A variation on my Simple Checklist Sheet.

The Macro Micro Checklist allows you to maintain a list of key deliverables, fine grained tasks, and a quick calendar of highlights for the upcoming month.

In the top left you’ve got a list of Key Deliverables. These are the high-level tasks / projects you’ve got on your plate. They may be personal things like “File Taxes” or work based things like “Deliver Example.com’s new logo”. There’s a faint dashed box you can either ignore or make a checkbox out of, and then check off the deliverable when you’ve completed it. If one of them needs to be brought to someone’s attention, needs followup, or whatever, you can just fill in the exclamation point at the end of the line.

In the top right we’ve got a circle calendar. Most people are going to be unfamiliar with these. I’d never seen one before I made one, but I doubt I’m the first one to come up with the idea. Each dot (or in this case half-circle) is a day of the week. The blue triangles give you a visual indicator for the start of each week (Monday). Saturday and Sunday’s circle’s are blue and their sections of the inner ring are grayed out. A full-page Circle Calendar is WAY more useful than a normal grid calendar for planning because each day is a further step along the ring. You actually make forward progress as you cross off days and the farther away a day is on the circle the farther away it is in time. On a traditional grid calendar the square for one week from now touches today’s square. Physical proximity has no relationship to temporal proximity.  Another advantage to a Circle Calendar is that it’s got a LOT of space for you to make notes and draw lines to the appropriate day without having your lines or text go over any other days.

A smaller Circle Calendar, like this one, isn’t great for detailed planning, but neither is a small grid calendar.  The idea here is to mark out important dates in the upcoming month and add any related high-level notes. As you cross out days you’ll be able to see if there is a lot of distance (time) to the next deliverable or not, and looking to the left you’ll see how many high-level deliverables still need to get done in the time remaining.  Everyone’s going to use the Circle Calendar slightly differently, but that flexibility is one of the things that makes them great. When I use them I generally write in the date on each Monday’s node, as well as the date of each major event (like a code release). Then, if any of the Key Deliverables in the top left need to be completed by a particular date, I’ll just write its number in the center of the circle and draw an arrow to the day it’s due. As each day goes by I’ll put an X in it’s node to cross it out. Some people might fill in the missing half of the circle. Whatever works for you and gives you a visual indication of which days have already gone by.

The bottom of the page is just like the Simple Checklist. See it’s post for details on how to use that and what all the boxes and exclamation points are for.

Downloads:
Macro Micro Checklist: Omnigraffle, png, tiff
Stand-alone Circle Calendar: Omnigraffle, png, tiff

Almost five years ago I wrote a self organizing todo-list application. It was ugly, but worked really well. Unfortunately for me, I really prefer writing my todo lists out on paper. I like the simplicity of it, ideas just flow out through my pen. I can make notes and draw little arrows connecting things. And, I can make really satisfying check-marks in boxes when I’ve finished something.

Paper’s just the right medium for me, and I know I’m not the only one. So, I created a paper version of that self organizing todo list, and every few months I find some little thing I can do to improve it. Now I’ve got three different forms which I’ll cover below:

• A Simple Checklist Sheet (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)
• A Self-Prioritizing And Time-Tracking Todo list (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)
• A Manager’s Planning Sheet (OmniGraffle, png, tiff)

(Why no PDF? Because the font placement is critical on some of these and Windows screws it up.)

If you find these types of forms useful be sure to check out David Seah’s excellent Printable CEO series, which inspired these so many years ago.

[Update]  There’s now a fourth sheet to check out too. My Macro Micro Checklist.

A Simple Checklist Sheet

This sheet is simple and flexible enough to be useful to just about everyone.

The header has a place for the project name or some other context that connects the tasks you are working on: “Project X”, “Homework”, “Enemies of the State”… stuff like that. And, if you’re the type who keeps your tasks lists around for a while there’s a place for the beginning and ending date of the project, or maybe just the dates you started and finished the tasks on the page; whatever works best for you. I usually use it to indicate what week the tasks were for. This can be useful if you need to go back and see what you did last week for a status report.

After the header, the first thing you might notice is that everything else seems a bit faint, especially when you print it out. This is on purpose. As you can see in the example here, the lightly dashed boxes at the start of each line are there just to act as guides for your own check-boxes and practically disappear once you actually start writing. The three boxes allow for a hierarchy of tasks three levels deep, and there’s no reason you couldn’t easily draw boxes farther in if you really need it, but in practice I’ve never had the need.

At the right end of each line there are three more items in an equally faint gray: a place for a due date, a box to record the total hours spent working on it, and an exclamation point. The first two are pretty self explanatory, but they’re in a similarly faint gray so that you can just write over them if you need the space and don’t care about recording that info on the current line. I do this all the time and I’m happy to report the gray is light enough to not get in the way there either. The exclamation point is not so obvious. It’s for calling out items that you need to come back to later for whatever reason. In my case, I use it to mark items that I’ll need to discuss at the postmortem meeting we’re having the end of each release.

A Self-Prioritizing & Time Tracking Todo List

This one consolidates a lot of information in every line and is going to require some explanation. It is most useful for people who want a system to help prioritize tasksand want/need to keep track of the time they’ve spent working on them.

