Ingredients

My wife has been accused of viewing a restaurant's menu more as a list of ingredients than as a list of finished dishes.  She often asks them to make something special for her.  Here's the thing:  I'm kind of the same way about technical results.  When a coworker gives me a report with some experiments and the conclusions they've drawn, I'm likely to go straight to the data and come up with my own conclusions.  Data, of course, are the ingredients of a technical argument.

(I can't help it.  All my training and inclinations drive me to take observations and generate abstractions from them.  I will not be satisfied with someone else's abstractions if I get a chance to see the data.  Trust plays a role here, as does the fact that people learn best what they figure out for themselves.  As for Alice, she might order "off the menu" simply out of personal preference, but trust might have something to do with it too.  She might look at a menu, see a parade of bad combinations, and simply lose faith in the ability of the kitchen to produce something good without her guidance.)

The work of the chef and the work of the scientist are not so different.  I've always said that mine is a creative job.  They call us "knowledge workers".  We start with the elemental and construct something novel.  Ingredients become new forms of sustenance, or new areas of human knowledge.

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I'm writing this post in Blogger In Draft, with the "Google Scribe" feature on.  As you type, it offers suggestions on what word you might be in the middle of typing,  or might want to type next.  It is the strangest damn thing I've ever experienced.  It feels like someone is constantly interrupting me, or trying to finish my sentences.  I'm tempted to use it to write a blog post about nothing, just by letting it dictate the next word and see what the infinite monkeys produce.  They're developing self-driving cars--in fact, Google is part of the effort--next, will we get automatically generated art?

The Blackout Party (it's not what you think)

Last night I went to a party to commemorate a disaster.  On August 14, 2003, the northeastern United States suffered cascading power failures that left tens of millions of people in the dark for days.  To the best of my knowledge, no one at our party blacked out.

The restaurant/bar Melt has been holding a Blackout Party every year on that date, turning off the lights and TVs and serving dark beers in the dark.  Well, it wasn't very dark at 5PM with the windows open, but it was cozy anyway, and everybody looks better by candlelight.  Good thing, because we waited two hours for a table.  The company of good friends and the availability of Stone's Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale (yes, they really named it that), made the wait a pleasant one.

I'm surprised to learn now that the power failures initiated in the Cleveland area; I wasn't living here at the time.  Apparently trees had grown too close to several important power lines, and when they were asked to carry extra capacity, they came into contact with the trees and failed. 

(Here's something sciencey:  the extra current the wires were carrying caused them to heat up like resistors, which caused them to expand, in turn causing them to droop, which brought them into contact with the local foliage, which shorted them out to ground.  You gotta watch out for thermal expansion.)  

Having just spent a hard day hacking back bushes in my yard, I can testify to how much effort it takes to keep Ohio's greenery under control.  Still, it sounds like First Energy kind of fell down on the job that day.

Where was I?  In August of 2003 I was living in the Chicago area, hard at work renovating our first house.  We had frequent power outages, some of them long enough that we became concerned for our elderly neighbors, but we weren't affected by the Big One.  Perhaps Chicago had earned immunity eight years earlier with a deadly heat wave.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody commemorates that dark week.

Why music?

When you were a teen, you probably had songs that you listened to over and over, laying in your bed or huddled in the corner wearing headphones.  You weren't the only one.  Did you ever wonder why music is so popular with young people? 

Well, what is our music about?  Mostly it isn't about our schoolwork or our jobs, our laughter or our arguments, the safe things that occupy our everyday lives.  It's about more ... I think the right word is "intense" ... feelings.  Love.  Anger.  Ecstacy, delirium.  Scary stuff, it makes you act in ways you normally wouldn't.  I've begun to think that music is our way of getting used to those raw states of mind so we're prepared for them when they happen to us.

Why would we need that?  Here's my guess:  we are, as a culture, notoriously blind to our own emotional and even physical states.  Our minds are swimming with distractions created by consumerism; we're manipulated by advertising and fantasies in our media that are all constructed to maintain this capitalist world.  All that outside influence has a toll:  we may not have the time and the mental clarity to understand our own bodies and feelings - or we may simply give in to the distractions in order to escape from the hard work of figuring it out.  So we're unprepared to deal with lust, territorialism, fear, shame, and all the rest.  Music takes all those raw states and presents them safely, as entertainment.  Repeated exposure makes the messy stuff less frightening when it hapens to us.  

(Want a laugh?  When we have these intense feelings, we think:  I know what that is - and we start communicating in song lyrics.)

Here's a related thought, about adulthood.  I just got over appendicitis, and during the recovery I was repulsed by the idea of having a beer or a glass of wine.  Alcohol is about experiencing a different state of mind.  When I feel sick, I don't want alcohol, because I'm already away from normal - I want to be normal again.  So maybe music functions to familiarize us with the scary aspects of our ordinary state of mind, and alcohol serves to take us away when it gets boring.

I busted a gut

I am in the process of recovering from a ruptured appendix.  After a whirlwind eight-day tour of Michigan, including sleeping in five cities in five nights, I arrived home with a stomachache.  Little did I know.

I went to Michigan for a professional conference in Traverse City--ICT2011, which I liveblogged a bit over at my Google+ account except, whoops, I forgot to make most of the posts public--and I took the opportunity to visit family on the way there and back.  Let me just say to any employer sending someone to a conference:  don't send them alone.  When your employee is trying to make technical small talk with strangers in their field, the awkward silences are depressing.  Send a coworker along.

