Yes, that is a photograph of me, sometime in 2004. Until very recently it was unavailable in any digital form. I am now though the owner of this printer/scanner. Which means that such memories are possible, even on the internet.

As I unpacked it though, because I run Ubuntu I found myself in an irrational “will this work, will it be a nightmare” frame of mind. Despite knowing that linux supports more devices than any other os.

It Just Worked.

Easier than the installation would be on pc/mac according to the documentation. No installation at all in fact. Just connect & go. Which is how things should work all the time.

The desire for this to be the case is just one of the reasons I contine to use Ubuntu. A mentality that sees the worth examining itself by these sorts of criteria:

There are still many people who think that the scariness of an operating system installation is a good place to ask people unnecessary questions about things they’ve never heard of. There are still many people who seriously think that “Gnome” and “KDE” and “XFCE” are acceptable terms to use when communicating with non-technical people.
Ubuntu and “desktop environments”

I should not have to perform sysadmin tasks in order to connect something to my computer. And now I don’t. Because people have put serious thought into designing a system that makes things easy for the user.

Love regards etc

P.S. you may notice a new link in the sidebar to “Love regards etc” which, in case you were wondering, is my brand new pipes powered blogroll

Although not a US citizen, I stayed up on Tuesday to watch the US election results come in. Despite my own normally over-zealous cynicism and the inherent banality of 8 hour news broadcasts, I couldn’t help getting swept up in the power of the moment.

euphoria is a four letter word

Even now, having had time to calm down, I am overwhelmingly pleased that Obama won. Despite early misgivings, the Obama campaign has eventually won me over. Especially this video interview with Joe Biden and some of Obamas later speeches. The sense is there, that this might actually have been an election where it was possible to vote for somebody rather than against somebody else.

prediction is hard. especially about the future

What I would like to do here is to give a brief idea of what Obama would need to do in order to keep this faith. At least as far as I’m concerned. As I see it, there are four major problems facing him at the moment:

1. The way the US is viewed in the rest of the world
2. Keeping the still almost 50% of the US population that didn’t vote for him happy
3. The economy
4. The rest of our problems

plans are easy

Obama has to address all of these things to keep the undeniable momentum he has, and the faith that people have put in him. There are obviously countless ways that these things could be addressed, but I my agenda would be the following:

To get a US led mission out of Iraq as soon as possible. By which I mean within months. Keep troops there, but relinquish all strategic control to the UN. This would go an incredibly long way towards restoring America’s world standing. Especially if it was done in a quick and humble manner.

To push through with the house gains that the democrats have made and the good feeling towards them, a vastly extended universal healthcare program. There will be massive objection to this from the ‘interest’ of the medicine industry, but should he manage to push it through in such a way that benefited the average American, I cannot believe that once it was in operation it would have any other outcome than to consolidate the moderates he has won over, and also quite possibly to win new voters of the disillusioned republican variety.

To commit America to more renewable energy and reductions in greenhouse gasses than is currently thought possible. This would also be a hugely positive move in terms of world opinion and establishing America in the position that she seems to want to take. America is a hugely inventive and highly developed (technologically speaking) country. If anyone will rise to the challenge, it will be them, and for the first time they have a leader with enough political capital and enough of a mandate to make it happen.

And then comes the task of sorting the economy. For which I have no solid propositions to offer with regards to how it can be ’sorted’. Possibly, if you were committed to radical green policies as above then you could begin to operate a New New Deal type program whereby you partially state-sponsored both research into the development & deployment of green technologies, and also the improvement of existing practices. As an industry, if backed by serious tax breaks, the energy efficiency industry could be massive.

[cynicism]

In truth I suspect that very few if any of these things will happy in a way that I will be able to endorse wholeheartedly & without strong reservations. Just for the minute though, I am still happy to hope.

love regards etc

Running the risk of giving this blog a distinctly Groucho Marxist focus, boingboing have alerted me not only to The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marxwhich looks like a fantastic book, but also to another portion of Groucho’s correspondence that can be found online:

Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca extract:

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

One of the things that are so fascinating about reading Groucho’s letters is that the rhythm of his voice & delivery, which is so distinctive, comes through into the structure of every sentence.