The grid at the left of each row has four columns “i”, “e”, “t”, “c” for “Internal Importance”, “External Importance”, “Technical Feasibility” and “Creative Feasibility”

• Internal Importance: how badly do you, or your group, want this task completed. The more you want it the more you fill up the bar.
• External Importance: how badly does your client, or customer, want this task completed. The more they want it the more you fill up the bar.
• Technical Feasibility: how easy will it be to actually do it. The easier it will be to do, the more you fill up the bar.
• Creative Feasibility: how easy will it be to figure out what you need to do to complete this task. The easier it is to figure out the more you fill up the bar.

Some examples:
Creating a logo is creatively a pain in the butt (short “c”), but technically quite easy (full “t”). If it’s for a client it’s something externally important (full, “e”) but typically internally not very important (empty “i”). Creating a logo for your own company would be internally very important but externally not important at all.

Getting a logo design from another department is technically trivial (full “t”), creatively trivial (full “t”), and internally important important to you (mostly full “i”), but unimportant externally (empty “e”) because no-one cares that you got it from another department, they just care that you have it.

How much you put in each column is a judgment call, just fill in however much feels right. Once you’ve got them filled in you can just scan down the pending tasks for the one that’s darkest. Items that are quick and easy to get out of the way will have their right halves mostly filled in. Items that are important to get done will have their left halves filled in. Items that are quick, easy, and important will be almost entirely filled in. So, really you’ve got three ways to look at it, and none of them require much thought. The thing you should do first is the one that’s got the most black. But if you’re just looking for something you can whip out quickly when you don’t have much time to work, you can just look for something with a dark right side. Some people like to count up the number of squares they’ve filled in and then do the task with the biggest number.

Some tasks are related, or dependent upon other tasks. That’s where the little circles to the left of the grid come in to play. In the example you can see that a couple of the items have their circles drawn over and a line drawn between them. The parent task is typically the top one and the line between them shows you that they’re connected… literally.

You’ve got two lines for each task, as well as a notes space to the right for details you think up later and a big check-box you can fill in when you’ve finished the task.

Beneath the text lines there’s a blue line filled with lots of little boxes. These are for tracking how much time you spent working on each task and what day you worked on it. You’ll note that there are only four boxes per day (actually three boxes and a circle). This is for two reasons. The first being that we rarely have more than four hours a day to devote to any one task and the second being that if your tasks are taking more than four hours each you’ve probably not broken them down to sufficiently fine-grained level. The last box is a circle simply to help visually separate each day’s boxes. There are seven days worth of boxes but you’ll note that the last two (Saturday and Sunday) have faint edges. This is because you need some time off. Go have a life and endeavor to never need fill these in. It’s a little hard to see in the picture but in the example the first task was worked on for two and a half hours on Wednesday.

After the boxes you’ll see a “due / / ” section were you can note a due date if the task has one.

A Managers Planning Sheet

Next up we’ve got a planning version for of that last one for manager-types. The idea is that managers will be assigning tasks at a much higher level, and the people actually working on them will divide them up into “bite-sized” pieces.

The header remains the same, but the prioritizing aspect of each task has gone away and been replaced with a due date. The hours are no longer tied to days since many tasks, at this level, will span days and are purely there for estimation purposes. You can fill in the hours boxes like a big horizontal thermometer.  Alternately you can use it to estimate days. When the task is completed you can go back and fill in the “total” at the end to see how your estimates stood up against the time it actually took.

The circles to the side of each task are exactly the same as in the Self-Prioritizing version, and are for connecting related tasks.

Some of you may remember that I was working on creating my own language. I wrote a creation myth in it a little over a year ago, and with the exception of a few months, I’ve been trying to make daily diary entries in it as a way of not only recording my life but practicing my language.

I didn’t create this for any grandiose reason. I simply wanted a language that would express the way I think. I wanted to play with language itself and learn more about it. And, I wanted to learn a new language. But I’m fairly honest with myself about what I can, and will, realistically accomplish. I could learn a natural language no problem, except for the lack of anyone to speak it with. More importantly, natural languages are external things. Someone else created them. The rules are someone else’s, and to speak it correctly you have to learn, and abide by those rules. But, they’re all just abstract foreign things. They’re not anything you’ve grown up with (at least not the languages I’m interested in), or anything that conforms to your brain’s view of the world. And without someone else to speak it with, it’s a lot like rote memorization. You memorize their words, their rules, and just accept them. And free writing in a natural language before you really understand the rules can lead to some very bad habits based on misunderstandings, and the words you have to look up seem fairly random. It doesn’t make a lot of sense why a word sounds the way it does, or why it means such different things*.  Reading from books isn’t very doable either until you’ve built up a fairly decent vocabulary.

But creating your own language… that’s something else entirely. You aren’t memorizing someone else’s arbitrary rules. You’re creating constructs that rules flow out of. Words can sound however you want. Take “water” for example. To me English’s “water” doesn’t sound like anything I associate with the stuff of rain, rivers, and oceans. “Water” isn’t flowing, or bubbly. It doesn’t ripple or wave. But, lelea (lay lay ah), *that* sounds like water to me. So, that’s what water is. But, being me, I didn’t just use the rule’s I’d grow up with. I’d just end up with a cypher of English if I had, and I wanted to learn. So, I gave myself a few small restrictions which would have a significant impact on what I created. Sentences would have a Verb Subject Object order, there wouldn’t be a verb “to be”, and the concepts of Yin and Yang would be an integral part of word creation: pushing and pulling, male and female. To me the world is all about the push and pull of energy, and I wanted to help myself to see it in those terms. I also wanted it to sound similar to Hawai’ian and other languages that evolved from gift cultures, with their flowing tones. That evolved into a requirement that all consonants be separated by a vowel and never come at the end of a word. Somehow I ended up with a glottal stop like Hawaiian too, although that wasn’t intentional.

