Background: I’m a musician, or, I was. I used to want to be a studio bassist. When I’m in the house I’m frequently singing about whatever I’m doing. When I’m walking down the street I’m not just striding across pavement, I’m beating out quarter notes with my feet. Sometimes I add in syncopated rhythms with my hands slapping my thighs.
So, when it comes to remembering what to buy at the store there’s a song for that too. Here’s how it’s made. Maybe it’ll help you remember what to pick up too.
Step one: list, out loud, everything you need to buy. Everything has to have an even number of syllables. If it doesn’t call it something else, or just draw out the last syllable as you sing it. Generally you just want two syllables per item. Today’s list was:
Step two: order it in the reverse order you’ll be picking it up in the store. I typically go around my store counter clockwise grabbing things at the ends of the aisles closest to the side of the circle I’m on. The first item in your song is the last item you’ll pick up. This reverse ordering is critical, and I’ll get to why in a moment. If you don’t know the store you’ll be shopping in you’re screwed. Just accept that you’ll forget something and do your best. Or, write it down. That works too, but it’s just no fun.
Step three: start walking. If you drive to the store then maybe you should park at the far end of the parking lot. You could probably use the exercise anyway.
Step four: start singing. Each step is a quarter note. One item per step. One eighth note per syllable. I sing out loud until I get to the store to really cement it in my brain, and to myself when I get there so that people don’t look at me like an idiot for singing a repetitive tune about “hair goo” and “cat shit”.
Step five: remove the item from the list as you pick it up. This is where it becomes critical to have your items in reverse order of acquisition. You don’t have to think which one it is because it’s always the last, and it juts makes your song shorter. By the end of my list of was singing “pas-ta but-ter *step* *step* *step* pas-ta but-ter *step* *step*” and then “pas-ta *step* *step* pas-ta *step* *step*” If, however my list wasn’t in reverse order I’d have to go through the whole thing each time in order to get to the item i needed to buy. This sucks with a long list, and if you stop singing when you get to the item that’s closest to you you’re likely to forget the end of the song. With a reverse ordered list the more you pick up the easier it gets because it gets a little shorter each time. Otherwise it just becomes “<item> …did I get that? yeah.. <item> still need that… <item> oh that’s two rows down but other thing is closer.” I didn’t think of reversing the order for a while and I assure you the songs were much less effective.
Notes: I find it much more fun if I use nicknames for some things. I haven’t bought “cat food” ever since I saw that Far Side cartoon where the dog wrote “Cat Fud” with an arrow on the inside of the dryer door. Now I always buy “cat fud”, along with the “cat shit” (because the cat shits in the kitty litter), “hair goo” (why bother specifying the brand?), and so on. Being silly just makes it even better.
“I don’t know how it got this late.” I said to my dog. “Well,” I continued, “I do know. I worked late, and I’ve been reading…” But then I stopped.
I stopped because I realized that neither of those, or any of the other excuses we give for “how time flies” have anything to do with “how it got this late”. They’re merely how we came to not notice the passage of time to this point. But we have absolutely no idea how it passed. Some scientists have theories that describe its passage but not the real how or why of it.
The energy of the Big Bang must be nothing in comparison to the energy required to move everything in all the universes forward through time. And yet, we sit here, not just ignorant, but not even noticing this force that is exerting an obscene amount of influence on our lives. It’s like someone has launched us from a cannon strapped to the back of a rocket while we continue to discuss the movie we saw last weekend as if we were calmly sitting on a park bench.
And even that… even that metaphorical park bench is on a planet rotating at 465.1 m/s at its equator, 18 1/2 m/s around a sun, that is itself hurtling away from the center of our universe, and somehow we delude ourselves into thinking we’re stationary upon it. And all of this is nothing, nothing, to the force that moves us through time.
I see two possibilities, although I’m sure there are more:
1) time is an incredible pushing force, and maybe the reason we can’t travel back in time is because we can’t overcome its inertia. I read a theory once, that went something like this: if you had a rod that was infinitely long and infinitely dense, that you could get spinning sufficiently fast, and then spiraled a space ship around it, the ship would be able to travel back in time. Now, I am woefully ignorant of physics, and quantum mechanics, but that sounds a lot like expending energy to overcome an opposing force.
