Sun CEO’s haiku tweet resignation announcement
Posted on | February 4, 2010 | No Comments
I love that Jonathan Schwartz tweeted the announcement that he was leaving Sun, including this haiku: “Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”.
Two things about it:
- You’ve got to appreciate someone who can keep a sense of humor in what must be a pretty difficult time (though perhaps I detect a sigh of relief?)
- People assume that a CEO’s role is complex, but, as his succinct comment makes clear, it’s fundamentally simple. Not easy, but straightforward. Understanding what executives want is no mystery.
Information Landscapes – From where we’ve come
Posted on | February 4, 2010 | No Comments
I’ve been following the evolution of information visualization since I first blogged in 1998. Well, even before then, Muriel Cooper was leading her students at MIT’s Media Lab to probe on new ways of interacting with textual information. You can see the work she presented at TED5 in 1994, the same year that the Web really took root, in this post from David Young’s blog. But don’t just watch the video — there’s also a link to an in-depth profile of Muriel written by my friend Janet Abrams, and a link to Lisa Strausfeld’s 1995 CHI paper on visualizing financial data. (15 years later, Lisa continues to blaze trails at Pentagram.
Sorry about the rss feed problems folks.
Posted on | February 1, 2010 | No Comments
Working out some kinks. Nothing to see here.
Two blogs in one: peterme.com and peterme’s linkblog
Posted on | January 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying out some new stuff for peterme.com, and I’ve gotten it to a point where it’s time to share.
People reading peterme.com via RSS (Google Reader or some such) would have noticed a bunch of links in the feed. This was an attempt on my part to see if I could get back to old school linkblogging, the kind I did when I maintained this site by hand. I have now separated the link blog into a separate feed, which you can either read in normal web on the sidebar of my home page, or subscribe to its RSS feed. The feed for just the main peterme.com posts is still available here.
Or, if you want to see both in one feed stream, subscribe to this feed.
OK. Enough housekeeping.
Don’t allow yourself to be abused by employers (What I would tell interaction design students, #4 in a series)
Posted on | January 21, 2010 | 4 Comments
We are entering the season of college recruiting. Across the country, design schools are inviting potential employers to meet their students. Students are burnishing their portfolios, preparing their spiels, all the while trying to maintain their overburdened academic load.
One of the things that saddens me about many designers is how little professional self-esteem they have. As long as they get to occasionally work on cool projects, they’re willing to put up with remarkable abuse. I suspect many don’t realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. So, to all the students out there looking for work, when the recruiter offers you the opening, “What questions do you have about us?”, ask questions like:
How many hours a week do you regularly expect people to work?
From what I’ve seen, most design firms, particularly name design firms, expect team members to regularly put in 60- or 70-hour weeks. They do this either because: a) they bill you out hourly, and so want you to generate as much revenue as possible or b) they’re terrible at planning projects, and overcommit within a particular timeframe. The problem is, if you’re a full-time employee, you’re not getting any extra cash for work beyond 40 hours a week. So, the company is benefiting from exploiting your time, but you are not.
What kinds of activities will I get to perform in this role?
In school, interaction design students typically engage across a range of activities, including user research, interaction design, product strategy, visual design, and prototyping. However, most employers tightly align a job title with a job description. And that job description is the box within which you can work. So if you’re an “interaction designer” or a “UX designer”, you might be just a workflow-and-wireframes jockey, because user research is done by people with the title “User Researcher”, and Flash prototyping is done by people with the title “Web developer”. Design firms do this so they can task people as if they are interchangeable cogs in a machine. It makes it a lot easier for planning, but it’s stultifying as an employee.
So find out what freedom you’ll have in your practice.
What do you expect for an employee’s utilization percentage?
(This is more for design services firms as opposed to working in-house.) Most people, if they’ve never worked for a services firm, don’t even know what a “utilization percentage” is. It’s the amount of time you spend doing billable work. Utilization percentage * billing rate = company revenue. As such, employers want that utilization rate to be very high.
I feel that a 75% rate is humane. Any expectation above 85% is out of line (particularly if they’re working you more than 40 hours a week). Some companies have 100% utilization targets. That’s crazy. Basically, it means you’re turning the crank all day. You have no time for internal business. No time to read, think, grow. No time to experiment, try new things. When you’re going beyond 85%, you’re basically sacrificing your professional growth in order to line your company’s owner’s pockets.
Will you own any intellectual property I develop during the time I work there, even if it’s created outside of work hours?