With those few tiny restrictions I’ve been building something that’s seriously challenged my mind and forced me to question so much about how English works, and what I really mean what I speak. Getting rid of the verb “to be” has been the most challenging. It is so ingrained into English that learning to speak without it has really taken work. But, it’s been so worth it.

In Olo ( the name of the language ) I’ve found a real sense of peace. I actively want to write in it at the end of the day; not to keep up my practice, but because the act of using it is so relaxing. If I go to bed without having written I feel like I missed out on something special, like a relaxing beer or glass of wine at the end of the day is for many.

I think a part of that may be that I keep my journals in a Moleskine, and writing on paper, in a different orthography is so removed from anything I do during the day. I believe that the different orthography is a huge factor. The act of drawing those foreign characters really does seem to affect my mind. I’m enjoying watching how those characters are evolving as my speed and comfort level increase. It’s like watching a natural language’s evolution in fast forward, because there’s no-one to make me stick with the old way. One of my characters started out looking like a “u” with a straight bar closing the top, but now the bar has remained and the “u” part has turned into a sort of attached curlicue. Writing in not only a different language, but a different orthography gives me an even greater feeling that this is *mine*… It’s something I can own as thoroughly as my own thoughts.

It’s also nice to know that in this language I can speak without reservation. If we spoke honestly with each other we’d hurt a lot of feelings. And, while most people do feel comfortable speaking honestly in their diaries, there’s always that lingering worry about what would happen if someone else came across it. But with Olo I don’t have that worry, at all. I do plan on eventually making my language reference public, but even if I did it would take enough tedious work to figure out what my diary said, that no-one would be likely to actually bother to figure out more than a few lines.

Because the vocabulary is still evolving, writing any sentence forces me to pause and question what I really mean, because so often we say things in our native tongue that aren’t really what we mean. We use idioms constantly; far more than most of us realize, but I don’t have that luxury. I’ve only three to work with in Olo (so far). We’re frequently talking around our meaning, because there’s no way to accurately express our true intent. But with your own language there’s always that option. It’s *your* language, and if there isn’t a word to express a concept you can create one, and you’re free from unintended connotations and implications. In English, for example, I could talk about “toil” but there are lots of negative connotations there. We don’t really have a word for work that you do that is simply undesirable, like washing dishes. You don’t really “toil” at washing the dishes, and it’s not really a hardship. It’s just undesirable work. A big part of most people’s lives is filled with undesirable work. In Olo, there’s a word that’s similar to “unpleasant” but without the negative connotations. It’s simply “not pleasant”. Combine that with the word for work and you can speak about work that is undesirable but not bad: pa’u hana.

If you need the ability to discuss something in a way your native tongue doesn’t adequately allow for, you can devise a way of doing it. As time goes on the rules your language accretes will make this a bit more difficult, but you’re unlikely to live long enough to make a language even a quarter as complex as English, unless you go out of your way to add complexity. But, if you, like me, are creating a language to express the way you see the world, or want to see the world, you’ll find things work out quite nicely.

I’m still rather slow, and as I write more I am constantly having to coin new words which sometimes take a while to get memorize, since many of them, like “doubt” don’t come up very often. New affixes arise, and force me to go back and alter a few existing words to conform to the new rules from time to time. But, the process is wonderful, and educational in so many ways. I hope that one day I may meet someone special and she’ll be wiling to learn it with me. I think the intimacy of a private language shared only between you and your lover would be an incredible thing. I may never meet someone like that. But, even if I don’t, I’m learning so much, about language, about myself, and about the world around me.

So what’s the point? Why have I written this?
I think the point was to speak about language creation, to give a little glimpse of what it can be, and what it is for me, to let some people know that it’s a legitimate option, and let others know that they are not alone in their desire to create a language. There are thousands of language creators around the world and it’s something with a long historical tradition. It’s certainly not for everyone, but what is? Conlangs have been brought into the public’s eye again with Na’vi, and learning it, like many conlangs, will provide you with a wonderful perspective on your native language. You’re also likely to find a small sense of community because it’s like joining an exclusive club for speakers only. But, creating one can give you a means of self expression you’ve probably never imagined. So many of us think with words of our native tongue, and every language has some concepts, and views of the world that it simply can’t express well, especially when you consider how tightly bound our language and culture tend to be.

Language creation is frequently a solitary act, but it can be a very rewarding one. Even if no-one else learns your language, there are many of us who will enjoy getting glimpses of it, and happily help each other with their creation. If nothing else the Conlang mailing list has proved an incredible resource for questioning English and learning about options that other languages present.

* Hawaiian’s  lāhai (just a random example) means: to poise aloft ( as a kite ) , to leap, or a short wing fence to guide cattle to a corral. To someone who didn’t grow up with the language it seems so arbitrary, and we’ve no way to know if it is, or we’re just missing something because we haven’t grow up with it or its culture.

