Fire and motion

Quality Over Quantity

I've got two examples of quality over quantity for you. But first, just the opposite:

A week ago it was hot. The heat wave was reaching about 90°, and we spent most of the day sweltering by the pool, vying for the shade. It didn't cool off much that night either.

I popped in a Blu-ray disc to watch with my wife. She and I settled in, hoping the movie would take our mind off the heat.

The Blu-ray disk spent a couple of minutes downloading trailers from the studio's server on the internet, and then proceeded to gather the local time and weather conditions and display them in widgets in the disc's main menu.

First: That's the last thing we want. What we want is the movie. That the disk would make us wait forever in the heat to download trailers we don't want to see, and then do the calculations to display the local time and the weather in these annoying widgets complicating the main menu was frustrating.

Second: What was really infuriating was that the disc got the weather wrong. Instead of showing the high eighties, it displayed the current weather at 62°. Even worse, it displayed the day's high as 62°!  I wanted to throw my shoe through the TV. Luckily for the TV, it was too hot to be wearing shoes.

Not only was the Blu-ray disk blocking our attempt to watch the movie it contained, it was mocking us with blatant lies.

A Note To Blu-ray Disc Authors: We don't want to be reminded how late it is, or how uncomfortable it is outside. We want to escape into the movie. Now. Please let us.

Things Done Right

The natural thing to do in the iteration of technology is to add things. (Hence the stupid Blu-ray widgets.) Make things do more, make them bigger, or if there's supposed to be smaller, provide more of them. But that's not always better.

So when companies can resist that urge, and make things actually better, instead of making them just do more or have more stuff, then it's worth applauding.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V

We've gone through a few generations of cameras increasing the size of their CCDs or CMOSs, making images take up much more space, but not making their picture quality any better. Consumers would end up with the same problems, but would need more disk space for the pictures.

Sony recently made a camera that didn't take bigger pictures for its class, but one that took quicker and better pictures. It's the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V. Outstanding. That's exactly the kind of improvement I've been hoping for.

Google Chrome

Google's about to release a new iteration of their browser, Chrome, that actually has less visual noise around the web page than the current version. Awesome! They're taking away the stuff we don't want. They're already doing DNS pre-fetching in anticipation that we'd click somewhere on the page. It's like they want me to be more efficient at what I want to do.

I love it when companies hone in on what the product is supposed to do.

That's how companies can make their customers happy, and keep their customers with them.

End of an Icon?

The baby biting my nose in the picture to the right is turning ten years old.  It's hard for me to believe that I've been using that picture as my avatar across the web for so long.  When I created that avatar, I chose a picture that delighted me.  My daughter and I were playing a game that we both loved. I'd hold her with her head next to mine, and when she'd turn away I'd brush her cheek with my nose, to bug her.  She'd turn back and playfully bite it.  We'd both laugh.

My wife caught the photo of us in the middle of the game.  The original photo was nearly monochromatic already, and I thought I'd make it sepia-toned to give it an aged look.  It seemed a good idea at the time, since because we had a new baby just about everything seemed renewed and full of wonder and color.  A faux sepia-toned photo added some variety.

Now, that ten-year-old sepia-toned photo is beginning to look, well, old. Not only can the baby in the photo read the blog about herself, she probably has her own twitter account. It's time for a new icon/avatar.

There were a few things I really liked about the old avatar. I liked that I used the same one across multiple websites.  That makes it easier for my friends to know that it's the same me at each website. I liked that I only took up about 30% of the image.  At most sites that allow you to put up an avatar, you're going to be stuck seeing it yourself, so you'd better not mind.  I don't want to look at a cheesy smirking headshot of myself when I check in at social networks.  And even though I only make up 30% of the frame, I'm glad that it's me in there.  I do want my online friends to have at least a rough idea of what I look like.

So that was my criteria for the new photo, too.  I want to use the same one across social networks, I want to be in the photo, but I don't want to have to look directly at my own ugly mug.

My friend David D. posted a self-portrait on flickr that really captured my imagination. He only comprised a small part of the photo, yet there was just enough to suggest physical traits to recognize him by, and it had a brilliant warm blue sky. I tried to capture a similar shot, and this is the result. It meets most of that criteria. A couple of other aspects of the photo grew on me, too. I like the deep blue, and I like that since I'm facing to the right, for most social network posts that put my icon on the left, it looks like I'm looking at the conversation.

I'm going to give this new icon a try. Let's see how it goes!

Reclaim Your Attention

Kathy Sierra hit the nail on the head three years ago when she introduced the concept of the Asymptotic Twitter Curve. She links to some excellent essays that suggest we're not doing ourselves any favors by letting our attention be divided amongst myriad bite-sized nuggets of information. Go ahead, read her post and follow a few of the supporting links. You'll be glad you did.

If it's possible, the temptation to avoid entering "the zone" to focus deeply on one subject has gotten worse since 2006. The success of Twitter has spawned similar microblogging sites and caused other sites like Facebook to make activity streams their main focus. Media and websites have become very proficient at vying for our attention.

It's a good idea to occasionally evaluate how we use our time. If you think there's room for improvement in the way you allocate your time, Leo Babauta wrote a short wonderful article called How To Reclaim Your Attention.

All of Leo's suggestions are good ideas. His sixth suggestion, give your attention to the important, is so important that it bears a little more encouragement. Daniel Steinberg wrote an article, Kill, Commit or Transform your Projects. While the title seems a little dire at first blush, the action of triaging some projects to fully commit to others is invigorating.

What is it you want to accomplish?

By Skill and Hard Work

A few days ago, I read Rob Walling's article, Why You Should Re-architect Your Career to Amplify Your Strengths, which explains that we'd be better off spending our time maximizing our strengths instead of fixing our weaknesses. He makes a strong case and applies it to the niche of software development, but it's a good idea in general, too.

Then today I read Lucy Kellaway's announcement of her new motto, Nomina Rutrum Rutrum (which translates to "To Call a Spade a Spade"). In her article, she mentioned a few other great mottos, too. Not only have they stood the test of time, they gain some caché from being in Latin. In her words:

This is partly because it lends an air of sophistication, learning and tradition. But it is also because most people don't have the first idea what it actually means and so have to go to the effort of finding out. Once they have done this, any banality in the actual meaning is camouflaged.

I already loved certain pseudo latin phrases like the names of the websites ars technica and vox machina. Just by having those names the websites hit the ground running with a certain level of sophistication.

I decided it was time for me to adopt a motto too, and one of the classics spoke of a truth that I hold dear. It's the motto of the Blackburn Rovers, and it goes to the heart of what makes a successful endeavor stand out. I'd like to make that motto my own, too. It is:

That translates to "By Skill and Hard Work." It jibes with Rob's article because it states that hard work won't get you all the way. One should work with one's strengths and apply their best effort if they want to achieve excellence. I also like the implication that the arte can help the product result in something beautiful. We would do well to have made something both beautiful and excellent.

Go Left To Read Older Entries

Michael Heilemann said it succinctly two years ago when he explained that pagination navigation should have newer stuff on the right, and older stuff on the left.

He wrote:

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the right. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the left.

Left = Old.

He's got it right, and Wordpress (among others) has it wrong. I love Wordpress, and in order to help Wordpress users fix the code in their themes, here's some sample code that corrects Wordpress's default pagination navigation:

For pages with single entries:

And somewhat confusingly, for pages with multiple entries you should have the following:

This intuitive idiom is important enough to get right, despite the fact that Wordpress's backwards implementation has gained some traction.

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