Advice: Beware the First Version of Any E-Thing

A quick bit of technical advice, here, on the occasion Apple's release of the next-gen Mac OS tomorrow. I'm an unabashed Mac lover (though one who duly respects XP, alright?), but here's what a couple of decades in the computer world have taught me: Never Buy The First Version Of Anything.

The software business has long treated the first public release as the last beta version. True, you could test today's complex software forever and still never be sure you'd pressed every button in every possible combination. So they count on the "bleeding edge" types, the ones who pride themselves on having the latest/greatest of every product, to find out what still needs work.

It's therefore unsurprising that The New York Times' estimable David Pogue, in today's column praising the new Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (10.5 was Plain Old Leopard, I guess), nonetheless refers in to "the number of non-Apple programs that 'break' after the installation. I experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3," and a couple minor apps.

"The compatibility list at snowleopard.wikidot.com lists other programs that may have trouble. Most of these hiccups will go away when software companies update their wares... Let’s hope that Apple hurries up with its inevitable 10.6.0.1 update, too, to address the occasional Safari crash and cosmetic glitch I experienced, too."

Let me hasten to highlight the gist of the column, though, which he summarized as,

"Otherwise, if you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed (and) polish, and you’ll keep experiencing those 'oh, that’s nice' moments for weeks to come."

State of the Art column, NYT:
Apple’s Sleek Upgrade (8/26/09)

So, like the man says, better to wait for the 10.6.0.1 (or -.2) version. Let the real hardcore geeks unearth the larger bugs and thus get it in shape "for the rest of us."

(Full Disclosure: Mr. Pogue, in an earlier incarnation as a writer/reviewer for MacWorld, had nice things to say about two different manuals I wrote, as he was reviewing the programs they described. So, yeah, I am kinda partial to the guy's opinions, and think he's wicked smart.)

Related, here:
"Endless Vistas... of confusion" (2/4/07)
Posts tagged "tech advice"

"How do we come up with new ideas?"

Alison Arieff, blogging on design in the New York Times, asks this always-useful question, by way of giving some serious room to a gentleman who vividly "illustrates" the practical value of plain old seat of the pants blue-sky imagining.

She begins by listing a battery of common distractions we're all fighting through to remain optimistic enough to keep creative and productive, remarking,

"I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.

"That’s why I am so enamored with the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson, a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller. Many of his musings are simply whimsical, existing primarily as a source of inspiration or delight. Others tackle very real issues, from environmentalism to alternative transportation to homelessness."

(Johnson's caption:)
"Auto Abandonment Zones are built to acccomodate growing numbers of drivers who lose the will to proceed further in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic. Drivers may pull off, leave car keys with an Abandonment Officer, and board a nearby train, phone relatives, or calm themselves in 'parks.'" (Bolding mine.)

As one who has spent far-r-r too much time edging along in traffic, in the pre-mostly-virtual world when the only way to get paid was to show up somewhere every day and be there throughout regular work hours — thus condemning you to rush hour drives — I found that to be wickedly dry humor. Arieff continues,

"In Johnson’s oeuvre, nothing gets to exist if it doesn’t have at least two functions: the skylight uses solar energy to cook the dinner, for instance, and the exercise bike operates the washing machine (cleaning clothes and toning the wearer’s muscles simultaneously)."

"Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas" (On Design blog), 5/4/09

For more examples of witty yet functional doubling-up, Johnson has visually proposed an array of gardening tool footwear, including the Weeding Oxfords, Shear Shoes, Lawn Aeraters, Lawn Edging Spurs, and the Watering Sneakers. Presumably, you could accomplish a lot of tasks among the dirt and weeds just by walking around — in a very deliberate manner, one would guess. Afterwards, you can relax in Johnson's Ten-Speed Hammock, or the Blooming Rose Chair with Ottoman (p. 62 in the book preview).

Now, a lot of this stuff is intentionally (we hope) zany; besides demonstrating some fairly precise drafting skills, the man's also a comedian. But the creative thinking on display, focused on real-world objects, can only spark a few fresh thoughts in anyone trying to see where things can progress in their own sphere of influence.

A vast number of such thoughts are drawn out in Johnson’s 1984 book: “What the World Needs Now: A Resource Book for Daydreamers, Frustrated Inventors, Cranks, Efficiency Experts, Utopians, Gadgeteers, Tinkerers, and Just About Everybody Else.” Let me recommend the final, how-to chapter, "Author's Tips for Inventing Useful and Useless Things," which is excerpted there at the other end of that link.

"I sit on the living room rug at home and look out the window at the garden. …I avoid my desk and drafting table, as such furniture has the connotations of serious endeavor, deadlines," etc.