A thought came to me this morning. Apple’s App store, and it’s apps. It’s a forest and trees kinda situation.

It’s much easier to find a tree by going to the forest.
The forest is huge filled with trees.
And the trees benefit from living close to each other.

But…

Each forest typically has only a handful of types of trees.
So, it’s not a great place to go for tree-choice.
Sure, there are plenty of trees in the forest, and they’re all unique,
but they all exist within a limited band of variation.

Then there’s the fact that a pine tree planted in a forest
isn’t really any different from a pine tree planted elsewhere.
As long as the two have the same soil, water, and sunlight
they’ll both grow up to be big strong pines.

Being in the forest doesn’t change the nature of the tree.

But, if you want more tree choices, you have to leave the forest.
Living in a forest forces certain limitations on it’s inhabitants.
You simply won’t find a Joshua tree in a Pine forest.
The soil is all wrong, and even if it was compatible soil,
the Pine trees would grow high and steal its sunlight.
The Joshua tree, if it survived at all, would wither.

Developers are a lot like Botanists.
We’ve seen beautiful trees from around the world.
We know what lives beyond your local forest.
We know the beauty that’s possible.
We know the myriad types of fruit we could consume.
But here in the Pine forest…
Well, the Pines are very pretty,
and we don’t mind pine nuts,
but we kinda crave a mango,
and an orange,
and an apple,
and…
and…

Wouldn’t you like one too?

—-

For those of you non-geeks who don’t understand the limited variation metaphor:

Apple limits any app that is sold on the App Store to a specific set of functionality. There’s a lot more your iPhone could do if you didn’t look for your trees (apps) in the Apple App Store forest. Unfortunately, to do that, you have to jailbreak your phone. Also, the app store hampers developers ability to make bug fixes. In contrast, Android apps are only limited by the phone and the Operating System (OS) that runs on it. There is an App Store equivalent on Android (they call it the Marketplace) which makes it easy to find apps. But there aren’t any real restrictions on what you’ll find there, or how quickly developers can update their apps with bug fixes. And, it’s not the only way to get an app. You can go to a web page and download an app, just like on your computer. Yes, the iPhone has a slicker OS right now, and yes, there are definitely more, and sexier apps in the App Store at the moment, but that doesn’t mean your choices aren’t being limited by Apple. It just means Apple got there first with a really nice device. Apple’s grown a great Pine forest, but it’s still a Pine forest and you’re not going to find any Mango there.

There are a number of people out there who have expressed an interest in learning Na’vi (the language spoken by the Omatikaya in Avatar ) and are getting verbally shat upon by the communities they dare to mention this in. And, I can understand the knee-jerk reaction that it’s silly to learn a language from a semi-random piece of popular fiction. But, I can also think beyond that.

Learning a language, any language, is a remarkable thing, especially in American society, and if you think about it, there is nothing more or less valid about a language that was created for a movie. Does it really matter how a language came to be? The fact is that it is a legitimate and speakable language. Koreans write in Hangul, a writing system that Sejong the Great made up from scratch less than 600 years ago. They didn’t need a writing system, they were getting by with Chinese characters. It just so happens that the Korean people seemed to agree they deserved their own writing system, so they switched, but it was no more a “real” writing system than any of the ones Tolkien created for his languages. There are two million Esperanto speakers, and maybe ten million who have studied it. It’s a conlang (constructed language) just like Elvish and Na’vi, the only difference being that it was created to bring world peace through improved communication instead of just being created for the sheer love of language.

So, should Korean’s stop using Hangul because some guy made it up? Should Esperantists throw in the towel? What about Esperantists who learned it as their first language? Esperanto, the Hangul writing system, Na’vi, and  Elvish are all “fictional”. None of them existed until someone got it in their head to go create it.

…this wouldn’t have been such a remarkable case from the perspective of time – as you already have entire regions of internet clogged with Tolkienfags who struggle to master his own fictional languages despite being unable to use english properly. – Random Ass-Hole

I’m not even going to bother pointing out the grammatical errors in that statement, but the sentiment is not uncommon. The logic however, is horribly flawed. Our native tongues are things so deeply ingrained in our thinking that it isn’t possible to step outside of them and analyze them without first learning something else. Think about it. How can you possibly analyze the limitations of a language without bias when your tool for analysis is the same language which is, of course, bounded by the same limitations and biases?

Seriously? Go learn an actual language, not something from a movie. – Ignorant Jerk

Ignoring the fact that Na’vi is, in a very real sense, an “actual” language. I would argue that learning Na’vi or Klingon would be much better choices than any of the Romance Languages for someone who is interested in leaning how language itself works. This is because both of these languages go out of their way to be very un-English. English, for example, is a Subject Verb Object language. Na’vi has no such restrictions. Through the use of accusative, ergative, genetive, dative, and topic marker suffixes speakers of Na’vi are able to construct their sentences in whatever way flows best. Can you say that about English? Do you with your years of practicing English even know what those are?

“Verbs in Klingon take a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, plus suffixes from nine ordered classes, plus a special suffix class called rovers. Each of the four known rovers has its own unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.

The most common word order in Klingon is Object Verb Subject, and in some cases the word order is the exact reverse of word  order in English. ” – Wikipedia

That’s not to say that there aren’t such significant variations amongst natural languages. Pretty much every twisted idea you can conceive of to warp a language has already been done by a natural language at some point in history. But what better way to learn your own language than to attempt to learn something so radically different from it that you are forced to question everything from word construction to sentence construction?