*almostarealpost

Earlier today I was confronted with what is probably the winner in my all time best error message competition:

The mentality behind thinking that this is a useful message to display to a user is simply remarkable. You might as well go the whole way & just display Nietzschean aphorisms:

The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.

At least that way I could be sure that it was a joke.

If you are going to communicate to someone, make sure you have something to communicate to them. Otherwise you are just wasting their time.

Love regards etc

So it seems that Amazon are expanding again & have launched their Mechanical Turk service. Which caught my eye largely because it reminded me of The_Turk, which is one of my all time favourite Wikipedia articles.

Amazon’s mechanical turk did grab my attention enough for me to take a look. Offering cash for tasks that can’t be automated in an online marketplace is an interesting idea. The sort of thing I might email to the recent graduates I know who complain that they can’t find a job. Except the remuneration for taking a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) is almost exclusively peanuts.

And you know the phrase - Only monkeys get out of bed for peanuts.

Which brings us to something that IS brilliant, The_Turk.

Which was a chess playing machine built in the late 18th century that claimed to be an automated chess machine but actually concealed a human chess master in a small cupboard. The Turk toured for the best part of a hundred years, and amongst other achievements, beat Bonaparte and was the subject of a Poe article.

A brilliant sense of imagination, wonder & showmanship at work in this story. Which reminds me of the Werner Herzog film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Every man for himself and God against them all)

So thank you amazon for reminding me of these. And interesting that you might name your new venture after an infamous hoax. I hope it’s irony I’m appreciating there.

I don”t want to be informed about the webpages you were thinking of building. It can only ever disappoint me that you never got around to building them. The philosophy of worse is better, of getting some kind of working prototype out there is a completely valid one. Something is definitely better than nothing.

But if your something is less than a working prototype, then please don’t tell people about it who are not involved with developing it. If what you’ve come up with is a good idea, then this is especially true.

If you have an idea for a product, service that I would actually be interested in, then telling me that you have had the idea, but not the conviction to actually complete it is worse than me thinking that you never thought of it in the first place. All that you will do is waste your users time & raise their expectations only to have those expectations dashed, and potential users irritated.

If it’s broke, don’t ship it.

I used to work in a bookshop. At one time, a management type decided that it would be a good idea if we published a newsletter to inform customers of signings, new releases etc. I liked the idea.

Until I saw the first draft. Which was, to put it mildly, rubbish. Phrases like “Comic sans is a bad choice for body copy” and “that  lo-res image blown up 300% makes you look silly” sprang to mind, only for me to realise that this was somewhat overanalysing the problem. Which was that this was something just shy of the competence level of a homework project from a seven year old schoolchild.

Instead, I went with

Anyone impressed by that would be impressed by anything.
& is therefore never worth going out of your way to be impress

Which is a phrase that I have re-used extensively since. In fact, I use it as a rule for all of the marketing initiatives that I have to deal with. Who exactly is going to be impressed by this? if the answer is ‘a teenager circa 1997′ then we probably haven’t got this right yet.

Moral of my story: If you aim higher, you impress all those other people by default. Just about good enough leaves you alienating the more discerning people out there, and actively damages your brand.

If there is one thing that impresses me consistently, it is simplicity done well.

Not that I have anything against things that are complex per se. But in things that are more complicated than they need to be. In fact I love complicated abstractions, I am fascinated by Cricket for instance, which is nothing if not a very complicated set of arbitrary rules that seems completely impenetrable on the first encounter.

But if it wasn’t for that, then the game itself wouldn’t be half as interesting. It’s a great example of a situation where adding layers of complexity actively adds to the value of something.

When I have discussions about how the accounts department of my company works though, or when I look at the shrink-wrapped tomatoes at my supermarket, something dies inside at the complete stupidity of just how complicated this thing has become, for no tangible benefit at all.

A little strongly stated perhaps. but the point remains – do we really have to make four payments back & forth where a conversation & one would do, & everyone would be sorted out & happy much quicker? Do you_really_ think that there is enough wrong with the methods of storing tomatoes that people have been using for the last thousand years that there is any real benefit from the waste you are generating? Not to mention the extra hassle involved in my actually getting at them.

So please, can we just keep things simple?