moebius recursive

I need envelopes. Lots of envelopes…

Not real sure how well the one above actually works, but it looks kind of cool.

Technorati Tags:
art, collections, style

misc

The guardian have provided some cycle-themed summer reading suggestions crowd-sourced from twitter.

Technorati Tags:
bicycle, books, cycling, reading, summer

books

Google Earth is a fascinating and useful tool for learning about places and even just taking virtual tours of places you would like to visit. With the 5.2 release, you can now get a sense of what the weather is like in those locations as well. For most locations you can enable the ‘cloud layer’ and in some places you can actually get a weather radar overlay.

Technorati Tags:
google, googlemaps, travel, visualization, weather

travel

As the internet has become more and more mainstream, I often wondered if there my be some sort of impact to the way that people absorb data. Apparently, there are some that are of the opinion that the internet is having a pronounced impact on reading habits. The reaction to this is a ‘slow reading’ movement.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual tidbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.

Technorati Tags:
cognition, culture, ideas, internet, reading

ideas

Congratulations on the well earned victory in the 2010 World Cup!

Consider commemorating the 2010 World Cup with this awesome graphic in poster form.

Technorati Tags:
football, spain, worldcup

misc

I was listening to a report on the radio the other morning about how postal rates in the US are going to increase and how this was going to cause issues for some people. I had to laugh. To me it seemed that if they did it right, they could solve two problems at once.

The obvious solution to me was to eliminate the ridiculously cheap ‘bulk rate’ (aka corporate welfare) that businesses have enjoyed and abused for years. Bring this to parity with the ‘first class’ postage rate that the private citizens that fund the postal service have to pay. The net effect of this should be two fold: 1) less junk mail being sent out 2) less junk mail being thrown away. Those who wish to continue to send me 4 catalogs a month from which I have never ordered a single thing may continue to do so — only now paying their fair share.

And while we are at it, require all those tax-dodging corporations who have incorporated offshore to pay international rates for all of their domestic mailings. After all, for tax purposes they are a ‘foreign’ company, they should be for postal purposes as well.

Technorati Tags:
dubious, humor, ideas

ideas

Why you will never be able to download at the speeds that carriers claim. Yeah, I’m looking at you Sprint and your EVO hysteria. My Nokia N97 with AT&T service seems to download as fast or faster than every EVO that I have seen in town. Go figure.

Technorati Tags:
gadgets, internet, mobile

gadgets

From a design and ambiance standpoint, the Nomad Light Fire is fantastic. These would be ideal on our deck or even in the solarium in colder weather. Not sure how one goes about buying one (or what it costs)…

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design, ideas, ingenuity, style

gadgets

Soccer vs Football – John Cleese breaks it down for you in this video

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humor, video

fun

In my local and online shopping, I prefer to give my hard earned cash to a smaller outfit that offers a good (or in some cases superior) product and many times a much better shopping experience. However, of late, I have had two consumer experiences that lead me to believe that small online retailers don’t understand the importance of customer service (or customer relations).

First up in Inventory Magazine (and their related shop). With only two issues in circulation, Inventory is a fantastic magazine: interesting articles, well presented and sustainably produced. No quarrels there.

I decided to splash out and buy one of their bespoke store brand shirts albeit at a bit of a premium price. A little over a week later the shirt arrives. It looks as if it has been unceremoniously stuffed into a folded up shopping bag and a shipping label applied to the outside. A cursory inspection of the shirt shows that it has several obvious defects in the material and craftsmanship (slubs in the fabric, loose buttons, untrimmed threads). Basically, reminds me of the sort of thing you would see on the rack at as a ‘second’ at TJ Maxx. Clearly the item hadn’t been inspected at all before plunked into the bag and sent of to me, the customer. I am justifiably more than a little disappointed in the item I received so I sent off an email to Inventory. Several days go by with no response. So I send another. Still no response. I direct message them on Twitter (where they are fairly active so I know someone is on the other end of the line). Again nothing. At this point, my thought is ‘what the hell?’ – they have had every opportunity to a) respond b) make the situation right. Instead they have chosen to do nothing. Buyer beware when purchasing from Inventory Magazine’s online shop.

The second example is comical in an ironic (and similar) sort of way. Monocle is another fantastic monthly magazine that has ventured into online sales of a small number of curated items from music to books to rather dearly priced clothing ($400USD espadrilles anyone?). I already subscribe to the magazine so I have an online account with them. My attempt to use that account to purchase several music CDs from them was a very rough ride. After selecting the items and placing them in my shopping basket I attempted to check out. I selected my existing account from a list. But I can move beyond the screen because it keeps telling me I need to input a city name. Reselect info, visually verify there is, in fact, a city listed. Check. Still can’t proceed. Fire off an email to the Monocle sales team. The response: ‘try again later’. What?! Presumably they have invested in self healing technology for their site. So I try again a week later. Same error. Another email. Then another. Then another. Finally get a response to, wait for it, ‘try again later’. When I inquire if the issue has been identified and fixed (it has not) I get the curious response of ‘just send us your order and payment info in an email(!) an we’ll try to process your order. My payment info in an email? Are you mad? At this point nearly two months have gone by and they have not fixed their site. Now I need to renew my subscription. Same issue with that. I am able to work around it by manually re-keying all of my address info into the system. I was so frustrated that I emailed Tyler Brule (Monocle’s head) directly about my poor experience with the Monocle order process. You guessed it, no response at all.