My last stop was in Williamston, to help my dear old friend Cat move to Grand Rapids.  The task of packing a house she'd lived in for 12 years proved overwhelming, so her boyfriend and I unstuck the gears.  I awoke early Sunday morning with a stomachache, which I thought meant I'd eaten a bad burger the night before.  I drove home uncomfortable, laid down to rest, and covered myself with a blanket.  And ran up a fever.  I felt slightly better as the day wore on, and we couldn't decide if I had food poisoning with a possible hernia (a painful spot on my right) or appendicitis.  Early Monday morning, I had a crescendo of pain so intense I could only breathe in gasps.  We went to the hospital.

They took out my appendix that day, noting that it was perforated before they got to it.  That means the bacterial soup inside it had a chance to attack everything else in my gut.  The doctor said the outsides of my intestines looked "pretty pissed off".  I replied "I can relate". 

The day after the operation I was swollen taut with inflamed intestines.  I couldn't even stand up straight for fear of the tension bursting my incisions.  They hit me with three different antibiotics in the hospital and gave me a fourth to take home.  It's Friday and I still can't button my pants, though I did manage a half day of work from home yesterday and another today.  Occasionally I get painful cramps that interrupt my ability to concentrate, and of course my digestive tract is not finished rebooting itself, but I hope to be able to return to the office Monday. 

Moral of the story:  do not mess with rapidly escalating abdominal pain associated with a low fever.  Get to a hospital.

Does Google+ solve a problem I don't have?

I recently joined Google+.  Why?  Everybody says it's supposed to compete with Facebook, but I like Facebook.  Why grind out another profile, track another feed, curate another presence?  And how do we know Google+ won't disappear like Google Buzz and Google Wave did, like cigarette butts flicked out of car windows on the information superhighway?

Pros: 

• I use a lot of Google products (gmail, calendar, docs, blogger, etc).  Plus might actually allow me to share/social-ize some of the things I do in those services.
• I have an Android phone; see bulletpoint above.
• I generally like Google's user interfaces.
• Google doesn't rearrange the furniture as often as Facebook, and they never do it with the purpose of catching my privacy settings off-guard like Facebook does.
• Google clearly means it this time.  Buzz and Wave got a lot of hype, but they felt isolated from the rest of Google.  This time, all of Google's UIs are being revamped to be consistent with each other and to be integrated into Google+.
• Facebook is successfully becoming what AOL tried to be:  a self-contained, closed system, a substitute for the broader Internet.  That's not good.  I already feel like I'm fighting Facebook, and as this trend continues, it's going to get worse.
• Google is actually going to rename my beloved Blogger to make it part of Plus.  If I didn't get on board, I'd just feel resentful about it.

Cons:

• I now have to decide where to share things.  Which service should I put this status/photo/link in?  One, or several?
• I have to build this network from the ground up, and a lot of the people I enjoy interacting with aren't on it yet.
• This is unfortunately not one of Google's better UIs.  In my limited time with it so far, I'm finding it pretty counterintuitive.  They're trying to reduce clutter by hiding navigation tips, but for a first-time user of a novel service, that's a problem.

So, I'm on the plus bus.  We'll see where it goes.

New Blogger.com UI now available to all

As I've mentioned elsewhere, there's a redesign coming for Blogger users.  The new UI is now available (optionally, for the time being) to all Blogger users.  When you write a blog post, the UI will look different, but when your readers come to your blog, they won't see anything different.  If you write a Blogger blog, you can see it yourself by logging in to draft.blogger.com instead of the usual www.blogger.com.  I'm writing this post in the new UI. 

It's ... white.  The list of posts is very spread out, with the titles in standard 12-point font in something like triple spacing.  There are some very Web 2.0-ey features, like controls that only appear when you hover the mouse over them.  There are some features that are IMO missing, like the lack of hover-over text to tell me what those icons at the top mean.  They've incorporated a lot of the information that used to be in Google Analytics, and it's pretty granular.  For example, until now, I had no idea that my most-viewed recent post was the one I wrote about the closing of tabletalk.salon.com.

The new look for Blogger is visually consistent with the redesign of Google Calendar, which I really dislike.  I am a very heavy Google Calendar user, and I'm sticking with the old design as long as possible, because the new more spread-out spacing reduces how many things I can see - even on the giant monitors I use.  The new Blogger UI doesn't give me a rash like the Calendar one, though.

I think the redesign is intended to go hand in hand with Google+.  I recently heard that Google actually plans to stop using the name "Blogger" and rebrand the service with a new name when they incorporate it into Google+.  I have to admit, it's odd to use Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc, and ...Blogger.  Blogger has retained its name so far because it's huge--it's one of the 10 most visited sites worldwide.  With luck, they'll integrate all these services together better.  There are big changes coming!

Communication styles: You kinda need them all.

Getting a team to gel means opening lines of communication with everybody.  I have my own preferred ways to communicate, but they don't work for everybody, so I've had to adapt.  For example, it came as a bit of a shock to me when my boss told me that many of my coworkers were using IM to ask each other quick questions.  I hate IM, but it works for them.

As you might guess, I like email.  I work best in long-form written English.  It's precise, and it leaves a record, but it also creates a certain distance and formality.  The telephone is far more immediate and intimate, but it's easy to forget to ask an important question.  (I keep lists to remind me.)  On the other hand, the improvisational nature of a phone call can help you think of things that might never have occurred to you in the linear, boundaried process of answering an email.  And of course face-to-face gives you the chance to add tactile cues, like the dozens of touchy-feely prototypes I keep around my office.

The eight or so most important members of my team are spread across Europe, Asia, and the U.S.; many of them have English as a second language.  I can't afford to put additional obstacles in the way of our teamwork, like asking them to email when they prefer talking on the phone because it takes them forever to translate.  Having realized this, and adjusted myself to their preferences, I find we're getting better traction than ever.