.187</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Salt Lake City (D)</td> <td width="172">0.186</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Kansas City (NP)</td> <td width="172">0.184</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Flint (D)</td> <td width="172">0.178</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Miami Gardens (D)</td> <td width="172">0.175</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Tacoma (D)</td> <td width="172">0.174</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Detroit (D)</td> <td width="172">0.173</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Chattanooga (D)</td> <td width="172">0.170</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">West Palm Beach (D)</td> <td width="172">0.168</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Atlanta (D)</td> <td width="172">0.167</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Fayetteville (NP)</td> <td width="172">0.163</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Knoxville (R)</td> <td width="172">0.163</td></tr> <tr> <td width="186">Jackson (D)</td> <td width="172">0.160</td></tr></tbody>

Interesting – out of the 20 top cities (over 100,000) by crime per capita, 18 have Democratic (or Democratic-leaning non-partisans) as mayor. The stat I do not have here, which is critical, is the percentage of mayors that are Democratic, but I doubt it’s over 90%.

Forty-one years ago, the Internets were created. There have been many twists and turns, but there can be no question, that all the tumult was leading to a single creation. That creation is the below video.

One of my favorite things in science is when a researcher takes a look at a very simple situation and applies some simple analysis of the underlying data. For example, how rad is this?:

Eating Behavior and Obesity at Chinese Buffets

First, I love the fact that there were secret people in the restaurants who’s job it was to watch other eaters. Could you imagine if you got caught, how you would explain that? But, second, and more importantly, what I’d like to know is to what extent there’s a causal relationship here. The authors make it clear that they were not looking for causation, but it is an interesting question nonetheless. For example, people with high BMI scores sat facing the buffet – did this cause them to eat more? Or was that a symptom of them constantly being hungry.

What’s especially interesting are some of the data points measured here – chopsticks vs. fork; large plate vs. small; napkin on lap vs. not. Incredibly fascinating stuff.

And then, a second study also came across my desk recently which also deserves some comment:

Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football

This is something that makes absolutely no sense to me. TMQ has talked about this for years – that football teams play far more conservatively than they should. And not just a little bit… check this:

But on the 1,068 fourth downs for which the analysis implies that teams are on average better off going for it, they kicked 959 times.

Holy cow! This paper goes through some possible rationale for this (momentum, information about the players, being interested in always being “in it”, rather than taking a swing early and having the game essentially be over, etc), but rejects them all. TMQ suggests that it’s just coaches playing traditionally just so they don’t have to answer annoying questions (and likely be fired). I’m not sure which is right, but wouldn’t it be awesome to see a team actually follow the way the math indicates?

For those that are attempting to create the awesomest thing ever – you have some serious hurdles to overcome. Exhibit 1.

Found this particularly funny (thanks TMQ – )

Apparently, marginal tax rate under Reagan was higher than Obama. TMQ’s got it right; it’s borrow and spend that’s the issue – something that’s been true for the last 4 presidents at least.

Some three hours after the darn thing launched, here’s the view of the Apple store in University Village (photo taken, with some degree of irony, from my POS G1):

Like it or hate the iPad, like him or hate Steve Jobs – this line is one thing: desire.

I have a new post out on Seattle 2.0:

Envy the paper boy. When the papers are delivered in the morning, he knows exactly how much work has ahead of him. He knows how long it takes to fold and put a rubber band/plastic bag around each and stuff it in a bag. He knows how much the bag weighs, and where along the journey it’ll be hardest to carry. At the end of their route, he knows when he's done. And when he walks away from his route, he's done for the day, he doesn't have to think about anything work related until the next morning, giving him complete freedom for the day. What white collar worker can say this? We're all tethered to our Blackberries/iPhones/G1s, answering mails, being randomized to the nth degree and working against arbitrary and deadlines every hour of every day – and, more often than not, getting nothing really done. Yes, envy the paperboy. >>

The unquestionably most awesome part of this post was that it gave me the chance to include a screen shot from one of my favorite games of all time – Paperboy:

The game had handlebars for controls … come on! Man that game was cool.