The truly ironic part of this is how much Monocle the magazine bangs on issue after issue about who is doing customer service ‘right’ around the world and authoritatively proclaiming to those who aren’t ‘doing it right’ how they should improve. But apparently when it comes to actually providing customer service themselves, well, that is optional, suboptimal and unapologetic. Thanks for making me work so hard to be a customer, Monocle.

Fortunately, there are a few sites that understand customer service. One shining example is Corazzo, a Portland, Oregon-based provider of scooter/motorcycle riding apparel. From my first order, they have provided both stellar products and service. Questions and issues are dealt with promptly and personally. Subsequent orders are always accompanied by a hand written note of thanks (and many times a little something extra that shows they appreciate the return business). Absolutely fantastic. If they were a local company, I would stop by on a regular basis to congratulate them on their fine service and products and encourage them to continue in the same vein.

I can only hope that Inventory spend a little time with the Corazzo folks and figure out how to elevate their game. I wish Inventory success – if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t engage with them to try to improve. At this point in my experiece, they have a long way to go.

misc

Google is now providing a dashboard to allow you to view and review location data from you mobile device (if you have Google Maps installed and enabled Google Latitude for location reporting).

Whenever this topic comes up, privacy is usually one of the first things that leaps to mind. Google are careful to address this explicitly:

We’re really excited to make Latitude and your location more useful to you, but we definitely understand that your privacy is important. Just as before, Google Location History is entirely opt-in only and your location history is available privately to you and nobody else. Additionally, you may be asked to periodically re-enter your password when opening any Location History page, even if you’re signed in to your Google Account already (just to make sure you’re really you). Of course, you may always delete any or all of your location history in the Manage History tab or disable Location History at any time.

Technorati Tags:
google, googlemaps, gps, location, mobile, webtools

webtools

The Nokia and Intel cross-platform OS MeeGo is now available for adventurous netbook owners and developers.

The MeeGo netbook user experience is the first of its kind for the flexible cross-platform OS, allowing everyone to get a taster for what’s in store when a device is launched in the near future. Building on the latest open source technologies the MeeGo netbook experience boasts instant access to synchronised calendars, tasks and files, along with real-time social networking updates on your homescreen. It doesn’t end there, the OS also provides aggregation of your social networking happenings, allowing you to see all your feeds on one screen and keep all your buddies informed with what you had for breakfast.

When it comes to browsing the MeeGo netbook user experience integrates Google Chrome or a fully open source browser solution plus Google Chromium is also on board.

The OS also includes easy to use applications for email, calendar and there’s also a brand new media player offering. There’s also support for a myriad of languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Swedish, Polish, Finnish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, English and British English.

For those technically-apt developers amongst us there’s more than enough fodder for you to get to grips with. The release of MeeGo API includes Qt 4.6, the MeeGo SDK with an integrated application development environment, and various other operating system tools. Currently, the MeeGo SDK is focused on netbooks, but the next version of the MeeGo SDK, an early developer release in June, will support touch-based devices, such as handsets and tablets.

Technorati Tags:
gadgets, mobile, network, nokia, technology

gadgets

Several years ago I committed to myself to try to trust my intuition more and (perhaps with a bit of bias) I would say that commitment has served me well. This essay from The Guardian explores the topic a bit more.

Albert Camus said that the body is as good a judge as the mind. We know what he means. When we meet someone for the first time the whole of us responds to that person. Later the mind may reflect on the encounter and think that they were likeable, or not, but that first meeting will be an important element in whether we want to follow up the relationship or not. Yet, though there is a great truth in what Camus said, I believe that in the end the mind must be the final judge. The body, with its instinctual response, can orientate the mind in a particular direction or nudge it in another one if it feels it is going wrong, but in the end the mind must decide, using rational criteria.

The same point can be made in relation to what is called conscience. Some people think of conscience as an inner voice making them feel guilty, or telling them what to do. But conscience, as Thomas Aquinas said, is the mind making moral judgements. It is a matter of the mind, not any inner voice. In short it is the considered judgment we make when we weigh up all the pros and cons in the light of our values and overall perspective on life. This is not to say that guilty feelings, or intuitions are unimportant. They are. Sometimes they can stop the mind going down a wrong track altogether. When we make a rational decision it is very good to take into account the totality of what we are feeling. But in the end we must try to think as rationally as possible.

