kip/bot/blog

Oddly, this gives me hope #wearesoscrewed #wemightactuallymakeit

The fact that some one person, somewhere, or some bunch of kids being surveyed would convince people that a movie with owls as heroes (forchrissakes) would fly seriously gives me hope. Ferrealz.

Utility, Emotion, Apple, Think Different, I’m a Mac

The following video is getting a lot of tweetage (at least I’ve seen it from 6 of my less than 400 followees):

This is Steve Jobs in 1997, at an internal meeting setting up “Think Different”. I’ve always felt that Apple is a brand that thrives on much, much more than advertising despite its consistently famous spots. So I was surprised to see Jobs eschew “speed and feeds, MIPS and megahertz”, talk about core values so removed from the boxes, and even praise “Got Milk” because the spot’s primary virtue is that it doesn’t even contain the product (except for the milk moustache, and the word itself, of course, but hey). Did I need to think differently than I have in the past about the need for brands to move beyond the abstract emotional idea connected to an abstraction of the benefit the product endows on its owner? ( in other words, #crisisoffaith?)

Thankfully, no. There are a lot of reasons to consider this video something other than “an oldie but goodie” as the poster titled it.

0) This was a very specific moment in Apple’s history. Jobs had just returned as Apple’s CEO and nearly everything about the company had worsened during his absence: focus, quality, understanding of users, design sensibility. While Apple was a world-famous brand even then, its smallish market share still marked it as insurgent — much beloved, to be sure, but by a small, fervently loyal audience that was turning fervently disloyal and feeling betrayed. A bold, 1984-like declaration that the brand was returning to core values, in other words a re-statement of the brand, is exactly what advertising is good for and the Apple audience, the advocates and the embittered alike, are always sufficiently passionate to be reliable viewers and consumers of Apple advertising.

1) This was in 1997, so consumer behaviors were still pre-internet. Yes, Bill Gates had, two years previously, admitted the boneheaded mistake of missing the importance of the internet, but AOL and Netscape and dial-up were still king. A look at archive.org shows that neither consumers nor brands knew the importance of the internet in customer conversation, information spread and transparency, and disintermediation.

2) “Think Different” ran five years before the “Switch” campaign (which featured my veterinarian!) returned to something closer to speeds and feeds, utility, and comparative performance over the Windows-based PC. WSwitch” was short-lived (a little over two years), but there is narrative continuity to “I’m a Mac” in the content. While “1984″ and “Think Different” were high-level statements of high-minded corporate values, the last 8 years of Apple advertising have been very, very focused on the boxes (or cases) and what they do for users, especially in comparison to the bumbling competition.

Reminding myself of these things, I am now much relieved that I don’t need to re-think anything. #braincellssavedforassassinscreed

Coda: anytime I think about Apple advertising, I fondly remember Kevin Costner looking very relaxed and successful while contemplating a simple spreadsheet with his dog nearby. Oh, that I could have a job this taxing:

Designing an HTML tag . . . is actually fascinating

I’m getting up to speed on the upcoming tech wave by reading the finally published “HTML5 Up and Running”, by Mark Pilgrim. That sentence just feels sad (though necessary), but the first chapter of the book is really, really interesting. In a section titled “A Long Digression into how Standards Are Made”, Pilgrim walks us through a three week email thread that covers the origin and (pretty much) final resolution of the IMG tag.

The thread begins on February 25, 1993, with Marc Andreesen writing:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm“>

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to
suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can'’ and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Let me know what you think………

Cheers,
Marc

–
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

For the next three weeks, a number of programmer types, including Tim Berners-Lee, discuss a whole range of ideas for how this much-needed tag should be developed. It’s worth a read or two, since it highlights several open source, design, and software dynamics. Even in the note above you see a bunch of things:

The presence of shared, common language. One of the hardest things about organizations where teams are important is building a common vocabulary. Actually, it’s less about the vocabulary and more about building a precise understanding of what the words in the vocabulary mean. In my job, even the word ‘app’ can have too precise a meaning (iPhone or iPad app) or too loose (anything on the web that isn’t pure messaging or might contain a button). The thread started with the note above is remarkable for its precise, simple language and writing styles which conform to the expectations of other while personalities and passions still come through.

The idea is presented with a clear rationale, an awareness of its shortcomings, and a genuine openness to improvement and realization that something may have been missed. The thread goes on to propose some very different approaches to how to mark up images, and Andreesen ultimately sticks to his initial proposal but leaves things open to a better evolution saying “we’re not prepared to support [a different approach] at this point” and that specifics will be in place “for the time being.”

The conversation has a mix of ideal principles and the need to ship and finds a balance. More important, the decision-maker(s) are aware of the balance and compromise. Intel has an internal mantra that people need to “disagree, but commit” to the imperfect, different, or inferior solution that wins the day. Too often, that “commit”ment can turn into group-think that forgets that the decision needs to be revisited, involved necessary compromises, or creates serious problems elsewhere. Everyone on this thread is aware and keeps track of the issues that are left open or created while other issues are closed.

The thread operated comfortably and, again, in a self-aware fashion, at many altitudes. Tim Berners-Lee talked about user confusion while supporting the theoretical superiority of INCLUDE (a tighter, more pure, but more time consuming approach), another person suggests “maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural graphics language” (let’s acknowledge that markup languages are not up to this and rethink the whole thing), while others tweak the proposed structure of the tag.