New Blog post up on Seattle 2.0:

It is ironic then that the second time around people will make some of the biggest mistakes themselves. In fact, when you take on your next project, whatever it might be, the WORST thing you can do is spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying not to make the mistakes you made the first time around. More >>

Go and learn how being a naive fool may not be as bad as you think.

A new blog post up on Seattle 2.0:

Correlation does not equal causality – especially when it comes to running a successful business. If you have suddenly had a breakthrough, and, finally, are making some money, gaining market share, winning customers – be sure you know WHY or else you're likely to have all your success taken away just as quickly as it was bestowed upon you. More >>>

There is no greater force in the world than self-delusion.

Answer: lots and lots of people. New post up on Seattle 2.0 :

[T]he fact is that, even with years of (public) neglect, there were hundreds of millions of desktops which required IE working exactly as IE had always been. And this was the blessing and a curse that underlies where IE is today. >>>

In the world of the Web, where people constantly focus on the new new thing, there are worse places to be than majority having hundreds of millions of users as an installed base.

New post up on Seattle 2.0:

How sexy are you? Rate yourself how attractive you are to the opposite sex (or same sex for non-traditional folks) - be honest. Now take that number and add/subtract 2 from it. There are many who would suggest that you should not marry anyone outside that range - the experiences you have in life, and the type of person that it makes you, will create too big a rift for you to overcome over time (this does not apply to shorter term relationships). A similar guideline applies when deciding who to work with in your business. >>

It’s HARD WORK looking this good.

More efficiency talk on Seattle 2.0:

What's that you say? You don't work on an hourly rate? Wrong. You absolutely work on an hourly rate, and if you don't treat your job that way, it's a recipe an inefficient work day.  >>

Now if I could only figure out a way for someone to pay me to watch True Blood…

New post up on Seattle 2.0:

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have a friend of mine stop by, and actually had five minutes free to go out for a cup of coffee. We got to talking about where we were, and the things that were sucking up all our available bandwidth. He had recently helped sell the startup he was working at to a much larger company, worked the minimum amount of time necessary to finish off his responsibilities and has branched out into a new new thing. It's always interesting to speak to someone who has gone round with the full lifecycle of a company and on to the new one. He reflected on his previous ridiculous hours, and his current ridiculous hours, and the fact that, despite his best efforts, the most meaningless stuff fills up all that time. When I asked him what his solution was to getting actual work done, he responded without skipping a beat, "Find a barber." >>

That’s it… I’m shaving my head.

Obviously the big news this week is the iPhone 4. So, without further ado, let me review … the Blackberry Curve 8530!

Basically, I was getting sick of T-Mobile and, worse, the absolutely horrendous G1, and needed to get something. I fully expect to be back on the Smartphone side within a year, so I up and got the cheapest contract I could (1 year) on the best carrier (Verizon) with the best phone that does what I need (e-mail, and minimal browsing).

Here’s what I have discovered, in no particular order.

First, the Blackberry is so undiscoverable and non-intuitive, I have no idea how it ever caught on. Every action is buried under a single ‘magic’ button, with no indication at all what you’re going to get when you hit it. Options? Forward email? About? Just doesn’t make sense.

The keyboard shortcuts are so unexpected that there are literally thousands of pages out there that do nothing else but recount all these hotkeys – which are totally necessary because without them, the phone is basically unusable.

The browser is bad. No, “bad” is the wrong word. Remember cowboy movies from the 40s where everyone good is dressed in white and everyone bad is in dressed in black, and you knew exactly who was really bad based on how much black they were wearing? Now imagine in the middle of the movie, all the people dressed COMPLETELY in black got together in some mountain cave to recount all their evil deeds. The MC of said gathering would be EXTRA bad; he’d likely be a fat banker of some kind, have a mustache and a monocle and fold his hands together when he talked, a la Mr. Burns. Now imagine you got all those mustached bankers together, from all the evil caves in all the world for some networking event in Transylvania. The owner of the castle where they were having their hor d’oeuvres and recounting how much they had swindled out of grandmothers and orphans would be some ULTRA bad guy, potentially even half vampire or something equally evil. Now imagine that guy fucked the devil and they had a baby. And imagine THAT baby fucked Hitler, and THEY had a baby.