He places a stack of typing paper and a pen or pencil on the floor next to him.

"I find that a few key words and a blurry scribble are all that I need for capturing an idea, but it is important to note down all ideas, since like dream images these products of the imagination evaporate easily and are usually impossible to retrieve."

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Related, here:
Building 'Living Space' Around Railroad Stations

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

Posts tagged innovation and creative thinking

The 20th WebInno Packs The House

I drove the length of the Mass Pike to Cambridge yesterday to attend the latest Web Innovators Group, "an informal gathering of people interested in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area." (Legally speaking, The People's Republic of Cambridge is part of Boston, but don't try to tell the people there that. This was not an event for the comrades, though; the host hotel just so happens to be down the street from MIT.)

David Beisel of Venrock, a venture capital firm, started the WebInno meetings in late 2005, I believe. I'm estimating that by the little post about WebInno #7 that I put in here in July '06; they're held every two or three months. The next one is scheduled for March 2009.

David was rightfully proud to greet the crowd of 600 by briefly reflecting on the event's modest start in contrast to what he saw, when, "tonight we've filled the entire grand ballroom." WebInno's long been an acknowledged hotspot for the area's technorati.

The focus is on early-stage startups, and the format's always been three "main dish" presentations to the assembled group, followed by open networking time when another number of "side dish" presentations by other hopefuls are set up in simple tabletop convention style.

With three main dishes and a half dozen sides, there's really far too much to say to do justice to any of them. So, with that caveat in mind, a quick pass through some highlights.

Trip Chill is putting into practice a widely desired service: a full-service digital travel agent and concierge. Plan and book your trip through their site, then get updates and automatic Plan B's directed to your iPhone or any mobile device. If your flight is delayed, for instance, it'll book you on another one, according to any preferences you originally entered on the website.

I was very keen on the prompts they'll send to remind you where you parked your car when you land back at your home airport. (Sign me up!)

Presentation-wise, too, these guys really had the right idea: presenters always have two people at the podium, one doing the talking and the other running the slide show. So Trip Chill's two speakers acted out their story, and with low key comedy. "How was your flight?"
"Oh, brutal. My flight was cancelled, I was stuck at O'Hare," etc.
"That's too bad -- I used Trip Chill(!), and it notified me, booked me on another flight," etc., etc. Host Beisel then conferred on them the spur-of-the-moment award for "best acting in a WebInno presentation." They had the crowd's full attention, laughing and engaged.

Don't just tell your story; whenever possible, Show it.

Next we had the exotically named Crimson Hexagon, promised a service to "make sense of the massive amount of information on the Internet." That turned out to be basically a digital clipping service for anyone who's written about more often than they can keep track of in Google Alerts; which they estimated at more than 25 a day. It's sold as an annual subscription, or, for now, by the month.

Crimson Hexagon (the name is a construct from Argentinian magical realism author, Jorge Luis Borges,) tracks, "reads" and summarizes everything that's being said about your company on the Web. They demonstrated the kind of intelligence gathering this makes possible by revealing that, in aggregate, the biggest attraction to the iPhone is the App Store, and that 14% of people who drink Gatorade do so for a hangover cure. (Note: this statements have not been evaluated by the FDA, and are solely the opinions of 14% of the sport-drink buying Internet population.)

Local Motors was the last and somewhat curious main dish, since the definition of "mobile innovation" was stretched perhaps beyond recognition to include a custom car company. But no, they belonged there because the design of their cars is crowdsourced. People post car designs, who the Local Motors man emphasized are paid if their design is selected (good for them! There's a practice conspicuously missing from most Web ventures).

Then the community comments, adds and critiques, and the company gets to hear "what people think of it real-time." At the point that, I suppose, that input plateaus, the company says, "this is the car we'll build here," since they'll create versions most appropriate for various locales; Boston and Hawaii were mentioned as examples. They'll build a hydrogen powered car for states that have that kind of "gas" station; they economize overall by using off-the-shelf power plants and components (although no sticker price was mentioned in the main pitch).

A very intriguing idea, especially on the umpteenth day that Washington-in-transition told us they just about had a bailout in place for the old Big Three carmakers. And they had some very sexy, European racing car designs that, together with their man's strong presentation, earned them the designation of Tastiest Dish of the.. . no, excuse me, that was "Audience Choice Award."

Web Innovators Group

Photo on Flickr by BostonDave (as of this writing, pix from WebInno 18)

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When I got off the road and into the hotel where the event's usually been held, having already decided that I wanted to do a little report, I was confronted with one of pressing questions of our time. Should I "live" blog the affair, or go by the traditional, Old Media approach of taking notes and putting it up tomorrow?