“Avatar? No, it is your idea of learning language used by in-movie characters that is disturbing, problematic and life wasting. NONE of us are bashing your fave movie.” – Random Ass-Hole

“How about, instead, you learn one of the hundreds of real languages that are in danger of dying out, and help preserve some of the collective heritage of humanity?
You know, instead of wasting your time learning a language made up for a film everyone’s going to forget about?” – Clueless Ass-Hole

“Please learn a dying human language if you’re going to bother learning a language at all.” – Polite, but ignorant.

Conlangers have a different take…

” I find the “languages are dying” line the most irritating thing someone can possibly say against the invention of a conlang. There is a lot of diversity of viewpoints in the conlang community, but there are certainly many of us who do care very deeply about endangered languages. Creating a new hobby language doesn’t affect natural languages any more than playing Monopoly affects the economy. Field linguists can preserve a record of the language, and members of that community can work to maintain or revive the language, but how exactly is it supposed to help endangered languages if we all stopped this conlanging business?

I think that [conlangers] are probably more keenly aware than most people that language is a community activity. (This just sort of slaps you in the face when you are the only person who knows your language.) I can learn an endangered language– probably pretty imperfectly at my age — but unless I can participate meaningfully in that language’s community or spawn a new community of speakers, it’s nothing more than hobby, just like making up entirely new languages. ” – M. S. Soderquist

conlangers simply are not equipped to save endangered langauges.

Linguistic fieldwork requires specialized skills which most of us do not have; while many of us may be capable of writing a fairly useful grammar of a language, hardly anyone of us have experience in conducting a linguistic interview and all that.  And documenting an endangered language is only the first step in preserving it; the much harder part of it is to create and maintain the social environment in which the language can flourish.  That is well beyond the possibilities of most conlangers, who are merely hobbyists in linguistics.

“While conlanging indeed does nothing to save endangered languages, it also does nothing to endanger languages, and most

… Indeed.  The survival of a language requires the existence of a community that speaks it, and a consciousness of the language’s value within that community. ” – J. Rhiemeier

A language is more than a collection of words and rules. It is the repository wherein a community encodes its values and viewpoints. Very recently we have learned to read Mayan, but no-one with half a brain would suggest that anyone is capable of creating any new writings in Mayan that actually capture the Mayan viewpoint. The same goes for ancient Egyptian. Sure we can read hieroglyphs and there are definitely people who can write in it, but again, we don’t truly grok it. We’re like computers parroting back words in accordance with some pre-defined rule-set. Even if you were to bring the handful of speakers together their usage would not reflect that of the original language even if it was syntactically correct, because we simply do not think like they did. We are not capable of observing the world around us the way they did.

The only people who can truly save a dying language are people who are part of its community of native speakers. Yes, an outsider can become part of that community. You, sitting there reading this, can pick some dying language and help save it. All you have to do is travel to where it’s spoken and truly become one with its community, assuming there are enough speakers to even form a community. You’d have to give up your way of life and take up theirs if you really want to save it, because language expresses a community’s perception of the world and the reasoning behind their actions in it. And you can not express that accurately if you do not share it yourself.

Which brings us back to Na’vi. Na’vi is not a dying language. If anything it is a blossoming language. Maybe it won’t survive, but there are thousands of people waiting excitedly for enough information to truly learn to speak it, and we will create a community around it. Some have even gone to great lengths to accurately piece together its rules based on the limited information we have at the moment. And almost anyone who attempts to learn it will learn more about their native language in the process.

Does it really matter that what is bringing us together is a “fictional” language? Isn’t it more important that people are coming together to participate in a creative, and educational act? Isn’t that an order of magnitude better than just sitting at home and watching the next episode of House?

Note: some names have been changed in order to better reflect the guilty.

Over on Sociological Images Lisa evaluates Avatar(spoiler alert) Unfortunately, she’s got an agenda, and is seeing what she wants to see instead of what’s actually there.

First off, she says that the Na’vi “… are, in short, the stereotypical “noble savage.”

Which as I stated in my review of Avatar, is simply false.

The Na’vi are never portrayed in the classic sense of “noble savage”. They are noble yes, but your classic “noble savage” (at least as I’ve seen it) is also, “savage”, “primitive”, and simply “doesn’t know better.” You will find none of that in this film. The Na’vi are simply an indigenous people with simpler technology than ours…

Furthermore, they have spent years being taught our modern advances and ways and have chosen to reject them. They are never portrayed as “savages”.

Lisa says that “After they win the battle, Sully assumes the role of chief, with the highest ranking female at his side.”

This is simply not true. While this may be assumed to happen after the film ends it does not happen in the film. During the film Jake always shows deference to the chief and never tries to overstep his place in the tribe (excluding trying to come back after being sent away for his perceived betrayal of them).

But Sully is not only a superior human being, he is also a superior Na’vi. After being briefly ostracized for his participation in the land grab, he tames the most violent creature in the sky, thereby proving himself to be the highest quality warrior imaginable per the Na’vi mythology.