2) all time exists in one instant so infinitesimally fine we don’t have words, concepts, or even brains capable of encompassing it. To me a two dimensional plane, with no thickness at all, is still infinitely thicker than the size of an instant with all time.
If all time exists in an instant, then maybe we are just creatures whose way of processing it is to have created a linear perception of it. Maybe those days that seem to fly by in a blink really do. We know that if you travel fast enough time flows more slowly for you, like astronauts coming back to earth only to find that the time they spent away from us was seconds shorter than the time we spent waiting for them to come back. Maybe, those days, where so much happens so fast, that go by in a blink, go by in a blink because so much happened so fast. If all time exists at once, and it is merely a perception that we’re traveling through it one slice at at time, then who is to say ones perception doesn’t actually move them through it faster? I mean, when the astronauts land it’s not like someone went in and cut out seconds of their life. Somehow they end up with us at the same place in time, and yet they got there sooner than the rest of us.
I think the physicists can prove me wrong on that theory, but isn’t it a wonderful one to try and wrap your head around?
Regardless of how time works, or why time works, it concerns me that we are so utterly oblivious to a force that affects us so completely, and with such disregard. We give it lip service, we speak as if it’s this obvious thing we all understand, but we haven’t a clue, and I, like you, have no idea how it got this late…
(And why they’re going to loose a lot more if they don’t catch up with the times.)
I love Amazon. I’ve signed up for Amazon Prime and definitely get my money’s worth out of it. But, Amazon’s simply can’t replicate the experience of browsing physical bookshelves and picking up random books by author’s you’d never heard of, simply because they caught your eye. So, I regularly go to physical bookstores, just to see what I find. It just so happens that the closest bookstore to me is a Borders, and I’m a Border’s Rewards member so I regularly have coupons for a discount on whatever book I want, which is why I found myself perusing the shelves of Borders yesterday.
I found Lonely Werewolf Girl, which sounded intriguing, but odd enough that it could have been crap. So, I pulled out my phone and looked up the reviews on Amazon, which suggested that it was worth checking out, but, I also noticed the price was five dollars less. Five dollars is almost the cost of another mass market paperback. Now, I’m totally willing to pay a little more for any book in a store, because they’re the ones who led me to it on their shelves, and because I get to read it immediately. But I’m not going to give up the cost of almost another book.
Next up was The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures. From flipping through it in the store I was confident I wanted it, and I almost didn’t bother looking it up on Amazon, but, having almost spent five dollars extra on the other one… I sat back down and pulled my phone back out. Ten dollars this time! It was $24.95 (plus tax) at Borders and $15.64 at Amazon. There’s no way I was going to pay 90% more for the same book. Yeah, I really wanted to read it right away… but 90%?!
But this story doesn’t have to be an indicator of the fall of brick and mortar bookstores. There’s no reason Border’s can’t compensate. Borders.com is already hosted by Amazon (for some bizarre reason) so why not make the kiosks at all the Borders show me not only if the book is in stock, but bring up the reviews so I don’t have to deal with my phone. And, keep an eye on the prices online, especially Amazon’s. Apps like ShopSavvy just make it incredibly easy to compare prices, and they’re only going to become more ubiquitous. Just pick up the book, scan the barcode with your phone, and voilla comparison shopping, and reviews in seconds.
Now, most people don’t have Amazon Prime (free 2 day shipping on essentially everything at Amazon), which means that Borders, and other brick and mortars have a pricing advantage because of shipping costs, but most people don’t think about shipping costs, and even if I was affected by shipping costs, they still wouldn’t have compensated for the fifteen dollar price difference.
Traditional bookstores can survive, but they’ve got to be at least close on price, and they’ve got to overcome the fact that Amazon offers me piles of reviews on everything I’m unsure about. No matter how good your staff is, there’s no way they can have read everything. I want the traditional stores to survive. And while I am willing to pay a small premium to them for the services they offer me, there’s only so far I, or anyone else, is willing to go in that area, and it’s getting far too easy to find out when the prices are non-competitive.
