During the first year I had this handheld vac, never once did a full charge of the battery last more than 5 minutes. When it got down to less than 3 minutes, I spoke to your support representatives, who told me that the charger was probably defective, and sent me a new one. That helped for a short period of time, and I lived with it.

However, I’ve reconsidered. I no longer want to own this device. Its complete inadequacy at the task for which it was designed plagues me, and I am sufficiently disgusted with it that I cannot bear to pass it on to someone else. Nor am I willing to just throw it in the garbage – it is not worthy to even contribute to landfill somewhere.

I am therefore left with no choice but to return it to you. Please do as you see fit.”

The proponents of the free market often propose that private ownership gives people an incentive to make the most of resources, and that people with ownership incentive are likely to make the best decisions about the use of resources.

I tend to agree in many cases – the market does often work and find the best solution, but I’ve been mulling over some exceptions to that rule.

Some traps that individual decisions in the market can fall into:

1) Divergent interests: the interests of the owning party may not be the same as the general public.

2) Irrationality: people don’t always act rationally or in their best interest.

2a) Obscured Information: even in the face of good information, which is often not present, the right decision isn’t evident.

3) Vested Interest: ownership of a thing is not the same as stewardship of a thing, and if you don’t have a personal vested interest in the thing, your best use of it may be to divest yourself of it (i.e.: use it up, parcel it, consume it) in exchange for lots of short term money you can use to buy something you actually want.

4) Value dilution: the more stuff you own, the less you care about any given individual thing. Ownership of lots of things probably means that each individual one is less valuable, because the value of a thing must be measured not just against the external market value, but also its proportion to your total assets, difficulty to replace, your incentive to replace it if you lose it, sentimental value, subsidiary values (prestige from ownership, etc…), and a whole host of other things.

5) Lack of patience and susceptibility to fear: People in control of a thing may require immediate access to it (liquidity), and will sometimes act to preserve that liquidity at the expense of the health of the overall economy, and therefore at the expense of some value of the underlying asset. This happens even though the people controlling an asset may be able to see the writing on the wall – everyone will be fine if everyone sits tight, but if you wait and someone else moves first, you lose. I think this usually manifests as “private enterprise tends to seek short-term gains”, but it’s tightly tied to #6:

6) The Tragedy of the Selfish: this is a concept I’ve been toying with on and off for a few years. It’s not the Tragedy of the Commons, and it’s not quite the Tragedy of the Anticommons, though there are aspects of both in there, as well as an arms race component, and some Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is the situation that exists when an individual makes what is logically the best decision to maximize their own position, but the sum effect of everybody making their best decisions is that everybody ends up worse off rather than better. Libertarian capitalism hinges on the assumption that making everybody individually better off is the best way to maximize the happiness of the group, and it’s simply the case that there are situations where that assumption does not hold. The example I often use for this is buying an SUV to be safer on the road. You buy an SUV, then other people do, because they want to be safer too. Except that if enough people make that same decision, you’ve overall raised the chances that if you’re hit by a car, it’ll be an SUV, which will do much more damage than a smaller car. Everyone is better off if everyone else backs off and drives smaller cars. It’s a simplification, of course, but I hope that makes the point.

That’s what I’ve come up with so far. I’m sure there are more. Of course these don’t always apply, but I think at least one of them does often enough to warrant a better justification that “the market will solve the problem”. They’re certainly things to watch out for when getting out of the way and letting the market work.

What do you think?

http://www.aquick.org/blog/topics/really-good-stuff/

There’s also a feed:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/topics/really-good-stuff/feed

I’ve been going back through the archives (and wow, there are a lot of archives!) and putting old stuff in there. I’ve gotten a lot of it, but not all of it.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=J0XZ58STDWJZ5QY4F9M0&signature=AiiDWIlwk21vgw1bn5UhVpRDZ2w%3D&iteratorSkipGroup=false&hitId=B8KZ23NCDS4ZY1ZVXVF0&externalHit=false

This is pretty extraordinary.