While the last sentence is true the first is arguably false. At no point in the film does it make any claim, explicit, or implicit, that Jake (Sully) is “superior”. He’s more courageous than most, and certainly has a strong moral backbone, but that’s not superiority. He’s not stronger, faster, smarter, or more educated than anyone else in the film. He’s just a good guy with courage. And there’s nothing preventing anyone on this planet from becoming that themselves. We can identify with Jake specifically because he’s NOT superior. He’s an “average joe”.

He gives them hope, works out their strategy, and is their most-valuable-weapon in the war.

This is true, but not quite how she suggests. He does give them hope. If he is the one to work out their strategy it is never shown, and if so it proves he’s a freaking terrible strategist because he has Na’Vi on horses ride straight into machine guns instead of hiding in trees and sniping.

There’s a good look at the racial politics of Avatar here, and if you doubt the words of us white folk, you might want to ask yourself why the Native American Times seemed perfectly happy with it, or why Wes Studi lent his voice to the film. If go into this determined to see it as “liberal guilt made flesh” that’s probably what you’ll come out with, or maybe you’ll see it as “The most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made.” Or maybe, you’ll just go and enjoy it as an excellent film with the simple message that the environment is worth protecting and that people unlike you are still worthy of your respect. You get out of it what you take into it.

[Update] Miller says:

I think you should mention that when Jake went after the toruk, his reasons weren’t simply to prove that he was in any way superior to them as a warrior (as Lisa more or less says) but to win back the Na’vi’s estimation of him since he had so indelibly lost it with his “betrayal” the scene previous. the only thing he was proving in that act was his sincerity in saying that he would do anything he could to win back their trust and to help save them from being wiped out. if he failed in his attempt at taming the last shadow, he would have surely died. and seeing as he had lost everything else (his position with the humans /as well as/ the Na’vi), there wasn’t anything left for him to live for anyway.

I agree.

B&N has already screwed the nook with all its caveats. Today I discovered that they’ve also made a rather significant cock-up in their iPhone eBook reader too.

As you probably know from my post about the Kindle I refuse to buy any DRMd book and not because I hate DRM. But there are still thousands of free eBooks out there, especially all the classic public domain books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books. So, being curious about the iPhone versions of the Kindle and B&Ns eBook reader, I decided to give them a try and download a couple free books on them. Both kicked me out of the app and into the browser when I wanted to find a new book to download, which sucks from a user experience standpoint but is understandable in that they already had it written and it saved them from having to pay developers to make and debug an iPhone version of the same thing. But, when I attempted to actually download a free book from B&N I made a rather frustrating discovery. You can’t get a book from them unless you give them your credit card number even if the book is free.

Now, I know some of you think I’m being picky here. Most people won’t be going for the free books anyway. And that’s true, BUT it misses the bigger picture. Most people haven’t tried eBooks yet. Testing it out on your iPhone or computer is a great way to see if you like the basic idea without having to spend over $200 on a Kindle or a Nook only to find you really miss paper. Plus, if you’re still unsure, a free eBook makes testing the waters even easier. But, if you go to try it out on a free eBook and they tell you “sorry, we need your credit card for that free thing” you’re probably going to do what I did, and say “screw that” and walk away.

I’m not sure if this problem exists with Kindle for the iPhone or not, Amazon’s already got my credit card number, but both companies should be making this process totally painless. They should be going out of their way to encourage people to download the public domain books they have available. “Here, see how cool ebooks are. Try out any of these thousands of titles totally free on your iPhone!” People will try them, and say “Hey. This is pretty nifty. I should totally try it out with a book I actually want to read.” Because, let’s be honest, most people don’t want to read the classics, and the handful of us that do probably read an order of magnitude more books that have been published in the past 20 years.

The Kindle, the Nook, and their ilk all use eInk technology which is reflects, rather than emitting light, just like a piece of paper. It’s as easy on the eyes as reading paper and uses an incredibly small amount of electricity, but you first need to convince people that it’s worth the cost, and the free eBook readers people have on their iPhones and computers are an excellent for these companies to show people the value of electronic books (even if they do screw you with DRM). iPhone and computer eBook readers are, in the long term, going to be a minority of sales because it sucks to read off of a computer screen. But they’re treating them as if they’re equal to the eInk readers, when really, they’re just backups, or taste tests….

Whilst a crude statement, Amazon and B&N should be learning from the drug dealers of the world. They don’t just have free samples available, they go out of their way to make sure you get a free taste of what they’re offering, because they know you’re going to like it and want to come back for more, and then they start charging. Amazon and B&N have truckloads of free samples (public domain books) with name recognition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, The Art of War, etc., etc.. These don’t require special agreements, contracts, or payments. They’re free to everyone. And yet they hide them behind closed gates. “Nope, can’t get any free books until you give us a credit card” They don’t even promote them “What? The free books? Oh… yeah, I think we got some in the back.”

Give us the free drugs you idiots! It’s almost as if you don’t want me to buy your stuff.

[UPDATE: They responded to an e-mail inquiring about how to get the free eBooks without a credit card]

Thank you for your inquiry regarding free eBooks offered on bn.com.

We provide free eBooks to enable our customers to test the Barnes &
Noble eReader on their device of choice.  All publishers require that
the eBooks they submit, including free eBooks, are encrypted for each
customer.  The ?unlock? device is the billing name and credit card
number of the primary credit card on your Barnes & Noble account.