Some companies, and I know this can be hard to believe, lay claim to an employee’s entire creative output, regardless of whether it happens during work hours. Now, I’m no lawyer, and if memory serves, these claims are not defensible, but would you want to work for any company that attempted this, whether or not the attempt stuck?
What support will I get for expressing myself publicly, and engaging with a wider community?
Unless you are a senior employee, most design firms offer no support for, and some actively discourage, their staff members developing public personas and engaging with a wider community. I’ve heard countless stories from friends who have had to fight their companies in order to submit talks to conferences, or contribute articles in publications.
(If you’re talking to a design firm) Are you a public company, or owned by one?
Public companies require levels of growth and profitability that lead to policies which often run contrary to delivering high-quality design in a sane environment. If you find out the design firm you’re talking to is public, or owned by a public company, be wary, and be certain you have satisfactory answers to the previous questions.
It’s about treating you like a person, not a revenue-generating asset
The questions I’ve posed here all boils down to whether the employer will treat you as a person, a human with wants, needs, aspirations, and desire for happiness, or do they just see their staff as a means to making money? (And, let me be clear — I’m all for making money, but there’s a point beyond which it just becomes greedy.) Never except the answer “It’s just business.” There’s no reason humanity and business cannot mix.
Stop with the bullshit school projects (What I would tell interaction design students, #3 in a series)
Posted on | January 19, 2010 | 3 Comments
I’ve got a little series of advice/guidance/wisdom/hubris for interaction design students
I’m very much involved with Adaptive Path’s hiring processes, and as such I see a ton of resumes, peruse a scad of portfolios, and discuss futures with hordes of students soon to be graduating from a range of undergrad and graduate programs. As a “hiring manager,” what interests me most is your work. Do you have the skills to pay the bills, and how comfortable and confident are you when talking about your approach to solving problems?
Among my biggest frustrations is having students walk me through bullshit school projects. Bullshit school projects are those which are solipsistic (solving a problem that a limited set of college students face), and/or uninteresting, and/or overly formal, and/or simply lack meaning. If I’m going to be hiring you to work with clients to help address their challenges, I need to be comfortable that you have an ability to engage in real-world problems.
I think much of the blame for these projects lays at the feet of the teachers, who have ensconced themselves in the academy in order to avoid the real world. But students have a responsibility to demonstrate what they can do in a way that someone who doesn’t know them can understand their thought process, their approach, and their talents.
Perhaps the single best way a student can ensure she is doing relevant work is to take internships at companies. I met one undergrad who has worked with IDEO, Frog, and Nokia, and the work she showed me was largely drawn from these experiences, and gave me the confidence that she could deliver real-world design.
I’m not saying students need to think corporatist. One of my favorite student projects is the redesigned BART kiosk by Ljuba Miljkovic and Ben Cohen. BART didn’t ask them to do this (in fact, it demonstrates that BART unwisely spent money on a user interface so poor it could be vastly improved by two smart college students in a semester), but for a class project they realized it offered a remarkable opportunity. It hit on a real-world pain point (as anyone who has purchased a BART ticket knows), and demonstrated a thoughtful and practical approach.
And it doesn’t need to be a project that appeals to a big audience. As part of his MFA work at CCA, Matthew Baranauskas has done a set of tangible computing projects to create new tools to help mentally challenged folks express themselves in a variety of creative ways. While the number of people who could use these tools is quite limited, by addressing a space very different from his normal context, Matthew demonstrates his skills and vision in such a way that it’s clear how he would approach professional work.
So, if you’re an interaction design student, please don’t do yet another mobile app that helps you and your friends coordinate getting beers (or yet another web app that monitors a building’s energy consumption), or some context-free formal exploration of gestural interfaces, or something that simply demonstrates that you’ve learned a set of methods. Identify an interesting problem *in the world*, and attempt to solve it.
Nexus One: I’ve had one for a couple weeks
Posted on | January 5, 2010 | 7 Comments
I can finally announce it publicly: I’ve had a Nexus One for the past couple weeks. While I played with it a bit, I never used it extensively, as I didn’t want to put my iPhone’s SIM card in it, and I didn’t have any other SIM cards lying around.
The Nexus One is a perfectly solid offering in this touchscreen-smartphone space. Its interaction and interface design are quite good. I love the Maps app, which essentially can operate just like an in-car turn-by-turn GPS navigation device, with the added benefit of Google Street View, so you can be quite positive your turning at the right spot.