There is very little preciousness — about ideas, implementations, territory, intellectual/engineering integrity — to be found. I’ve worked with engineers, and written code myself, for almost a dozen years, and was surprised to the point of shocked to see how matter of fact, and yet rigorous, a group of programmers could be, especially on a medium (email) that was at the time new and where etiquette was still evolving.

The book is worth a read and this chapter is really illuminating.
You can view the Andreesen post and click through the thread here.

The simplest data tells/inspires a story

A colleague (Ed) walked into my office today saying something about “becoming a doctor” when he came through the door. Slow on the uptake, I needed the explanation that this was a reference to Field of Dreams, specifically the scene where Burt Lancaster, playing Moonlight Graham had to leave the eternal youth of the field to save Kevin Costner’s kid who was choking on a hot dog. All of which brought to mind the tidbit I had to tell Ed: Moonlight Graham was a real player and the story was true!

I always assumed that W. P. Kinsella, the author of Shoeless Joe the novel on which the movie was based, was a baseball nerd who browsed the sadly no-longer needed Baseball Encyclopedia and found that one line of data that inspired a story.

I owned a copy of Baseball Encyclopedia and got goosebumps when it occurred to me to look up Moonlight Graham and see if he really existed. There it was. This guy got to put on a uniform, get on the official scorecard, maybe even took the field, but didn’t get to bat. Out of that line of zeroes, a string of non-data, really, Kinsella imagined a whole potential person and life story. Dig it.

My mind is a Quad Graph and Venn Free Zone

Way too many Venn diagram sweet spots and quad graphs (up and to the right!) in my life right now. For the next month, I will not reduce any thinking, people, or concepts to a two-axis or four overlapping point construct. Watch the awesome take-down by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society:

It is better not to speak . . .

’nuff said.

Underemployed agency people

Start at the bottom (and, keep in mind, that @kipbot and @thegaf do have a legitimate point. #FFusMrPrez

And happy birthday to Ms theGaf!

kip/bot/blog Compelling Curiosities roundup

Links from the week, worth bubbling up for future reference:

A really great analysis of how Yankee closer Mariano Rivera manages to dominate pitchers with a single pitch (cutter + the fastball). It’s what multi-media should be about — useful graphics explain pitch distributions, ball motion, how a batter perceives the pitches and the grip. Really great stuff. Must watch.

Fun old video of a dude demoing a Creative Labs keyboard with keys mapped to drum sounds. “This is rock and roll.” You need to watch the whole thing. Ferrealz.

A disgusting old advertisement in which sugar tries to convince parents that sugar, “isn’t just good flavor, it’s good food.” That segues nicely into a redemptive piece by advertising creative guru/pioneer/wizard and other stupendous word Alex Bogusky in which he argues that advertising should give awards for not doing things — start by refusing to advertise to kids.

Interesting piece for advertising types in which ad creatives are interviewed at Cannes about big ideas and trends in communciations.

MAKER ethos on failure

A couple months ago, I posted about the need to improve the way we celebrate failure. My big beef was the lack of accountability within the word fail and the inability to distinguish between a useful failure and a f#$%-up. Still think that, but have found two expressions of failure that have boundaries, express the point of failing, and are useful.

The first one comes from Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. Frauenfelder is a founder of boingboing and editor in chief of Make Magazine. The book covers his post-dot-boom look for a less expensive, less frivolous, more meaningful life. Three goals he and his wife set out for themselves were: 1) “take more control of our lives”; 2) “cut throught the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear”; and 3)”forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us.” The book’s chapter are walks through of various moments and types of DIY living, thinking and playing: how to kill your front lawn to make room for a garden; DIYing a better, cheaper source of coffee than Starbucks; making music with homemade instruments. (Sadly, no electronics.)

Anyway, the second chapter is titled “The Courage to Screw Things Up.” It’s designed to get people over the learning curve of DIY, one which is messy, costs some money, might get you an electric shock, some nasty cuts, some ruined clothes, and the occasional hole in a wall. DIY types classically take on a project that’s too big for them, muck it up, and then quit. MisterJalopy, a legendary maker (who remains anonymous), counsels that you embrace those early screw-ups, not just to get past them:

No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrong-headed and foolish. Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up

Fraunefelder summarizes: the act of failing “is the only way to equip [yourself] with the mental toolbox of a successful DIYer”. That works for me. Fits in with the notion of failing as experimenting — failures are paths to learning more about your materials, the techniques of the craft and how they interact with environmental factors, and in taking apart a problem and putting together solutions. Dig it.

The other one comes from the Make: Electronics book. It’s a simple slogan: “Burn things out, mess things up — that’s how you learn.” Again, a call for experimenting. When you burn out a component, like an LED light, you learn about polarity (especially if it’s your last one), you learn about current, surges in electricity, resistance and capacitance. Mess things up is a nice phrase to use, since it pushes you into a ‘mixing things up’ place — the tinkerer’s idea of grabbing anything that works, taking it apart and seeing if you can’t make it work a little better or differently or just figure out what it does. Frauenfelder has a nice line about Misterjalopy:

I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodelled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities … In his world, the things around you should have meaning, and his way of giving them meaning is by collecting, customizing, rebuilding, and combining them in ways that make him happy.

(Mister Jalopy can be found at www.hooptyrides.com)

For the electronics plateau, a boost from MAKE

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!