kip/bot/blog

When I was learning to program in C/C++, for several days/weeks and on several attempts I hit the pointers plateau — that thing which, conceptually, I couldn’t get my head around sufficiently to really grok the damn things. I eventually took a class that spent three weeks on it and now I understand them — their purpose, their usage, their style and how to troubleshoot them. A couple summers ago, I took a geek vacation between jobs and worked my way through the NYU ITP Physical Computing class curriculum and dug deeper into some Arduino stuff.

After a couple weeks, I hit a plateau. I needed things like shift registers to multiply the number of LEDs I could manage with the Arduino’s 13 pins; I needed to use a 555 timer chip to get pulsing, and there was a whole range of chips starting named 74______ that were described as “hugely useful” or “workhorses”. These things were critical and basic, like pointers, but (like pointers) it was impossible to find documentation for them that was comprehensible to someone with my level of experience. It was one of the weird places where the web let me down. I must have done dozens of searches, asked everyone I could for help, and could find nothing. Which is a drag, cuz those chips are what give real ooomph to physical computing projects.

Make Magazine has fixed that with Make: Electronics, an unusually good book even by O’Reilly standards. It contains in-depth explanations of how transistors and logic gates work at the physical level — giving you a more intuitive sense of how to work with them (rather than following steps by rote); detailed descriptions of the pins at three levels: the official specs, the occasional nomenclature, and the actual function; and some simple circuits that show what the thing does. The last might be the most important. Even the most basic 555 Timer chip examples I could find had so much stuff going on that it was impossible to isolate the chip and learn, iteratively through tweaking the code, what the things does. To top it off, the Maker Shed Store has a components kit that pulls all the stuff (including jumper wires) together for you.

The one weird thing about the book is in the index:

What the hell kind of alphabetization system is this?

Of course, it’s not like I have time to do anything on my nifty hand-made workbench. But it’s nice to have it when I’m ready. Hope springs eternal. Put differently.

while (!endOfUniverse)
hope.spring();
;

Ha!

B&N’s “pick me up” is a great cross-channel integration. I’m using my fantasy baseball drafts as a reason to finally learn a Mac-OSX database program, specifically FileMaker Pro. According to bn.com, “The Missing Manual” for FMP appears to be available at the Park Slope store. I signed up to have someone to reserve the book for me and here’s the confirmation:

In the next couple hours, I’m supposed to get an email telling me the book is there. I love how they took any possible confusion out of the process — ‘don’t come to the store’ till you get the email, give the email about an hour. I just did it a few minutes ago, so the only possible room for annoyance is if I just don’t get an email and I have no idea how to track the request. Still, it’s pretty cool.

====

UPDATE: In less than an hour, I got both my email and a text message. Pretty sweet.

I don’t know if I’m just noticing this or if it’s new. But it’s kind of weird — Amazon is touting books that have ‘deckle edge’. I originally thought it was an effect of when books needed the pages cut before reading, but it’s actually an effect of papermilling:

Definition: The ragged edge of the paper as it comes from the papermaking machine is the deckle edge. Handmade paper normally has 4 deckle edges while machinemade paper has two. Normally it is cleanly cut. Left in place, the deckle edge becomes a decorative, textured edging. An imitation or fake deckle edge can be created by tearing or sawing the edge of the paper.

Smoothing the edges is an extra cost, of course, and there have always been books — cheap pulpy, genre stuff, and higher end literary stuff — with the edges. But now it’s being called out as a feature of the book:

Right around the time eReading is set to experience another wave of growth . . . curious.

I finally hit a wall with the Kindle where I could no longer continue reading a book on the device and had to get a pressed-pulp book. The book is Dickens’s Bleak House. The factors that moved it into unKindleable, and which make me think there are serious limits to the academic application of the Kindle are:

- complex, rich novel
- first time reading of the novel
- taking notes for more than the recall of a passage
- not a translation, and a deeper engagement in the language

I think Dickens, in particular, provides some challenges for e-reading. His long, circuitous sentences - loaded with asides and interjections - cross Kindle pages in ways that make the button navigation and screen flashes unbearable. Less particular to Dickens, but more to 19th century British writers, the language poses a challenge too. The otherwise convenient in-line dictionary lookup function is helpful less than half the time in Bleak House because the subtlety of the word choice isn’t covered in the dictionary (small dictionary limited definitions), the particulars of the word’s use isn’t covered (British vs American dictionary), or the word isn’t covered at all (19th c.).

Before diving into the real problems with reading Bleak House on Kindle, some things that did work:

Footnotes are very convenient on the Kindle - highlighting the note, clicking the d-button, reading the footnote and then hitting “Back” to return to the text sounds arduous but is actually fantastic. Looking up footnotes with a big brick of a paperback can be a sufficiently prohibitive drag to make me just ignore the reference or word that I don’t understand and stick to the larger flow. (Whether the footnotes are worth reading is a different matter, of course. In my Kindle edition, they ranged from useful historical information, to the explanation of the image or metaphor, to cheesy HS English tips for understanding the book.)