Tags: jim gray, amazon mechanical turk, lost

http://growl.info

There’s also a command line tool that lets you send notifications to growl from scripts. I wrote a cron job to do time notifications:

0,15,30,45 * * * * /bin/date +\%m/\%d/\%y\%n\%H:\%M:\%S | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n BEEP -I /Applications/Countdown.app

I set the “BEEP” application in growl to use the bezel style, and I get a flash every 15 minutes in the middle of the screen to remind me that time is passing. (I used the icon from countdown because it was the only application I had with a clock.)

I really can’t express how useful this is. I’ve never been quite happy with how any of the IM programs I’ve used have handled notifications, but Adium integrates deeply with growl and has allowed me to set things up exactly as I want, so that I see the important things, but I don’t get cluttered up with having to click on every little notification to make them all go away.

This is very very good.

Tags: growl, productivity, notifier, useful

I have a Dyson upright vacuum, and it is quite simply far far better than any other vacuum cleaner I’ve ever owned. I bought the newly released Dyson Root 6, the handheld model.

The only handheld that doesn’t lose suction… while it has charge.

It’s outstandingly good from a cleaning perspective – it does actually work very very well. But what they don’t tell you is that while the battery does charge faster than others (3.5 hours), it only lasts for 5 minutes on a charge. As a result, it’s really only good for spot cleaning, and not as a general purpose dusting vacuum, which means it misses an entire big use case of a handheld vacuum – carrying it around while cleaning the house to use for dusting shelves, surfaces, ledges, nooks, crannies, etc…. When I did this, I very quickly found that I had a completely dead battery, and I had to charge it again for 3.5 hours before being able to use it again.

What’s happened here is that, like Apple, Dyson has decided that they’re going to focus on one usage pattern (keep the vac in the charger and pull it out occasionally for spills and then put it right back in the charger) and optimize that pattern, completely ignoring any other possible uses that the customer might want to put the device to. Unfortunately, in this case, I think they’re going to be hard pressed to find many people willing to shell out $150 just for spot cleaning. Because of the real-world mechanics of lithium-ion batteries, the expected usage pattern of the vac (keep it in the charger most of the time so it’s always ready for short bursts) is at odds with the strategy for maximizing the life of the battery (drain the battery completely, then recharge fully before using again), and in a year, the effective run time will be 2.5 minutes, not 5. The value proposition would be a lot better if they included a spare battery or two that you could leave in the charger and swap out with the dead one, so you could at least rotate them and have some expectation of having a live one if you’re actually using the thing. Arguably, it has advantages over, say, a dustbuster, but at at least 3-5 times the cost for less than half of the usage pattern, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

I might have been more receptive to this idea if they’d said outright – “look, we made it work for 5 minutes, but for those 5 minutes, it’ll work much better than any other handheld vac”. But they didn’t. They completely glossed over this glaring design failure, and it’s kind of a surprise. Judging from the tone of voice of the customer service tech I called to find out if this was normal, they’ve been getting this question a lot, and it sounds like they’re a bit insulted that people would harp on something that they don’t consider to be a failure while overlooking the substantial advantages that they have produced. It’s almost a case study in misunderstanding the requirements of your audience. A 5 minute battery life is not an acceptable feature for a handheld vac, and if there’s a good reason why it should be, Dyson should have made some effort to educate people instead of just throwing it out there and letting people figure it out for themselves. I suspect that there isn’t, and this is just a design flaw that they haven’t been able to fix and one they’re trying to ignore. The users of the device, unfortunately, aren’t granted such a luxury, and the failings of it are far more evident than the successes.

That said, it’s certainly an open question about whether to return it or not, because those five minutes definitely suck as much as they should.

Tags: dyson, root 6, dyson root 6, handheld vac, vacuum, vac, lithium-ion, poor battery life

http://cravingideas.blogs.com/backinskinnyjeans/2006/09/how_to_explain_.html

Tags: oprah, rss, simple

http://backspace.com/notes/2006/03/28/x.html

Tags: subway, NYC, direction, compass, navigation, compass rose

http://www.kottke.org/05/12/the-best-links-2005

The story of my Tuesday Morning commute!