(I remember at one of the earlier WebInno's, around three years back, when blogging was still the breathlessly hot new thing, there was some pride in the room that it was being reported live by at least a couple different speed typists.)

I decided to go for the latter, because I knew that today I'd cringe at what I threw up here without review; but mostly because if I get as focused as one needs to be to write and post a entry, I wouldn't have really been there. You know, the way it is with cameras: either you're documenting it, OR you're really there.

Twittering on about Facebook, etc.

Continuing on my (ir)regular, implied theme of What's Not Hot among topics currently considered high-temperature in the media, two items:

There's lots of twaddle about Twitter in the tech press and online communities. Most of it is just the old demonstration that the writers are Fully Buzzword Compliant, well versed in the latest thing, whatever the heck that thing is and may or may not be useful for.

This Web service appears to be providing the much-needed function of adding yet another layer of distraction to our ADD World. ("Thanks a lot! - what was your name again? Oh, gotta run, see you --") I loved the quote from the last post here, down below, noting that a "friend" had just left a note to everyone that they were brushing their teeth. I'm hoping the writer was kidding, but either way, this is a layer of "content" so thin as to defy measurement.

So I was glad to see this statement in one of the blogs on CNet, the venerable (in Web terms,) tech news site:

"Twitter's not going to change the world"

CNet's Charles Cooper, quoting a video blogger named Loren Feldman:

"Loren's main point (is), anyone who has followed the incessant bleating about Twitter's supposedly existential meaning to our lives--let alone the silly debate over Twitter versus FriendFeed--has to wonder whether tech's chattering class has lost its sense of perspective.

"Are we guilty of navel gazing to the point of silliness?"

Breaking taboos in the tech fishbowlJuly 20, 2008
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This tied in nicely with a piece I saw in the Old Grey Lady Online, a few caveats about Facebook -

.. .from a business perspective, it creates some complications.
...I neither want to be strategic in my postings nor selective in my friending, but I should probably be doing one or the other. I am also not religious in maintaining my profile, in part because I have no personal assistant to update my page, as one executive I know told me he does.

Once you jack in, Facebook creates its own imperatives. Why am I uploading pictures of my last family trip to the lake in the Adirondacks at 11:45 p.m.? Because I want someone, anyone, to see them.

When a new media winner like Facebook comes over the horizon, who loses? In my case, it’s probably my real actual friends. As a reporter, I learn to hate the telephone during the day, but at night I feel somewhat social again and step out onto the porch to call buddies for a little nocturnal quality time. Now I am too busy checking their status updates to actually speak to them.

The Media Equation: Hey, Friend, Do I Know You?
By David Carr, July 21, 2008
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Exactly as e-mail now reflects the pounds of junk mail in our "street" mailboxes, all new media will eventually return to earth, mirroring the net level of quality-of-life that most people are functioning at. (Not that there aren't people who reach for something more, a higher level of practice in whatever they do, of course -- imagine what it would be like if there weren't enough of them quietly anchoring things).

Postscript:
As you'll see from the date of the following post, I dropped out of blogging for awhile there, to take a break after two+ years at it -- even if admittedly doing it at a fairly relaxed pace for the medium, as it's currently understood. Once I saw that a few big bloggers had heart attacks over the last year, then that my favorite blogger, Maura Welch (who I began reading in the Boston Globe), just renounced regular blogging, and some other bigtime blogger just said goodbye, too... well, now I feel like I'm on the leading edge of the next hot trend, the post-blog Web!

But it's just another wave in the natural progression of new modes...

Gehry, Bricklin, Prototyping; & "Repurposing Content"

The idea of recycling material, if you think about it, is as old as the human habit of telling stories. So I'm hoping that's a good enough explanation for why I'm basically republishing this post I wrote recently for the Heart of Innovation. : - )

That's the new blog I've been managing and writing in for Idea Champions, and frankly my attention has been primarily there lately, which is how it should be. So I'll be cross-posting bits that seem appropriate here, after giving them a week or some decent interlude from their original publication.

Frank Gehry's Designing By Prototype

Columnist Dale Dauten wrote recently about some of the insights on creative thinking gained from observing the revolutionary architect in "The Sketches of Frank Gehry," Director Sydney Pollack's first documentary, new on DVD. "We get to learn how a genius works," he writes.

"Frank Gehry is the architect who did the curving, soaring metal walls of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, as well as Disney Hall in Los Angeles. He is the one who lets us walk into 'out of the box.'

"During his early Gehry spent his time hanging out with artists rather than fellow architects.