[Update] according to MKB Borders finally recovered their brain and split from Amazon.com. I never did understand their connection. Not only did Borders.com go to Amazon.com, after one click there was no more Borders branding and none of the purchases counted towards Borders Rewards, and they would obviously be making less than if they sold the books themselves.
[Update] related post: How Borders made me into a regular customer.
(and why you should support them)
Right now, most people are a little concerned about their jobs. Right now, the economy is going to shit because people are buying less. Part of this is the banks not giving out many loans. Part of it is that people have less income, or fear a sudden loss of it.
But, Hyundai has just done something absolutely brilliant. They’ve made an offer: buy one of their cars, and if you loose your job within a year, you can give it back. On the surface this seems incredibly generous, and in a way, it is. But, the risk to them is probably quite small. You see, car manufacturers let people return cars all the time. It’s called a lease. But normally they get cars back with two years of wear and tear. With this deal, whatever cars they get back, come back with only one year of wear.
Sales are down for all car manufacturers. Dramatic measures are going to be required for them to make it through this. And this, is awesome, because everybody wins.
And, as far as the cars go? Once upon a time I spent $2,000 on a used Hyundai. I drove it for years, and if it hadn’t left town with my ex, I’d still be driving it now. It wasn’t perfect. But, it was one of the best, and most affordable, cars I’ve ever owned. As far as I’m concerned , it was totally undervalued. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy one again. And, if you need a new car? I think you should give Hyundai some real consideration, if for no other reason than the fact that they have the courage, and intelligence, to make you an offer like this.
P.S. While the company may be brilliant, their web designers are beyond retarded. The main site is completely blank in Safari, and their USA site actually closes the window when you try and go there in Safari. I’m not kidding. It’s all “No! I’m not decent!” *slams the door in your face*. Actually, maybe it’s just having an affair and wants you to think it’s indecent. Because, when you show up in Firefox it’s all “Hellooo sexy. Wanna come in and…view my ‘curves’?”
Magic to the Bone is the best Urban Fantasy I’ve read in ages. Buy it now.
This as another one of my impulse buys. If it weren’t for the quote on the cover from Patricia Briggs I wouldn’t have bothered, but I really respect Patricia’s writing and, of this book, she said “Loved It. Fiendishly Original.” I couldn’t agree more.
The book is set in an alternate world where magic has been discovered, harnessed, and commoditized just like electricity. According to the jacket,
“Everything has a cost. And every act of magic exacts a price from its user maybe a two-day migraine…But some people want to use magic without paying, and they Offload the cost onto innocents. When that happens, it falls to a Hound to identify the spell’s caster – and Allison Beckstrom’s the best there is.”
Just to add a little twist, Devon Monk (the author) has added the minor problem that when our heroine casts she sometimes looses a piece of her memory. The bigger the spell the bigger the chance of a bigger memory loss. Initially it serves as a mechanism to help give the character a little depth by way of watching her handle the fact that she’s missing random pieces of her life, and many times you’re not sure if her claims of having not done things, like meeting her most recent step-mother, are true, or if she’s just lost the memory of it. And in the end her memory loss serves to as the basis of a wonderful epilogue, and a new beginning.
Devon’s made Allison a strong woman who’s very believable and filled with very human failings like self doubt, claustrophobia, and a tendency to jump into bed too quickly with guys she knows too little about. And I like that things like her claustrophobia aren’t used as plot devices. They’re simply pieces of her character. The wonderful thing about the characters in this books is their believability. In many books, especially in this genre, you can easily figure out the overdone stereotyped personality driving each character and know exactly how they’re going to react to everything long before they do. But, in Devon’s world the people are more like the random people in each of our lives. People who rarely fit into any obvious stereotype.
Now, I won’t claim that the book is totally unpredictable, but I must admit, that while I knew what was going to happen, it wasn’t clear until the end why it was going to happen or how everyone tied together. When I buy an urban fantasy I’m paying for an enjoyable escape into a world that’s filled with interesting people, and a bit of excitement, and Devon delivers.
