Silktree Leaves
Posted on June 21st, 2008
Silktree leaves…
From Newsweek’s article on their latest poll showing Obama leading McCain nationally by 51% to 36%:
“Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country’s direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that.”
Very early but still stunningly positive poll news for Obama…
Dave Winer is keeping up with all of this political news via his site NewsJunk - highly recommended. You can also get the latest by following newsjunkies on Twitter.
(Via Dave Winer’s Scripting News and NewsJunk sites.)
From PZ Myers’ Pharyngula blog - Bad news from Louisiana on a new bill in Louisiana that allows teachers to supplement science text books with added religious or other material on evolution, global warming, etc. Note that the bill is couched in all sorts of language about free expression and exposure to controversial ideas.
“Remember that crazy teacher with the weird ideas you had back in 8th grade? Now he would be encouraged to bring in bible tracts, anti-abortion screeds, and puff-pieces by right wing editorialists decrying climate change as a communist plot, all in order to balance the teaching of that darned evidence-based biology and earth science stuff.
Note also that this bill, the ‘Louisiana Science Education Act’, was introduced by a Democrat (Ben Nevers, the ignorant pissant) and was approved 94-3.
All I can think is that ‘Louisiana Science’ must be some kind of polite euphemism for ‘bugfuck crazy stupidity’.”
This is from the same state whose governor (and possible Republican VP candidate), Bobby Jindal, claims to have taken part in an exorcism and also cured cancer.
(Via ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed.)
It’s been about 6 months since I was kicked out of my lovely cubicle and forced to work from home. The reasons for this are obscure and really not worth sharing, but suffice it to say I was initially a bit ambivalent about this turn of events. Not that I didn’t look forward to working from home, but there are some negatives that I’d already experienced in past bouts of this kinda thing. Nonetheless, 6 months later I think I’m finally getting the hang of it. Here’s some tips that might help others adjust as well.
1. Don’t expect to get more done. You won’t, at least not at first. Sure you won’t have as many idiotic conversations about what was on TV last night, but you will have many more distractions then you are used to and these will get to you if you’re not ready for them. So until you know what you’re reaction will be, you would do well to stay away from TV’s, social networking sites and other potential wastes of time. Eventually, you’ll be able to handle these in small quantities but not at first. And keep in mind that those people in the office who constantly interrupted you in person will (unfortunately) not forget you exist. They’ll just interrupt you by phone and email instead. Eventually, you will get more done, but you’ll have to use the same strategies you would have used at work to make sure this happens - turn off the phone, stop checking email.
2. Give in and do some of the crap your commuting spouse is expecting you to do while you’re at home. Yes, you’re supposed to be working during the day while he/she is at their ugly office. It doesn’t matter. They will still expect you to put a wash on or do the dishes and simply will not understand how you could possibly be so busy that you couldn’t have taken a 10 minute break to do this. No matter how much you try to make them understand. They especially will not understand why you would not want to do put on a wash on your 10 minute break. Just do it. You’ll be happier and they will think positive thoughts about you (or at least not negative ones).
3. Go into the office every once in a while. But when you do this, put on clothes. Decent clothes. Not the beer and coffee stained T-shirt you’ve been wearing all week. And not the smelly Tevas. You want them to remember you still exist but in a positive way, not think that you’re a slack prick sitting at home in their underwear all day. Even if you are, you need to manage your image a little here. It’s important.
4. Don’t drink beer all day. Yes, this one seems obvious, but believe me it can be a productivity sucker… But seriously, when talking to your commuting co-workers, don’t even joke about all the wonderful things you can now do from home that they can’t do in the cube-farm. They’ll hate you and seek to kill you. When they call and ask if they’re interrupting anything don’t tell them you were just sitting on the back porch having a drink and gazing at the sky. They hate that shit. And, when they complain about the traffic they hit coming in that morning, resist the urge to jokingly commiserate and say the traffic heading up the stairs from your kitchen to your office was deadly. They will not find this anywhere near as amusing as you do.
5. Work like you want to work. This one is harder than it seems and takes some practice. Some people advise home workers to get all dressed as if going to work and to set aside a permanent office area to work from. The concept is you’ll be able to make the mental switch from home to work properly this way. Fuck that. Don’t do it. Work however you want to work, and in whatever way you can get your stuff done most effectively. You are free of all that other office convention crap, why would you try to keep living that way? If you want to work in your underwear go ahead (except if you’ll be doing video chats/conferences, but even then you rarely need the pants). If you want to blast bad 80’s metal out your speakers while you work, do it. Who cares? It’s no longer about what other people think is best, it’s about what works best for you. And keep in mind it can change on a daily basis. Some days skip the breakfast and the shower and just jump right in for a couple of hours. Some days work on your back deck if you want. Work at the kitchen table. Take calls on the toilet. Wear a kilt. Or a sun dress. Or your Pjs. Whatever it is that works for you (and doesn’t hurt others), do it. Just remember to get something done or they’ll eventually realize how much you suck at working from home…
I’m not a designer by profession (but I play one on TV?). Nonetheless, I am painfully aware of how important it is in my field. Design (good and otherwise) touches on the majority of what I do professionally in one way or another. Developing successful software products for my particular industry requires an acute awareness of the user and designs that are strictly tailored towards their needs. Unfortunately, more often than not, what we produce has a design that either has very little thought applied to it, or strongly refers to the engineering team’s ideas of what a good user interface should look like (which is usually the look of their favorite geek tool at the time). Either way not much in the way of user-centered design is done.