When you click on ?Get Free? for one of these titles, the default credit
card stored on your account will be authorized for the transaction or,
you will be prompted to set up an online account and provide your
billing name and credit card number.  Depending on your credit card
issuer, this transaction will have a token authorization amount ranging
from .01 to $1.00.  This authorization will be credited at checkout.

We hope you find this information helpful.

And I responded to them….

Your public domain eBooks were, in most, if not all, cases NOT
submitted by a publisher. YOU get them from Google and Google does NOT
require them to be encrypted. Google provides them free, and
unencrypted, to anyone who asks.

Even ignoring that fact, requiring a credit card in order to enable
“…customers to test the Barnes & Noble eBook reader of their
choice..” makes no sense. These are  two ideas that run at cross purposes.
Furthermore, your free eBooks are used for FAR more than enabling
people to test your service as they constitute a massive percentage of
the eBooks you claim are available for the Nook.

So, again, since your public domain eBooks are, in most cases, not
submitted by a publisher and do not require encryption, why do you
require my credit card? If nothing else I should be able to read the
ones you get from Google without encryption since we know that Google
doesn’t require it.

[Update 2 they responded to my response]

Ebooks are encrypted for copyright protection purposes. This is why
Barnes & Noble requires that eBooks, including free eBooks, are
encrypted for each customer. Currently, the ?unlock? device is the
billing name and credit card number of the primary credit card on your
Barnes & Noble account.

Please note that for security reasons Barnes & Noble does not store your
card information in the eBook or on your device.

Visit www.bn.com and click on the options that appear in the upper
right-hand corner to view information about your order.

We look forward to your next visit.

And I responded by pointing out what should have been obvious….

I think you are unclear on the concept of “Public Domain”.
The copyright on the books we are discussing has expired long before
you ever started selling ebooks.

There is NO copyright to protect on these books, and as we have
previously covered, there is no publisher requesting encryption for
them.

Every web page on the internet has an URL that is a unique address (that’s why it goes in the “address” bar), and in the beginning everyone used that. But early e-mail clients kinda sucked, and some of the current ones still do, and those addresses were so long they’d wrap, or had some funky characters in them that the e-mail client wasn’t expecting, and so it’d break the URL in such a way that you’d have to copy and paste both parts of it into the address bar instead of just clicking on it.

This kinda sucked.

Then Twitter came along and said “You only get 140 characters because that’s all that’ll fit in an SMS”. And, trying to write a useful little post in under 140 characters with some big-ass url eating up a third of them really sucked.

So, people turned to tinyurl.com and it’s cousins. Because they promised short urls that saved you characters and would always be clickable in crappy email clients so long as you ignore the fine print.

Fine Print? What fine print?
Well, imagine, if you will, that an URL is a bridge to a distant place. A normal URL works like a normal bridge, but tinyurls…

When you cross a normal bridge you know where you’re going to end up. I never have to worry about crossing the Mississippi and finding myself in Nigeria. With a tinyurl bridge, you just might. There’s no way to tell where it goes before you get there. KinkyPornThatWillGetYouFired.com ? Could be. Oh, and the bridge doesn’t go straight to the mystery land. No, all tinyurl bridges curve through the country of tinyurl. So, if they’re having a power outage, or an earthquake, you’re not getting there today. If they experience an economic catastrophe and cease to be then no tinyurl bridge that’s ever been built will ever make it past the once powerful, but now non-existant, country of tinyurl.com and you won’t be able to get to the desired location manually because there’s no way to know where that bridge ended up. Then, there’s the problem of Google (and its cousins). Google watches every bridge that’s built, and notes where it goes. The more bridges people build to a place, the more important that place must be. But guess what? When you use a tinyurl bridge no-one can see where that bridge goes. So that place you want to spread the word about? You’re not helping it. If anyone is getting any Google-juice out of the process it’s Tinyurl.com, but I suspect the Google geeks know better than to count those urls.

Then there’s the question of longevity. Not only shouldn’t you count on tinyurl.com and it’s cousins staying around, you should count on them going away. Almost all of them are totally free services with no advertising that just cost their owners money. The more you use it, the more bandwidth they consume, and more disk space they need. No, you should definitely count on these sites going away. It’s just a matter of time. Sure, as long as there’s a need another one will probably pop up to take it’s place, but all the millions of urls that used the old one will break when it goes away.

But, what about those old fashioned long urls? When I give someone the url to this page
http://weblog.masukomi.org/2009/12/27/why-tinyurl-co…n-the-internet
It not only gets them to the post but it also gives them some additional information. They can tell for example that it’s from my blog ( weblog.masukomi.org ) and not some porn site. In my urls (and many other blog URLs) there’s also an indication of when it was written ( 2009/12/27 ). This is especially useful when you need current information not something that was written five years ago. You can also tell if it’s something you’ve already seen. And last, but not least, the end of the URL ( why-tinyurl-co…n-the-internet ) gives you a hint at what the article’s about.

But what about Twitter?
Yeah, I hear you. It’s easy enough to stop using URL shorteners in everything else, especially since modern e-mail clients are generally pretty good about not breaking up urls, but you need to include URLs in your tweets from time-to-time. There are two simple simple solutions and both are really easy to implement. The only problem is that Twitter has to do it.