Technorati Tags:
cognition, ideas, intuition

ideas

So maybe the recent crazy for anti-bacterial everything is not necessarily a good thing? From Science Daily:

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

What next, the discovery of midichlorians and their impact?

Also previously Cut Down On Infections By Cutting Down On Antibiotics

Technorati Tags:
ideas, nature, science

ideas, misc

Here is an excellent (if not somewhat depressing) animation of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Technorati Tags:
currentevents, news, visualization

misc

Question is whether this just seems awkward because it is a new way of doing things or whether it is truly a bad thing. In any case, the iPad certainly takes it’s knocks in this discussion:

In a recent column for Interactions (reference 2) Norman pointed out that the rush to develop gestural interfaces – “natural” they are sometimes called – well-tested and understood standards of interaction design were being overthrown, ignored, and violated. Yes, new technologies require new methods, but the refusal to follow well-tested, well-established principles leads to usability disaster.

Recently, Raluca Budui and Hoa Loranger from the Nielsen Norman group performed usability tests on Apple’s iPad (reference 1), reaching much the same conclusion. The new applications for gestural control in smart cellphones (notably the iPhone and the Android) and the coming arrival of larger screen devices built upon gestural operating systems (starting with Apple’s iPad) promise even more opportunities for well-intended developers to screw things up. Nielsen put it this way: “The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not. It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.”

Why are we having trouble? Several reasons:

· The lack of established guidelines for gestural control

· The misguided insistence by companies (e.g., Apple and Google) to ignore established conventions and establish ill-conceived new ones.

· The developer community’s apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public.

After cataloging some of the issues with gestural interfaces in a bit more detail, the article attempts to conclude on a positive note on the ‘promise’ of GI. It comes off a bit mixed (if not mildly scolding):

The new devices are also fun to use: gestures add a welcome feeling of activity to the otherwise joyless ones of pointing and clicking.

But the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems.

We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers.

Technorati Tags:
accessibility, apple, design, gadgets, interfaces, ipad, usability

ideas

Here is a working web version of the solar system without any of the flash cruft. Master the possibilities, lazy web ‘designers’. Note how (shock! horror! surprise!) Internet Exploder doesn’t handle this properly (so much for standards).

Technorati Tags:
css, design, noflash, javascript, webdev

webdev

It is like it has been a race to the bottom in the last 48 hours in the blogosphere. Google puts out a simple announcement that now that android has achieved critical mass and is being sold by an increasing number of carriers (both in the US and around the world) that they will seek to sell their own Nexus One via carriers and stop selling it solely via a google web site. Simple, huh?

Not to read the blog and mainstream spin on the announcement. I can’t count the number of hyperbolic headlines I have seen about ‘Google hanging up on it’s phone’, ‘Google abandoning their phone’, ‘Google forsakes…’, ‘Google runs away from…’, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum. Really, folks, get a fracking grip and actually read the Google announcement. But I guess it gets dim wits to click on your site if you put a sensational spin on a very simple announcement, now, doesn’t it.

Technorati Tags:
android, blogging, googlephone, dubious, gadgets, google, googlewave, mobile

gadgets

A thoughtful and insightful posting on the Tea Tantrum and their ‘anger’. I have always regarded the ‘Take Back America’ rhetoric as coded language that belies a certain masked bigotry. It appears that I am not alone in that thought.

Tea Party supporters repeatedly assert that they are not racists and that their strong dislike of President Obama is not racially motivated. The Tea Party is clearly not a hate group like the Ku Klux Klan or the various militia movements on the fringes that openly advocate hate, hostility or violence toward those they do not like. Their income, education and political influence place the vast majority of Tea Party supporters much closer to the establishment than to any such fringe groups. And in 21st century America you cannot be a well respected member of the establishment and openly advocate racist positions.

But, while not overtly racist, their vision for America does not seem to include people who are not like them as full-fledged members of the same establishment of which they are a part. Tea Party supporters seem to strongly resent the educational, economic and political advances made by women, blacks, Hispanics and other minorities over the past few decades, so concretely symbolized by the election of Barack Obama.

The concluding paragraph pretty much knocks it out of the park:

Groups like the Tea Party will continue to rise, rally against these changes and try to Take America Back, egged on by the demagogues of their day looking to exploit their fears for their own power and riches. But the end is always the same. No one can Take America Back, because what they are really fighting is the fair, inclusive and democratic character of the country, a character that gets reaffirmed and strengthened generation after generation.

Technorati Tags:
ideas, politics, racism, teatantrum

misc

A superhero flavored take on the iPhone vs Android phone debate.

Technorati Tags:
android, fun, gadgets, humor, iphone, mobile

fun