Trying to be better at what I do, I’ve gotten a bit obsessed lately about educating myself on basic design concepts and have been browsing a lot of design-focused sites out there. As such, I’ve had Eric Karjaluoto’s article Fuck style on his website ideasonideas flagged and open in a tab in NetNewsWire for months now waiting to be read. This should be seen as a compliment, as I knew on skimming that this was a post I wanted to spend more time with…
Eric’s target is adherence and preference for style, particularly the style-du-jour, over focused user-centered design:
“This season we have “glowy” vector/bitmap collages and rather cute hand-drawn patterns. The following season will inevitably bring something equally novel on first sight, which we will quickly tire of as we are inundated by it. In the pre-web world, things rolled-out more slowly, and as such didn’t hit with the same force; however, better distribution systems allow this eye-candy to be dispersed rapidly. As soon as a particular style is hot, legions of designers reverse-engineer the treatment, and imitate it until it’s everywhere.
The challenge here is that as we are bombarded by these styles, designers, by their own accord and that of their clients and peers, gravitate towards reiterating whatever the style-du-jour happens to be. (Think of the swoosh logos of the late 1990s.) It’s easy to do, the pay-off is immediate, and for a short while, one’s portfolio seems deceptively strong. Most times though, this work is void of the research, strategy, and logic that are necessary to do something effective. As a result, it’s in fact a big pile of shiny bullshit.”
What drew me to this article is not that I have a lot of experience with the problem he describes. Though I’ve seen what he describes, I’m more likely to see a total lack of design input into a product than I am overly stylized design. The companies competing in my industry are by and large dominated by R&D, engineering and scientists (and of course the Finance people). These are the groups that come up with the product designs and this, of course, has the results you would expect. Even when external design companies are hired, generally the proposals for changes and improvements they make are very low on the list of priorities. Only slowly are design concepts making their way into what we do. I’m still amazed at the blank looks when a visual design concept is brought up in the context of software development discussion. By in large, design on this level is something totally alien to them.
However, the issue Eric describes applies easily not just to design in the way he’s thinking of it, but to programming as well. In this case it’s the shiny new tool, language or methodology rather than the hottest visual effect. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had colleagues say “Why don’t you rewrite it in .net/Java/Python/etc…?” when told I was working on some legacy product or another. They don’t say this because they think there is something specific to be gained from using their current favorite tool, they just think it’s cooler.
Shiny new things always attract, whether they’re the latest programming library or the latest web animation technique. This is more reflected on the inside of the product than the outside in my industry, but you also frequently see it in the user interfaces coming out of these groups. New user interface controls are frequently seen where they make no sense. These get used because they were shiny and new and the programmer couldn’t resist their lure. Or MacOSX style buttons suddenly appear in XP UI’s, or windows animate for no real reason… Maybe it’s not that style-du-jour doesn’t apply, it’s just that the people doing the applying of the style are different.
“We have to get our collective heads out of the sand. Everything we do must be held to a higher-standard. Perhaps we have to see design less like art (which is how I fear it is still classified by many), and more like engineering. The data and ability to measure results exists. We simply have to put hard analysis ahead of our personal impulses. This is a great opportunity for us as designers to make a leap. In doing so, we can earn a seat at the table and provide the unique kind of reasoning that our practice can afford.”
I absolutely agree with this. Design (and designers) are classified as somewhat frivolous and “artistic” in the engineering cultures that dominate the industry where I work. And agreed, this does have to change and maybe the approach of tackling design problems more like engineering is the way to go. But I also take a look around and think the inverse of this is also true. Software development and engineering also need to be held to a higher standard. On many levels what we do needs to perhaps be less like engineering and more like design. But this should be the kind of design Eric advocates, not the design by geek we currently utilize. This is design focused on achieving the goal of making something the user really wants to use. That does what they need to do. And that does it well. Not focused on making something the designer or programmer thinks is cool - we have more than enough of that kind of design already.
Peggy Noonan in her regular WSJ Declarations column on the pressure for Obama to choose Clinton as VP:
“Choosing Mrs. Clinton would make Mr. Obama look weak. No one would believe he picked her because he respected or liked her. They’d think he was appeasing her. This is not something he can afford! And in any case some people cannot be appeased. Voters would assume she and her people did their voodoo—I have 18 million voters!—and he fell for it. She doesn’t have 18 million voters, she got 18 million votes. It is telling the way she thinks of them, as if they are working-class automatons awaiting her command.
As for reports of their rage, there are always dead-enders, and frantic lovers of this candidate or that. This goes under the larger heading ‘lonely people.’ But there’s reason to think, and some Democratic insiders do think it, that a lot of the supposed pro-Clinton furor is ginned up on Web sites by the Clinton campaign, and even manufactured by the Clinton campaign, to prove Clinton loyalists are real and their demands must be met. In any case, you can see how Mrs. Clinton views her supposed working-class heroes by what she is doing with them now: using them as a bargaining chip to get whatever she wants.
Democrats this year have the winning fever, and Democrats will come out. By November they will be united”
(Via The Wall Street Journal.)