It’s probably safe to say that Twitter’s not going to give up the 140 character limit even when all phones have gone beyond that limit for texting. Those 140 characters have become part of Twitter’s ethos. If the limit was extended much it would transform what what Twitter is and how it’s used. So, what are these solutions?

The  best would be if Twitter were to set up their own tinyurl clone. There are plenty of free tinyurl implementations out there that are easy to install. You’d still have the downside of not being able to tell where the url lead to, and you wouldn’t be able to get there if Twitter was down, and if twitter went out of business they’d all stop working BUT, except for not seeing where you’re going these are all ok because if Twitter was down you wouldn’t see the tinyurl in the first place, and if Twitter went out of business the site would go away, and take all those now non-functional links with it.

If Twitter were to simply not count any characters contained in an url it would solve the problem on the web, and only require a minor code change and a simple database update. It has the downside that older phones would have trouble with the extra length and would need an url shortener, of course, if your phone is so old it can’t handle more than 140 characters then odds are you’re not going to be clicking on any links that come in a Tweet anyway.

While neither of these are hard they do both have a financial impact on a company that seems incapable of figuring out how to make any money.  Storing those few extra characters may not seem like much but I assure you that they add up, and the servers and hard drives required to make them keep working under a Twitter level of load (and nigh-constant hard drive failure) would not be cheap. But, there’s a good reason for Twitter to go through the effort of fixing these. Over time the URL shortening sites will die out, and as they do millions of links in old tweets will start to break, and that makes twitter look bad. How much will it suck when most all of the links in old tweets stop working and people stop bothering or wanting to click on links in tweets because they’re so frequently broken?

So, what do we do in the meantime? Sadly, the only thing we can really do at the moment is to try and put pressure on Twitter to address the problem from their end. Tweet them. Tell them you think having to use url shorteners sucks. Link them to this post. Write a similar post of your own to spread the word to your friends and tweet Twitter a link to that.

Summary:
In summary. Tinyurl.com and it’s cousins are bad because:

• You can’t see where the URL takes you
• The URL won’t work if the tinyurl is down temporarily
• The URL will break permanently when (not if) tinyurl ceases to be.
• It takes longer to get to the site because you have to first detour through the Tinyurl servers (literally adding thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of miles to every request).
• You’re not helping promote the page you’re trying to spread the word about because Google can’t tell what you’re linking to.

Please note that it’s not tinyurl.com that’s specifically the problem. They’re just the most popular one. ALL of the URL shortening sites have these same problems.

I didn’t plan to write this.

I just can’t get it out of my head.

Despite the hype, despite my fear of having expectations set too high, Avatar has blown me away.

You’ve probably heard people talking about how incredible the CGI is, and it is. But that’s not important. What’s important, is that James Cameron has created a lush and beautiful world that is utterly believable. You will hear that the plot is fairly simple, even predictable. But, that’s not important either. What’s important is that you enjoy every moment of it. What’s important, is that you care about characters, and when over one hundred and fifty minutes have gone by, you just want to see it all over again. It simply does not matter that the core story arc has been used time and again. Storytellers keep using it because it’s a works, and works well.

I’ve seen some of the few negative reviews of this talk about how it’s a tale of modern people versus the “noble savage”. But the Na’vi are never portrayed in the classic sense of “noble savage”. They are noble yes, but your classic “noble savage” (at least as I’ve seen it) is also, “savage”, “primitive”, and simply “doesn’t know better.” You will find none of that in this film. The Na’vi are simply an indigenous people with simpler technology than ours, end of story. They have traditions unlike yours and mine, but the movie doesn’t tell your they’re better or worse, merely asks you to accept them for what they are and believe that they are worth protecting. The only thing they really suggest is better about the Na’vi is that they live in tune with their world while the humans have managed to wipe out all the natural beauty on theirs.

James Cameron and crew have created something that will walk away with a mound of Oscars, and deserve every one.

The editing is absolutely brilliant, astounding even. The pacing is perfect. Everything you want from a film with regards to those, it has.  It is as long as it is because there was that much to show, but it never drags, and you never come across a part that, looking back, you wish they’d cut. The graphics will obviously get an Oscar, but there is no doubt in my mind that the editing deserves one too.

The CGI: the world, the creatures, the Na’vi… Incredible. You can’t tell the Na’vi don’t exist in the real world. They have pushed motion capture, especially the capture of facial movments, to a level that is indiscernable from a physical actor. I’m a geek, and as such there was always a tiny piece of me watching from that perspective, and I can remember one moment when Zoe Saldaña’s character Neytiri was speaking to Jake and the facial motions were so complex, so complete, and so perfectly rendered down to the creases of the skin, that the geek part of my brain just locked up for a minute. Some of the flora and fauna is so unlike anything on earth that it had to be CGI, but some things, like rocks… you simply couldn’t tell if it was CGI or not.

In a way it’s sad. It’s sad that the technical advances in this film are so significant, because you can’t talk about it without speaking of them, and that takes away from the film itself. Maybe when Avatar is as far behind us as the original Star Wars is, when the tech simply isn’t noteworthy by the current day’s standards. Maybe then we can have a real discussion about this film.

What I can say now, is that it is absolutely worth seeing. It’s not flawless. But it does exactly what a sci-fi movie should do. It takes you to a new place, or time, it makes you feel for its characters, and leaves you wanting more.

[Update] I made a second post about some BS commentary about Avatar.