Connecting margin notes to specific text is also an improvement on the Kindle. In paper, you typically have to cram something into the margin and then draw a line to the passage or word the comment refers to, or do an asterisk in the text, and then an asterisk on the note. Kindle is kind of handy in this regard.

Margin notes in general are cleaner and clearer without the space limits of the margin on the paper, it’s possible to take much clearer (no abbreviations or omitted words) and much more legible (no sideways or cramped handwriting, it’s all keyboard) notes.

Now for the #fail part. To transition into the downsides of the Kindle when reading a rich, complex, non-translated book for the first time, an image:

This is a page from Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘teaching edition’ of Madame Bovary. It can be found in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. The book itself is great. Nabokov’s lectures are opinionated, rich, and show how exciting a deep read of a book can be. Each lecture is accompanied by a page from his teaching edition. And the image above shows some of the problems the Kindle potentially solves: tight margins creating illegible notes, the difficulty of noting a particular word choice.

This picture also begins to highlight the problems of the Kindle. The first problem is access to the notes. On the Kindle, there is no scanning for notes. Many times, I’ll try to find a note or passage which I imperfectly remember — I remember the spirit of the passage, or I remember that I put a question mark next to it, or I remember simply that I made a note in a particular scene. On the Kindle, I need some precise information to do a search, or I’m stuck browsing through all my notes.

A bigger problem is when I have more complex notes. The left hand side of the page is mostly highlighting or attaching a comment to a part of the page. But the right hand side is much richer and deeper. On that side you see Nabokov connecting one word to another (in this case a word associated with a character) and highlighting how the sentence structure works or is altered in translation. Kindling Bleak House, I quickly got frustrated at how hard it was to connect Dickens’s carefully worded and important description of a character’s physical attributes to the actual character. In a book, I would circle the name and connect it to the phrase, making it easy to find and emphasizing that relationship. Not easy on Kindle. It was also hard to track the evolution and repetition of word choices with Kindle’s note-taking. The start of Bleak House is all about atmospherics of muddy, foggy, smoky London and the people moving through it and its thick air. Noting what makes it work, or how it connects to the muddy, foggy, smoky Chancery Court is impossible with the Kindle.

Another Nabokov screen highlights both his intense reading and a dimension of the note-taking problem that seems unsolvable for several more years. This one is from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

OK, not everyone is going to spend time to draw the specifics of Gregor Samsa’s transformation. And some of Nabokov’s extensive note-taking simply can’t be done in the book and forces him onto plain sheets of paper: a map of Leopold Bloom’s circuits through Dublin, a map of England highlighting the action in Bleak House, a floor plan of the houses in Mansfield Park (all to be found in the book). But it does highlight a problem with all e-readers and tablets and the iPad, the obvious and reflexive answer to which is “give the reader a touch screen and a stylus.” But the resolution is just too low for good note-taking. Anyone who has worked with a tablet over the years or drawn on the iPhone has seen that the lines are unusably jaggy, the letters look terrible, even an asterisk or a simple circle is impossible to use. The iPad video mentions that there are 1000 touch points on the new screen, which is quite a lot but nowhere near enough to be a meaningful input/note-taking device.

The last bit of suck in reading a rich, serious book on the Kindle is random access. I’m using the phrase loosely, but the idea is that this kind of reading experience (and re-reading and referencing) benefits from or requires the ability to jump around in the book quickly — going back to a character introduction, following a passage that covers several pages, recalling a passage of dialog — in order to re-orient yourself, or, more importantly, follow a development or theme. Not a big deal with a lighter weight business book or genre fiction, but maddeningly off-putting for deeper reads of deeper stuff. (Random access has always been a problem with e-readers - even with the wheel of the first Kindle or the side buttons of the Sony Reader, this seems unsolveable - but in the context of this kind of book, is crippling rather than merely inconvenient.)

So, my personal choice was to switch over to a Penguin edition. It will solve most of the problems above and leave me with the problem of how to turn a page on the subway, the dilemma of whether to find the footnote or just keep reading, and force me into tighter, messier note-writing on the margin. If I want to read deeper (and enjoy more), it seems I have to let go of Kindle-y conveniences.

Which raises the bigger issue: is my Kindle making me a sloppier, less thoughtful reader? I have a line that “I read more and better in less time” with the Kindle. This line is practically a reflex when people ask me about it. I think it holds true for middle-brow reading, work stuff, and periodicals, but I’m worried about more complex books. Is my reading style flightier and more focused on catching the high points and moving onto the next book now?

One of the few ‘technology is hurting us’ arguments I’ve ever bought is Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly piece about the new cognitive style being created by Google. (I blogged it here, the original article is here.) The key passage that threw me off in Carr’s article seems relevant to the Kindle-enforced shallowness of my reading of Bleak House:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

I don’t think there’s economic interest in the Kindle making us shallower readers, but I think it is a natural outcome of the design — at least for encounters with new books or books that require deeper engagement and a record of that engagement.