Strike? Not a problem. I’m a good New Yorker. I can make things work.

I live up in the Bronx, around 250th Street and realized that if the HOV-4 mandate was going to go into effect at 5:00 AM, I was just going to have to wake up earlier. Out the door at 4:15, past 96th street by 4:45 at the latest. I’m at work with a hot cup of coffee before the whole problem can begin.

Piece of cake.

I begin my commute and realize immediately that something is wrong. It takes me a couple blocks to realize that I am riding in my car with a flat tire. If I were not a business owner with a responsibility to my business, my workers and the general global economy, I probably should have taken this as an opportunity to stay home.

Instead, I changed my tire. Given the pothole situation in the City, I’ve done this before. Again, this by itself is not a problem. Fifteen minutes definitely beats my brother-in-law in terms of time to fix a flat. This morning, however, time was crucial. I get back on the road and race down to 96th Street, where I see many lights flashing at the blockade point. I look at the clock.

5:01.

I am, of course, alone in my car.

I am deftly swept from the highway by flashing lights and three men in blue. It was poetic. They waved me to the right onto the exit ramp and I was back out, literally the second car swept off the Henry Hudson Parkway of the morning.

At this point, I figure that the only thing to do now is find some passengers. This is, after all, the intention of the blockade in the first place: to force a carpool to make sure transportation works like clockwork. It’s time to trawl the streets looking for some people who needed a ride.

But who is awake at five in the morning? The city that never sleeps, let me tell you, is quite dormant at 5:00 AM. The only people I could find were some homeless people and some intrepid early-risers in pajamas with cameras, tracking the chaos that was beginning to accumulate. None of these people were eager to take a ride — and very quickly, I realized I wasn’t the only car on the streets looking for passengers. This started to get a little serious.

At some point, I realized that finding people to go all the way was becoming a fruitless endeavor — but perhaps that wasn’t necessary either. Perched as I was now between 96th and 97th on Columbus Avenue, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. To get past the blockade, all I needed were four people in my car.

Even if they were only going for one block.

But how can I convince people to go just one block?

I decided to fall back on that good old American pastime: I would bribe people.

I started with my brother, who was conveniently located on Columbus Avenue and who I had already awakened several times trying to figure out what to do. I went to his building and found one onlooker, still in her pajamas and another woman who was on her way to the gym, unperturbed by the situation since she was already on vacation.

“Look,” I said, “I am willing to offer both of you $20 to ride one block with me.”

A couple eyebrows went up. After all, this really sounds like a proposition for the red light district. “Are you serious?” said gym girl.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“I don’t need the money, ” said the pajama lady, “I’ll just go along for the ride.”

Great, now I have three people. I called my brother again. “Come downstairs.” “What?” “No, really, come downstairs.” “In a few minutes.” “Just put on your coat and shoes and come down here. I have two people waiting, I’ll take you one block and then you can go home to sleep.” Younger brothers can be worn down in this manner. He relented, came downstairs with a grumpy attitude but with his coat on.

Due to the cold, we made a mad dash for the car. I started up and drove back to the blockade. The police shone flashlights in the car, counted us, and allowed us to proceed.

Fifteen feet beyond the police barricades, I pulled over. The gym girl said, “Happy holidays.” I passed her back a twenty. The woman in the pajamas said, “You know what? I’ll take you up on your offer after all.” I passed her a twenty. I looked at my brother. “You want one, too?” “Sure… why not,” he said, grabbing the bill before I had even finished the question, already going out the door.

On 95th Street, I’m alone in my car again and think to myself that this is how to negotiate a transit strike on $60 a day.

It then took me ten minutes to get from there to West Soho to work. No traffic, after all. If it were any other day, I would think I was fortunate to have found no traffic. But the empty streets pointed to the ridiculous situation that this strike has caused. People shouldn’t have to go through this rigmarole. It’s just wrong.

Besides, when I got to work, eager to have that hot cup of coffee that got me out the door in the first place, I discovered that there was no place around there open to buy coffee from. After all, the coffee brewers were having a hard time getting into the City as well. No Dunkin Donuts, no neighborhood deli, no guy on the corner. On a cold December morning, it’s a sad day in New York City when you can’t get a cup of coffee.