That child, roughly speaking, is very close to being NEARLY as FUCKING HORRIBLE AS THE BROWSER ON THE BLACKBERRY CURVE IS.

I say this with no exaggeration whatsoever, I have had a worse browsing experience in the past week than I did in 1992, when all I knew how to use was gopher on AIX 3.2. I have no idea what RIM was thinking, but the quality of the display, the rendering speed, the download speed and the “support” for anything beyond reading a pure text page on your local machine is so bad, I don’t know why you would even bother. In fact, when I accidentally click a link in email, and it opens the abortion they call a browser, it makes me want fly to Ontario and just start punching everyone I see there in the face for being located in the same city as the people who designed this thing. Though, candidly, it’s probably a bit generous to even say “opens” since all the “browser” really does it show me the goddamn loading screen for five fucking minutes. And, Opera Mini, the “solution” is even worse – because all I get to do is LOOK at a screenshot of what may or may not be a web page – it’s so slow, and zooming is so weak as a UI metaphor, why even bother. 

Apps – yee-ikes. Yeah, there are some apps out there. But they are so far behind everyone else in the world, it’s a joke to try and compare them. My browsing experience on the phone or on the Web looking for some simple solutions (a voice recorder, a stop watch, etc) was miserable. I found what I was looking for, but there were so many garbage apps, so many projects that haven’t been updated in years, and so few ratings (to help me figure out which were real and which weren’t) that I wish I hadn’t started looking in the first place.

And with all that bile, it is the single greatest email tool ever created. How and why Outlook and/or the iPhone don’t use these metaphors are beyond me. For those that are unfamiliar -

  • U = next unread
  • Delete key = delete (is there a way to go to next unread message?)
  • R = reply
  • L = reply all
  • F = forward

I can navigate through an unlimited amount of mail as fast as I can mow down zombies in an FPS. For this purpose, and this purpose alone, it is AWESOME. For everything else, let me tell you, do NOT look into the abyss -- they don’t have enough Bactine in the world to heal your wounds after coming back.

New post up on Seattle20.com today:

Agility, in the world of software, is the focus on iterating quickly on customer demands, releasing regularly, and getting accurate customer feedback to start the process all over again. Instead of spending countless weeks and months gathering requirements and then putting together the absolute perfect product, the idea is that you release a MVP— minimum viable product —as soon as humanly possible and then change it based on what you see people doing with a live version of your product. There's a lot to love about this philosophy: it's creative, it's easy to test, and, best of all, it throws all the old ways of doing things under the bus! More >>

People who look to agile software development as a panacea are just as mistaken as those who think it’s a load of crap. Best part of today’s blog post – did you know that beer is 11,000 years old?

New post up on Seattle 2.0 today:

"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, they’re all learned." – various attribution, most commonly to Bruce Ediger

While there is some debate (especially among new mothers!) how intuitive the nipple is, the nipple is the perfect product. It fits exactly to spec, even without user testing and with a variable user group. It's extremely portable and instantly available in a wide variety of environments (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). It's (mostly) instant on, and (mostly) intuitive, and works without even thinking, when one or both users are half asleep. But best of all, it was designed with a singular purpose for a very select audience segment, and, for that segment and that audience, it is a wholly complete solution. >>

Marvel as I work even MORE body parts into a single blog post! Plus, I get the chance to mention the OXO cups (again) – man do I love those.

 

New post on Seattle 2.0 today:

Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day and night recruiting them. Yet, all but a few entrepreneurs fail miserably when it comes to finding, talking with, and winning these incredibly valuable partners. How do you avoid this all too common mistake? >>

There were endless jokes about tea bagging, but I thought I’d take the moderately safe road. I heard an interesting comment the other day about your public persona – either be totally open or create a new persona and stick to it. Kevin Smith has done the former, Jason Calcanis has done the latter, and both are extremely successful. The funny part is that I’m not really trying to hide anything, I’m just not interested in having something vulgar be in the title.