How good is this? This is, without a doubt, one of the best urban fantasy books I own. I’ve just pre-ordered the second one, and if I lost the first I would buy it all over again without hesitation.
A little while ago Jason Kester wrote a post complaining about the fact that he had to sign up with an OpenID provider in order to get an account on StackOverflow. He went on to point out the value of having a frictionless sign-up process. And, while everything he says is true. He’s missing a crucial fact.
You see, StackOverflow knows their audience. They know them really well. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of StackOverflow’s users are web developers, and any web developer worth their salt has experimented with OpenID by now, which means they already have an account with an OpenID provider. Those who don’t are almost guaranteed to have an account with one of the many OpenID providers listed on StackOverflow’s login page:
So, for StackOverflow’s audience, signing up is a matter of typing in the right url, and signing in with the password they’ve probably been using for years. No remembering a new password or reusing an old one and thus making it more vulnerable. Just enter your url and go.
So, yes, Jason’s right, signup should be as close to zero friction as possible, but knowing your audience trumps it, because when you know your audience well you can make things better than you ever could when trying to make things easy for absolutely everyone.
The fact that Jason had to go sign up with an Open ID provider speaks to a couple possibilities:
—
P.S. On a related note. Many of us have learned that if you have your own domain name it means you never have to send out e-mails to everyone when you change who’s providing your e-mail, because your address will never change. Honestly I’m amazed that so many developers are handing our their Gmail addresses. Anyway, you can do the same thing with OpenID by adding 2 tags to the html on your home page. Now, I just enter http://masukomi.org on any OpenID site (that’s where I put the tags) and I’ll never have to change my logins if I decide I don’t want to use MyOpenID.com as my provider anymore. Just like never having to send out updates about a new e-mail address.
P.P.S. Google has totally failed with their OpenID implementation. The whole idea is to give an url that’s easy to remember and has the user’s name in it. Technically you can use your gmail address (since @ signs are valid in urls (it’s an obscure login thing no-one uses anymore)) but all the OpenID consumers are asking for URLs not addresses, so users won’t know they could use their gmail address, nevermind the fact that Google hasn’t told anyone their e-mail address will work as an OpenID url. AND, WTF is with that google.com/accounts/o8/id who the hell is going to remember that if they wanted to use an URL instead of the e-mail no-one told them about?! I think there’s also an even more obscure google address you can use with a long string of random characters that you’ve even less hope of remembering.
[Update] Apparently many of you don’t believe me that your Gmail address is a valid OpenID url. I would point you to this article on Google’s blog that confirms my claim. And, I’d like to point out that www.example.com needs http:// prepended to it, just as <username>@gmail.com would need in order to be a valid url. The wget manual puts it succintly:
You can also encode your username and password within a url: ftp://user:password@host/path http://user:password@host/path Either user or password, or both, may be left out. If you leave out either the http username or password, no authentication will be sent. If you leave out the ftp username, ‘anonymous’ will be used. If you leave out the ftp password, your email address will be supplied as a default password.
You can also encode your username and password within a url:
ftp://user:password@host/path http://user:password@host/path
Either user or password, or both, may be left out. If you leave out either the http username or password, no authentication will be sent. If you leave out the ftp username, ‘anonymous’ will be used. If you leave out the ftp password, your email address will be supplied as a default password.
Developershare is the percentage or proportion of the total available pool of developers that is coding for a particular product or platform.
Example: Regardless of how good the Palm Pre is, Palm will be hard-pressed to steal any of iPhone’s developershare.
Aspirin is an embeddable Java SMTP server, that’s been fairly well received. This is just an announcement of its new home and a notable change to the codebase.*
There’s been a lingering threading bug with it which resulted in the only way to kill it being to use a System.exit() call. In an attempt to clean up the codebase, and make it easier for developers like you to work on it, and pass back any interesting patches you’ve made, I’ve taken two notable steps:
The first is that I’ve converted Aspirin into a single threaded beast. Throw what you want in it’s queue and it’ll churn its way through it in a background thread which will go away when it’s done. No more thread pool. So far I’ve just made an initial pass at it. While it should be functional it definitely needs more testing and should be considered alpha.