I took some pictures this morning by the traffic blockades on 96th Street, where the NYPD was preventing people with fewer than 4 in the car from passing.

I really love the Metlife Building. It always looks very pretty lit up at night, but I happened by it just as the sun was setting the other day, and it just got this amazing glow about it.

The cube is back.

I just started playing around with macro photography, using a set of extension tubes on my existing lenses.

It’s fun!

During a recent discussion about Star Wars, it occurred to me to wonder what it was that Obi-Wan was doing on Tatooine for all those years when he was supposed to be watching over Luke, and then I realized that it had already been answered by the first thing we see him doing in Star Wars.

This weekend, I helped out at the Compleat Sculptor booth making chocolate fingers for the kids at the show. I took a bunch of pictures of the booth and the rest of the show.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?id=33120

Ask What’s That Bug:

http://www.whatsthatbug.com/

I have, however, changed the base font, as some have complained about that.

Is it better?

http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=30382&category=main

Okay, they’ve cleaned up the interface a bit by grouping related things into similar boxes that are actually labeled, and I’m told that the interface elements are all vector-based so you can resize them arbitrarily. That’s nice.

But.

Over many years of designing custom content management interfaces for lots of people to use, it became crystal clear that there’s a huge difference between a “tool” and a “task”. A tool is a function that lets the user do something, but a task is a function that lets the user accomplish something.

In my experience, most successful content management interfaces are primarily task-based. When the user sits down in front of the computer, the goal is to get something done, not just use some tools. Tasks are for most people (beginners and power users alike), but tools are for power users. If you know what you want to do, but it doesn’t fit nicely into the framework of getting something done, you need a tool. Tasks should be the default.

This is why the new Office UI is still confusing – it’s full of tools.

Let’s take Word as an example. The forefront example of tools vs. tasks is the question “why is there still a font box?”, and the corollary question “why do the font options still occupy a huge chunk of prime screen real estate?”. Changing the font is a “tool function”. When you change the font in a document, you haven’t really accomplished anything. Sure, you’ve made it look different, but “making it look different” probably wasn’t the goal. What you were really doing is the unspoken “drawing attention to this text” or “making it match the company colors” or any number of other things that aren’t just “making it look different”. With a tool, you can “make it look different”, but it requires a lot of input from the user in order to get the rationale right, and this is why expert users get frustrated when beginniners change the fonts and their results don’t match their intent. The software shouldn’t make it easy to change the font without understanding why. There should be tasks centered around things you might want to do, and the software should guide you. Importantly, if you do understand why, and you have different intentions than the software does, it should get out of your way – but that comes around to letting you use tools to get around the limitations of pre-defined tasks.

(An important note: a “wizard” is not a task-based interface. It’s a poor substitute that attempts to graft tasks onto what is primarily a tool-based interface.)

This goes right to the heart of the debate of semantic content vs. formatting. A huge portion of the tech community has been trying very hard to get people to think in ways that are structured, for various reasons. It’s not always the best approach, but it’s by far the best default if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you go through your document and decide “this needs to be 14 point Helvetica and this needs to be italic and this needs to be 24 point Times”, the onus is on you to understand why you’ve chosen those particular settings. “It looks nice” isn’t good enough, if it doesn’t match your intent. You’ve lowered the chances of getting the right result, and you’ve made things more difficult for the next person to go through and standardize your settings when your one-page memo gets reformatted to be used in the company brochure. You’ve probably also made things more difficult for yourself. Instead of trying to decide what it should look like, you could have just told the machine “this is a heading, that’s a title, and this paragraph is a summary of findings”, and made your life easier.