I’m very interested in leaving Apple and AT&T, and the Nexus One could very much be that new phone for me. I am not really reliant on any non-standard iPhone apps, so the transition shouldn’t be too hard. But, at this point, I’m not ready to make the change, for two primary reasons:
- Podcasts. The thing I do most with my iPhone is listen to podcasts. And I’ve become quite reliant on the “2x” playback feature of podcasts. Google’s Listen app does not offer double-speed playback. I suppose I could turn my iPhone into an iPod touch and use the Nexus One for other things, but having two glass bricks on me at all times seems unnecessary.
- Desktop software configuration. Or rather, the lack of it. With Nexus One, you have to do all your configuration on the phone, or within various Google Apps. There is no iTunes equivalent for the Nexus One. I believe this is a huge mistake. Anyone owning a Nexus One is likely to own a computer with a USB port. Why not let me use my computer, with it’s bigger screen, easier text entry, etc, etc, to configure my Nexus One? I’ve said it many times – iTunes was the secret of iPod’s success, and is quite significant in iPhone’s success. Having to do everything on the Nexus One’s screen is a pain and it kind of angers me that Google hasn’t seen fit to release software to make the configuration easier. (If you’re not beholden to Apple/iTunes the way I am, this might not be an issue. Or, if you’re an extensive Google tool user (Gmail. Google Calendar, etc.), it might not end up mattering to you, as you can get all that information onto the Nexus One pretty easily.)
All that said, if I could get a $60/mo plan on T-Mobile for the NexusOne (which is what I currently play AT&T, as I’m grandfathered in with my first-gen iPhone), I would have to seriously consider the switch. However, it looks like the minimum price of the necessary T-Mobile plan is $80/mo, which is kind of a non-starter for me. I would even consider $70/mo with unlimited SMS and data.
I am happy that there is now a legitimate competitor to iPhone/AT&T, and one that is not beholden to a particular carrier. I hope this finally leads to some competition in the pricing of service plans.
Book Review: The Book of Basketball
Posted on | January 3, 2010 | 2 Comments
When I was a kid, I wore glasses (and looked something like this (second photo)), and when I played sports, I wore goggles. And when we put up a basketball hoop in my backyard, my friends and I prentended to be the Lakers (local team), and because I wore goggles, I pretended to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (with skyhooks and everything). Which is a little strange for a 10-or-so year-old white kid of average height, but there you go. (Somewhere in my life I have an autographed photo of Kareem, sky-hooking over Wilt. It’s awesome.)
As a child, basketball was my favorite sport to watch. I drifted away from sports when I went to college (I in fact could get quite self-righteous about how professional sports is a tool for narcotizing masses). About 4 or so years ago, I got back into watching sports. I tried out football for a season, but it didn’t really take. Basketball has, and, for better or worse, I root for the Warriors (local team).
One of the sad truths of my current life is that I don’t believe any of my friends are basketball devotees. Football, yes, even baseball, but the graceful game is lost on my companions. So, I’ve turned to the internet to get my fix when it comes to basketball discourse, and as part of that, I’ve become quite a follower of Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, whose columns are the most reliably funny writing since vintage Dave Barry. It turns out that while Simmons follows all sports (including, it seems hockey and even a little international soccer), basketball stokes his passion most, and his latest tome, the 700-page The Book of Basketball, is his love letter to the NBA.
Though I’ve finished the book, I’ll admit I read about 80 or so percent of it. It’s crammed with stuff, including exegeses on players and teams from so long ago that I had trouble caring. But the bulk of the book engages, is funny, and informative. You do have to look past his Boston homer-ism (and his strange antipathy for Kareem, even though as a kid, Simmons wanted to change his name to Jabaal Abdul-Simmons), his needless porn, stripper, and Vegas references, and his inscrutable support for Allen Iverson, a player who violates pretty much everyone of his tenets for great basketball, and ranks extremely high in his Pyramid (Simmons’ suggestion for a new Hall of Fame). If you do, you’ll learn a lot about basketball, it’s history (pre-ABA, during ABA, and post-merger with the ABA), what players and coaches themselves have said about one another, and why, when you study it closely enough, Russell is simply better than Wilt. You’ll also laugh, as Simmons is nothing if not funny.
There’s no way I can recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t love basketball. Those who do have likely already heard about it. I don’t know if it’s worth the full price, but if you do check it out from a library, be prepared to renew it at least once if you plan to get through it all.