"He works by taking sheets of heavy paper and making models out of them. Not blocks, not wood or Styrofoam, but paper. When one of the models becomes an idea worth pursuing, it goes through an evolution, a series of models of increasing sophistication."

Dauten, taking the dare, as it were, starts creatively cross-referencing:

"If we wanted to apply his style to, say, working on a new sales presentation, we wouldn't use other sales presentations for ideas, we'd use novels or plays, movies, paintings . . . maybe even, I don't know, zoos, or airports. And not just one, but dozens. Some would become rough models, several going at once."

"Inside the brain of a genius lies lessons on generating & implementing ideas" by Dale Dauten, 5/6/07. (Gehry's "Dancing Building" in Prague. Uploaded on Flickr by astilly.)

Rapid Prototyping, Dan Bricklin, & "Serious Play"

This reminded me of another recent read on the power of creating with the method of "rapid prototyping," from Dan Bricklin's blog. Bricklin is of course the co-inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc (the original Excel, and the first "killer app" on what were then "personal computers"), among other programming breakthroughs in simplification.

(Continued...)

The peaceful, Human-powered lawn mower

Just in time for Spring: here’s one for the “appropriate tech” and “common sense” categories, specifically for the owners of “lawns”:

If you’re concerned about potentially catastrophic, globally-local climate change and your input to it, or if you’d just like a more peaceful “lawn solution” with the added benefit of light, invigorating exercise in the fresh air and sunlight (Nature’s own anti-depressants), consider the hand-powered mower.

I thought this would be the perfect time to say a few words in its praise, do a quickie search on it, and pop a couple relevant links in here for your mowing pleasure.

Search results for “hand powered mowers” (Google)

The persons at People Powered Machines have models by two or three different makers, comparison charts and all that. They say the new models are lightweight and easy to push, not like your grandfather’s models, and the simplest is well under $200. They're even upfront enough to admit this is a smaller-acreage solution, recommended "for lawns of 8000 square feet or less."

A list there makes for a strong array of selling points:

"What you can hear while mowing with a Reel Mower :"

• birds
• your children playing alongside you
• conversation
• phone ring
• phone not ring
• music
• books on tape
• your children fighting inside the house (ok, so the power mower might have it on ths one)
• your neighbors dinner party which you are not interrupting
• the ice cream truck!

(From ‘Why we only carry reel mowers’ on peoplepoweredmachines.com)
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Related, on Rosswriting.com/FunPart :

It's a Loud, Loud World
Where the essayist asks why our space-age technology can’t deliver ‘’no-sweat, no-motor’ tools,‘ described as, ‘professional, hand-powered gardening tools that were so finally machined that they matched or bettered their fuel-driven counterparts? ’

"A Working Simple System"

(orig. posted 7/6/06)

(About our concept of "news"...)

One thing I'm not going to do is limit the subjects of this inverted column to "news," in the sense of only throwing items in here that relate to what happened or was published within the last 24 hours. Especially when we only plan to update this maybe a couple times a week.

Like with this following bit -- what is timely about this is, however, is that I remembered it today; which technically makes it news, doesn't it?

= = =

"A Working Simple System"

Here's an idea so profound, so fundamental, that I can't tell you how many times I've quoted it; even before the time I had it on my old site ( in "the Serious Part," now enshrined here, along with everything else in the Internet Archive). A lot of system designers of all kinds would do well to contemplate this principle.

It's from a book by John Gall, famously named "Systemantics, The Underground Text of Systems Lore." (With the typical feverishness of Web publishing, I'm going to slap this up here now, then do some searching later to see if I can find anything about it online, or in print, or at least a bread crumb trail. Originally found this in print, in the old Whole Earth Review when I believe Kevin Kelly was editing it, before he went on to Wired.)

Some essential statements:

"Complex systems exhibit unexpected behavior.

"The system always kicks back - systems get in the way - or, in slightly more elegant language: Systems tend to oppose their own functions.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

"The parallel proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

General Systemantics Press, Pub. Date 2nd Ed.: November 1990

---

(Shortly afterwards:)

...Sure enough, there are ample references to Mr. Gall's book all over the Web.

"General Systemantics Press was established in the 1970s to publish Dr. John Gall's book, 'Systemantics™ - How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail.'
This was the First Edition of what is now 'The Systems Bible™,' which they proclaim includes, "three new chapters, new AXIOMS, THEOREMS AND RULES OF THUMB, and many new Horrible Examples..."

Of course there are a number of entries about it in the Wikipedia;
the main page for Systemantics contains these additional, comforting Laws:

"The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.):
In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.

"Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being."