Secondly, I’ve moved all development over to GitHub. This is where you’ll find the new single-threaded version. I’ve done this because git allows you to make as many changes to it as you want with all the benefits of version control, and without me having to allow any random Joe to commit to the master repo. However, I would be more than happy to accept essentially any patch you feel like pushing back (incredibly easy on GitHub). I’ve got no real agenda for Aspirin. I want it to be small, easy to use, and trustworthy. If you have a one line fix, or tweak send it in. If you have a new feature you’ve added to your copy (big or small) send it in. If you reorganized the code in your copy to be more readable, send it in. Almost anything you send it will be accepted into the main repo, I just want to give it a once-over to make sure it’s not going to harm anthing, and that it actually benefits something.
The url for Aspirin on GitHub is here http://github.com/masukomi/aspirin
On a related note, I’m planning on making a fork of Aspirin that’s tailored to working on Android. Because there really needs to be a way to send e-mail without having to display an editable e-mail message to the user. The plan is to hook into the same sending mechanisms that the Gmail app uses, and have e-mails send out silently but be visible in the users sent-mail folder. If you’re interested in such a beast, drop me a note and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop.
* Unfortunately dev.java.net gives me no good tools for contacting the “observers” on the project. WTF is the point of letting people sign up as observers (or developers, or anything else) if you can’t communicate with them except via a mailing list they may not be on?! I so regret putting aspirin on that site.
Yesterday I was discussing the fact that I need a new laptop and how much I wanted to get an HP Mini 1000 (cheap, ultra light, good manufacturer), but couldn’t because of those damn independent Mac developers. They keep making incredible apps I simply won’t give up. Unsurprisingly, he asked me what my killer apps were for the Mac, and I thought you might be interested too. But, before I start the list, I just have to give a major shout-out to the indie developers for OS X. You guys make the most creative, useful, and beautiful software on any platform. If it weren’t for you I would have given up my Mac years ago.
All of these apps have free trials. If any of them sound interesting to you, please download them and give them a try. They are each worth every penny.
* Yes, I could pirate Illustrator, but as a software developer it’s important to me to only use software that’s free or has been legitimately paid for. I wouldn’t want anyone pirating software I wrote so I won’t do it to them. And yes, Inkscape is arguably more powerful than Lineform, and I like it, but I can’t use Inkscape on a Mac because OS X’s X server doesn’t support pressure sensitivity, and it tends to slow everything down, which screws up long flowing lines.
** They have updated Delicious Library with new features since it was originally released, and they are quite good, but it took years to actually get them the last time around. And it still can’t @$#% let me borrow a book! Also, there was lots of frustration on their forums and very little interaction from the company when the last version was months late in coming out. So, the app rocks but I’m not thrilled with the support or the co.
With purpose, and a focused mind, I prepare to petition the god.
Up from my desk I rise, and walk forth. Down the hall, into the room where his idol waits.
I pull my offering from my pocket: a small piece of paper covered with symbols, and the face of a past leader, all done in green. Carefully, I prepare it, making sure it is flat, and smooth. The god will accept nothing less.
With two hands, and head bowed, I hold my offering to his mouth, my breath holds for a second. Is it good enough? Will he accept it? It starts to pull from my fingers, but this is no guarantee. He will consider it’s worth, and quality. If it’s not good enough he will spit it out. He is not a mean god, but he is a strict one. He would let me try again, but today, there is no need. He accepts my offering. I can touch his colorful side, adorned with symbols, and raised areas for the hands of supplicants. I choose one, head still bowed, and wait.
It is rare for a supplicant to be rejected at this point, but it has happened; sometimes they choose wrong, and sometimes it seems the god changes his mind, to teach them a lesson maybe… Who can know how the mind of a god works.
An instant later a sound emerges from deep within the idol. And a bright cylinder appears in his pocket. A cylinder for me!
It is a Coke! The god has accepted my offering! With shaky hands I pull the tab, and feel the sweet caffeinated rush of his glory.