The UI appears to have some of this by grouping tools by tasks, but it doesn’t follow through — “Write”, “Insert”, “Page Layout”… but then, “References”? Nope. “Mailings” – maybe, but probably not. “Review” – we’re back. “Developer”? That’s a noun. Obviously there isn’t a consistent organizational structure here. Task-based interfaces are a radical shift from tool-based ones, and they require the UI designer to ask of every function put in front of the user: “Do I really want to give them this power? Am I making their life easier by doing so, or just giving them a shotgun to aim at their feet?”. It’s Microsoft Office, not Microsoft Fun with Fonts, Colors, and Margins. There’s a strong argument to be made that it shouldn’t be easier to use all of the features, because they’re a waste of time for most users.

Microsoft should have taken this opportunity to put together a new interface that’s not only prettier, but also radically easier to use, more intuitive, and above all, more productive. Instead, they’ve produced what appears to be more of the same.

http://www.pocketmod.com/

Forget the moment of silence, give me a few minutes of the opening theme against a flickering starfield.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?id=32433

Here’s a link. He’s in an office building on the 27th floor, in the datacenter with generators and food and stuff. There’s also a live video feed out the window.

http://mgno.com/

I just couldn’t resist, and you shouldn’t either.

http://www.cafepress.com/adamf.29467430

Great idea!

Via makeblog:

http://random-international.squarespace.com/instant-labeling-tape

We’re doomed.

Chapter 1: Some things are too complicated to have arisen by evolution, specifically people.
Chapter 2: …..?
(Chapter 3: Profit?)

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing to it. It’s the opposite of science.

“I don’t understand this, so there must be no possible answer”.

It says not just that we don’t know, but that we can’t know, so there’s really no point in trying to figure it out.

But where are the feeds?!?!

http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2005/08/the_new_new_thi.html

These are faucets with the top removed so you can see the water flow, which is illuminated with red and blue LEDs to indicate the temperature of the water.

Awesome!

Via Futurismic:

http://www.inhabitat.com/entry_236.php

http://www.stuffonmycat.com/

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/06/idea2005/source/60.htm

It’s a new Rubbermaid product called the “Paint Buddy”. The idea is that when you paint, you leave a little left over in this thing for making touchups.

Didn’t I see this in a Lillian Vernon catalog, like 20 years ago?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/arts/30appraisal.html?ex=1277784000&en=4099edc8a297a3b6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

It’s rare to find kid friendly games that aren’t boring for adults.

I’ll be posting a review to Buy Adam when I’m done with it, but there’s one piece of dialogue I just have to share (possibly slightly inaccurately quoted from memory):

Raz: They’ll be looking for Raz, the boy, but they’ll find Raz… the Psychonaut!
Dogen: And then you’ll make their heads explode?
Raz: What? No! You do that?
Dogen: No…
Dogen: Except that one time. But now I wear this special hat. Do you want to try on my hat?
Raz: No, no, that’s okay.

http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/service/nineline.htm

OVERVIEW
P2P file sharing programs provide Internet users with the ability to share files on their computers with millions of other Internet users. Common P2P use includes song and movie file sharing, gaming and instant messaging. P2P file sharing software makes it possible for people to accidentally share personal files or sensitive data. These programs also allow easier access to computer systems for theft of sensitive documents and unauthorized use of network resources. There have been incidents where P2P programs have exposed sensitive federal government documents.

P2P file sharing software potentially compromises computer systems. The use of this software creates vulnerabilities through which malicious code (viruses, worms, Trojans, bots) or other illegal material can be introduced.

The use of P2P file sharing can result in network intrusions.

CONCLUSION
Few, if any, university owned computers have an operational reason for running P2P file sharing software. These applications represent a network vulnerability that cannot be afforded without a strong justification.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200505/msg00315.html

This followup message illustrates a number of ways to get around that restriction:

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200506/msg00004.html

As I’ve written before, P2P is not a technology, it’s a technique. You can’t just wish it away by eliminating programs or blocking ports. Bits are just bits. By themselves, they’re meaningless, until you apply a filter to them that explains what they are. Once again, all together now. Content is a pattern, not a thing.

P2P isn’t going anywhere.

So’s Margaret Cho. She’s funny.

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/42245

http://homepage.mac.com/djcatnip/iMovieTheater26.html

http://www.triroc.com/wtc/

http://www.piermont.com/pictures/wall/