Book review: CHRONIC CITY
Posted on | January 2, 2010 | No Comments
I don’t know if it’s related to fatherhood, but in the past year I’ve read a lot more fiction than had been my habit. My two favorite novels from this past year are China Mieville’s The City and the City and Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. (I only just realized I never reviewed The City and The City, and as it has been a while since I read it, I won’t do a full review here. Rooted in the hard-boiled detective genre, it’s a tantalizing mindfuck of a book, involving a pair of Eastern European cities that actually overlap, and where the populace conducts a consensual hallucination to ignore the other city (and if they break the spell, they’re taken away). This construct allows Mieville to pursue ideas on urban existence, many revolving around the idea of “unseeing”, an act that citydwellers unconsciously do everyday.)
Chronic City is also a mindfuck, though in a different way. Set in a parallel-universe Manhattan (the 9/11 bombings have been replaced by a mysterious gray fog; The New York Times publishes a war-free edition; every character has a strange, but awesome name), our guide and narrator (the book is mostly first-person) is Chase Insteadman, a former child actor engaged to a marooned astronaut. In the opening chapter he meets Perkus Tooth, an apartment-bound pot-smoking contrarian intellectual driven by conspiratorial thoughts at the fringes of pop culture, and gets caught up in Tooth’s associations, both human and cognitive.
I really enjoyed the book. Mostly, it’s a lot of fun. Lethem constructs a oompelling simulacrum of Manhattan, and teasing it out provides endless amusement. The mind-trip is well executed. And Lethem has evolved into a remarkable prose stylist, a master of metaphoric language, someone who can really paint with words in a way I haven’t read in a very long time.
If you like trippy fiction; if you’re a pop culture and literati junkie; if you already find Manhattan otherworldly, Chronic City is definitely worth a shot.
Movie review: UP IN THE AIR
Posted on | January 2, 2010 | No Comments
About a week ago, Stacy and I saw Up in the Air for one of our cherished (and too seldom) nights out (well, it was an afternoon out, but close enough). I enjoyed director Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking and felt that his Juno was better than the other 2007 best picture nominees that I had seen (yes, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), and so was looking forward to his latest. And I knew a fair bit about the movie going into it — if you listen to public radio podcasts about movies and entertainment, Reitman had been on all of them.
This is probably his weakest effort of his three films. It’s not a bad movie, and I thought it was basically okay. I was never bored, and didn’t want to leave midway, which for me is a sign that the film has something going for it. But the idea that Up in the Air is seriously considered a Best Picture candidate, much less considered the odds-on favorite, is appalling. That such a trifle, a wisp of a film is accorded such plaudits confuses me (until I look at the other candidates and realize, Hoo-boy, this was a lame year for movies.)
My dad’s tweet about the film captures my feelings pretty well: “UP IN THE AIR is a balloon filled with the hot stuff; it justs floats aloft, going nowhere fast, then deflates and crashes with a dull thud.” And I don’t mind that for the first 2/3rds or so the film goes nowhere. But, yeah, when it decides that it needs a resolution, it turns a corner toward an unfulfilling climax and denouement.
I think where Reitman fell down was a matter of tone. As he explained in his various interviews, the film was first conceived in a pre-recession world, and was originally planned to play a lot more arch, perhaps more like Thank You For Smoking. The recession hits, and no longer can you play laying people off for laughs. However, Reitman couldn’t let go of the humor altogether (it’s clearly his natural inclination), and so you get this tonal mish-mosh, and the movie loses its emotional resonance. Compare that with The Informant!, a similarly-scaled film, also relying on a movie star to carry it, but where the director (Steven Soderbergh) unwaveringly struck the same amplified tone throughout the entire film.
All that said, there is one remarkably powerful element in Up in the Air, one that struck me on first viewing, and has haunted me since. As Reitman explained in interviews, most of the people we see getting laid off in the film are people who actually had been recently laid off, and were asked to re-create the horrible moment of their firing. There’s one guys in particular, an African-American man, who’s eye starts twitching uncontrollably, and asks the firer: “What are you going to do this weekend? You have money in your bank? You got gas in your gas tank? You going to take your kids out to Chuck E. Cheese?” That man’s performance (and it’s hard to call it a performance because it doesn’t at all seem “performed”) floored me. It’s the one thing in that entire movie that stuck with me more than a couple hours later.
Linkblog
- Ravens Coach Brian Billick Tackles Super Bowl XLIV : NPR
February 6, 2010 | 10:03 amAs we approach the Super Bowl, I found this interview about what a coach really does surprisingly informative.