A new book-reading group from Penguin recommends the top ten classics that everyone should read. The reason to read them?

Why read classic works of literature? There are a myriad of reasons, just one of which is to catch the numerous references that appear in movies, television, politics, and throughout pop culture. In the above video, you can see a trailer for a short film we produced showing what happens to a hapless young suitor who hasn’t read our Essential Classics.

That was disappointing . . . read the classics so you can follow popular culture references (which pop culture artifact references Oedpius beyond the already known sleeping with mom or maybe tearing ones eyes out gag?). I would have had a lot more respect for the outside chance of impressing women or making people feel bad about themselves when you drop little literary bombs on a conversation.

Happily, I was pleased to find I had read all but The Inferno. But even then, I’ve bought several copies of The Divine Comedy’s various volumes over the years with serious, I mean serious, intent to read them. I feel good about that. And you know what? I don’t actually know any references from Dante (aside from the uncommitted cursed to chasing a blank banner — I like that one), so I may be missing a whole bunch of references in 24 or The Unit.

Speaking of 24, Season 7 of Jack Damnit Bauer is my current exercise motivation. Jack has been exposed to some weaponized bionanotechnocellulonucleo whoozeewhatsit and is, apparently, waiting to die, wishing he could lead a mission but knowing that that would endanger the mission and the men on it. He is already dead. Positively Shakespearean. Good night sweet prince.

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Just signed up for bookarmy this morning. Someone had posted on an old entry of mine that it was pretty good, but first impressions can be killer. Leaving aside some confusing design issues (a mix of authors, readers, reviews, publisher descriptions, and user-generated content threw me off), the first recommendation was beyond terrible. After you sign-up, you ‘get started now!’ by entering a book. I entered my standard Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not only is it a favorite book that I go back to again and again, it’s also the classic example of how weak recommendation systems are — Amazon seems to always indicate that if I liked that book by Milan Kundera, I might like these books. Until very recently, all these other books are invariably by Milan Kundera — like reading more of this author hadn’t occurred to me.

So what did I get at bookarmy?

In fairness, the top listings can be hard to sort out, so I went to the second page of recos:

This would almost have to be driven entirely by “people who read this also read this” with little to no reliance on even basic publishing data such as genre, period, fic/non-fic. Bummer. I’ll give it a few more titles.

I don’t know if this was always the plan, or if this was an easy thing to do, but I feel well served as a Kindle owner (almost enough to be not pissed about the big Kindle), and impressed by Amazon.

Got an email this morning:

This is a for-real need I’ve experienced often — I highlight a passage in a book I’m reading on my Kindle. Later, when I need it for a blog post or to send to someone in a mail or for use in a document I’m writing, I have to open the Kindle, find the quote and type it in. Hard to read and type, hard to find, and little context (when you can only see small sections of a small number of notes). The Kindle site, sparse but pretty fast fixes (most of) that:

While my kindle experience has generally been a love-fest, there are some areas where it falls short and I feel the pain:

- the digital version of books don’t always preserve section breaks within chapters. This is especially true in novels, the kindle format sometimes loses the extra paragraph break or first word capitalization that indicates a shift in scene

- some weird capitalization/italicizations appear or linger in the digital versions of some books. I think this is mostly classics, but the last three public domain things I’ve read (two Austens and a Dickens, which, to be honest I haven’t and may never complete) have random-seeming words appear in caps. it’s very jarring

- taking notes can be funky. When you highlight passages of periodicals, you lose those highlights when you store them at Amazon and take them off of your kindle (yes, I’ve spent enough money to fill my kindle memory and my sd card). It’s not really fair to complain that Amazon should store the state of my book, but it is a difference between the book and the kindle

- Random access::difficulty moving through sections. this is the biggest problem. It’s nearly impossible to quickly navigate between sections or highlights of a book.

- real note-taking. While the commenting function of the kindle (with its keyboard) is useful, it’s still less rich, and yes less satisyfing, than having an open book next to an open notebook where you scribble madly. I was wrong earlier, this may be the biggest drawback.

That all said, I still love the thing. And I have to say, I am so over the smell of the books and the sound of the riffling pages thing. I still love my big-ass Riverside Shakespeare and still think there’s a certain majesty to my illustrated Dickens, first edition Orwell, and bound series (like POwell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”, which seems larger as four bound volumes, rather than 12 single ones published under different marketing sensibilities), but I’m not bumming too heavy. AND, during a miserable plane ride where I had kids on all four sides of me, it was wonderful to switch from a work-related book, to Thomas Friedman, to the paper, to a piece of pulp trash like The Camel Club and find the right reading rhythm.

And think of all the trees I’m saving . . . *hugs self-righteous self.