New post up today on Seattle 2.0:

Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples:

However, in the rush to disrupt the existing models, people are forgetting the lesson learned in the music industry; aggregation of content provides the best experience for users and the biggest profit opportunity for the owners. Simply said:  aggregation wins. >>

Whenever business model trumps user experience, the end users suffer. And that opens the door to your competitors.

New post up on Seattle 2.0:
Content farms are insanely hot right now, no matter what the chattering classes would prefer. These companies, who churn out large bodies of low cost and low quality content in order to win search results, have completely overwhelmed the professional content producers in the search engine result game. Yet, despite all the hatred, these same journalists cannot seem to coverthemenough. The biggest question is, are we truly on the verge of a new content world that will kill the market for quality content? And, more importantly, do you have any chance of rising about the low quality noise? >>
To be clear, I think that content farms have their place - but if anything content is TOO well produced right now - there's just no way the business will work when the real quality content (and Google) wakes up.

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The surface guys at Gnomedex have said that if you do a blog post that contains the word "Gnomedex", you'll be able to grab it and play with it. This blog post accomplishes that goal (3 times over!).

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New post on Seattle 2.0 today:
Lou Gerstner had it wrong – the question is not whether or Elephants can dance. They can dance very well. The problem is that they’re usually listening to entirely different music than you are, and, if you’re not careful you’re going to get stomped.
Out of everything that's been involved with being the world's largest collection of sound bites and short quotes, the partnerships with the studios has been the most challenging and newest experience for me.

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New post on Seattle 2.0 today:
We are all narcissistic whores. The Interweb has done it to us; it’s impossible not to stare into the pond when there is nowhere else to look. As a result, we spend far too much time watching river of social data for every mere mention of something that we care about or, worse, gazing at our navel because no one is talking about us. So we listen, and talk, and every so often it pays off in just a little bit of an echo to make us feel like someone cares if we live or die. So is this a screed against new media? Not at all. There is a point to all this, and not only is it valuable for you, it’s crucial for your startup. >>
I wish I could say that it's been nothing but successes for me, but this is what I've learned so far - get out, get out get out because you never know what's going to hit.

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New post on Seattle 2.0 today:
Congrats on becoming an entrepreneur, get ready for misery. Dave McClure’s extended rant telling you what an idiot you are to want to do a startup is a wonderful summary of all the many things that can and will go wrong with your new baby. It instantly reminded me of a great story in "D-Day, June 6, 1944"  by Stephen Ambrose. He writes of a private Charles East of the 29th Division, who was "told by his commanding officer on the eve of D-Day that nine out of ten would become casualties in the ensuing campaign[.] East looked at the man to his left, then at the man to his right, and thought to himself, You poor bastard." If you want to do a startup, you have no option but to think this way, because you will fail. Your business is not the exception; your technology is not a revolution; your team is nothing special. You are going to fail. And the worst thing you can do in the world is try to prepare for that fact.  >>
There have been quite a few posts going around about failing in startups. This feels like just a giant pendulum swinging back and forth, encouraging and discouraging people to leave large companies and go do something else. For whatever reason (economy I assume), we are way back in the "don't even try it." camp right now.

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For the first time, since 1954, the Giants are World Champions”. I was really impressed with them, most of all because they had real character to their team, instead of just being a bunch of thuggish caricatures of what giant freak baseball players would normally look like.

The thing about it, though, is that while the White Sox and Red Sox were genuinely REALLY old records to win, the Giants already had some success as a franchise, so I’m not quite sure why everyone was so longing for this win.

Here’s the news on that – you can’t. I don’t care what you say or do, what recipe has worked for you in every time you’ve had a cold since you were five, you cannot beat it.

However, to minimize the pain of the symptoms, here’s a recent story I heard which covers your best bets:

Take two single ingredient drugs every 12 hours, at the start of the scratchy, continue until symptoms are clear

  • Ibuprofen/Naproxen - Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, helps to easy the feeling of malaise, cough, sore throat.
  • Anti-histamine - first generation, make you drowse, Benadryl or Chlor-Trimeton, take care of runny nose

Plus:

  • Salt water gargle - to relieve sore throat
  • Lemon mint throat lozenges - to relieve cough

NOTE: these do not make you better but help you feel better while you're sick.