- Henrietta Lacks: A Donor’s Immortal Legacy
February 6, 2010 | 10:02 amThis is utterly fascinating. Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells are the world’s first immortal cells. I had never heard of HeLa cells before this interview with author Rebecca Skloot. Now I want to read the book.
- The Incredible San Fancisco Artists’ Soapbox Derby, 1975
February 4, 2010 | 8:00 am24 minute film about a truly delightful community endeavor. I don’t think SF has this kind of artist mojo any longer, but I’d love to see something like this Oakland, careening down Joaquin Miller Road.
- Paywalls, Blogs, Comments, Editing and Magazines: A Conversation with Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine | The Awl
February 4, 2010 | 7:37 amIf you’ve followed ftrain for the past 10+ years, you already know that Paul Ford is among the smartest people on the internet. This conversation with The Awl about pay models for publishing and his experience at Harpers is a little precious at times, but worth a read.
- Interview with Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed
February 2, 2010 | 8:12 amBloom County was among those key influences informing my sense of humor, including Monty Python, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Edward Gorey. This interview looks back to its creation.
- Axe Cop
January 31, 2010 | 9:52 pmSo awesome. And funny. The best comic ever written by a 5-year-old and drawn by his 29-year-old brother. I wanna Avocado Soldier t-shirt.
- Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 3 and 4
January 31, 2010 | 7:28 pmRick Prelinger collects archival, industrial, and found footage of San Francisco, and presents them as clips in front of live audiences. Delightful look at the city’s past.
- Roger Ebert’s best films of the decade
January 31, 2010 | 7:23 pmI’m a little late on linking to this. Historically, I’ve found Ebert to be far too forgiving a critic (he just loves movies too much and gives poor ones a pass), so I was surprised at how close his list is to mine (if I bothered to make one). Synecdoche, Me And You and Everyone We Know, even Juno.
- Taking Directions from Slime Mold
January 25, 2010 | 7:54 pmIf my colleague Kate Rutter were to have a spirit organism, it would be slime mold. Slime mold are bizarre, neither plant nor animal nor fungi, and they’ve become the poster species for self-organizing systems. Anyway, they can also design subway systems. Scroll down to listen to the piece about them.
- Where has all the popcorn gone?
January 24, 2010 | 4:20 pmThe folks on Chowhound have the same question I did the last time I went to the supermarket. Popcorn could become the next artisanal fetish.
- S.F.s Market Street changes as city evolves
January 23, 2010 | 8:07 amCarl Nolte does it again with an exploration of Market Street’s multiple personalities. The stretch between 6th and 9th is among the most depressing urban blights in the US.
- Online Dating: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
January 21, 2010 | 8:13 pmOKCupid.com is a dating site. OkTrends is where the people behind the site reveal insights discovered through statistical analysis of site behavior. It’s awesome.
- How to be a superstar bartender
January 18, 2010 | 8:39 pmExcellent set of explicit instructions for the basics of mixing drinks (measuring, shaking, stirring, twists, etc.)
- Unofficial Google Advanced Search
January 18, 2010 | 5:50 pmNifty cheat sheet for getting the most out of the magic text input box.
- The San Andreas Fault made startlingly real
January 18, 2010 | 4:41 pmRoll over for notes.
- Uh huh… Uh huh… “Beaver”
January 17, 2010 | 8:59 pmI laugh every time I think of a Canadian history magazine being named “The Beaver.”
- Radiolab: Animal Minds
January 17, 2010 | 1:33 pmYou should simply subscribe to the whole Radio Lab podcast, and if you need convincing, this latest episode on “Animal Minds” will sway you.
- The Coast of Dystopia
January 17, 2010 | 9:49 amIs The California Dream in tatters? It sure feels like it, though the state is still hard to resist.
- Mobile-phone culture: The Apparatgeist calls
January 16, 2010 | 5:52 pmHealthy reminder of how you cannot assume standard behavior when it comes to product use across cultures. I’m wary of the “Apparatgeist” – I tend to agree with Mimi Ito.
- Time Your Attack: Oracle’s Lost Revolution
January 16, 2010 | 5:45 pmTiming is everything, and 1999 was simply too soon for what proved to be many great ideas. (I worked at Epinions, which pre-saged much of “Web 2.0″.) An instructive article, though I wonder if, in part, Ellison doesn’t get the support/hype he seeks because, by all accounts, he’s such a dick.
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