Watch the Throne

August 30th, 2011

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I said I’d listened to Watch the Throne seven or eight times already this week, because I have. I totally have. It’s good. Luke-warm reviews be damned.

One of my favorite things: this line from Jay-Z in “New Day,” where he throws a massive spoiler alert down a few weeks before the recently announced Beyoncé pregnancy.

Sorry junior/I already ruined ya/
Cause you ain’t even alive, paparazzi pursuin’ ya/
Sins of a father make your life ten times harder/

Also great: the Otis Redding samples in “Otis;” the fact that Jay-Z is 41; the RZA name-checking; even more hip-hop cameos from Bon Iver; the final step in Kayne’s transformation from smart-ass jerk to brooding dark asshole.


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Issues Considered: Music

Caring is sharing

August 29th, 2011

Everyone’s given their thoughts about Steve Jobs, and now we can focus on the fact that Apple is still a company and still making cool things that we all spend lots of money on and they’ll end up doing just fine without him.

That being said, I loved Faruk Ateş’ take on Steve. As a former Apple employee, he offered a list of Steve Job Moments, which included this gem:

While by no means a pleasant memory, it’s one I’ll never forget just the same. It was a few months after MobileMe’s launch, and I’d just joined that product group two months before it. We were all called in for a meeting with Steve, who chewed out the entire department without raising his voice more than once.

I forget what specific things he said during that meeting that struck me so hard, but they had nothing to do with MobileMe’s problems. They simply made it clear how much Steve cared about Apple, about great products, and about all the people at Apple who work their asses off night and day, all to deliver their best work time and time again. Steve seemed personally offended, for himself and on behalf of the rest of Apple, by this one department’s failure to deliver. More so even than he was upset over the tarnished reputation, it felt that our failure was taken as a lack of respect, and that offended him even more.

Whether this is how Steve felt about it I’ll never know. What I do know is that I walked out of there not just agreeing with everything he’d said, but also that, were I ever to run a company, I would make sure to care that damn much about everyone and everything in it.

The biggest thing to take away from this is, indeed, Steve Job cared, and that’s one of the more important things any of us can do to make something work. It isn’t how hard we work, or how much money we put into it, but that we care, damn it.

When we care, we continue working regardless of how hard things get. We treat our co-workers and employees with respect – and we hold them accountable. We hold ourselves accountable. And we foster trust.

When we care, we see things through, and others follow. This anecdote was a good reminder of that.


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Issues Considered: On..., Technology

How I Write

August 24th, 2011

I don’t find a quiet room. I don’t grab a cup of tea. Instead, I cram. I think of an idea, I email it to myself to remember later, and I sit down to write when I have time.

Honestly, I’ve never understood the pains some people go to in order to write. The planning. The organizing. The ritual. I’m sure it’s important, and billions of best sellers prove that it’s working for someone, but it just doesn’t work for me.

There’s no routine, for me. This is how I write.

This Is How I Write

I start with an idea. The idea never comes when I want it to. It comes at a random time, and that’s why a routine doesn’t work.

Usually, I jot the idea down. I email it to myself. Then, I put it on my to-do list. If I don’t put it on my to-do list, the idea might as well have never happened.

Next: when I have time, I write.

That’s all.

I know, right? Because writing is this prickly, amorphous tangle of emotion and fear and all of that.

Truth is, I just write. I just start something. If I finish, I finish. If I don’t, I wait until the next day. The issue isn’t the process – it’s about getting over the blank page, starting to write a few words, and ending up on a roll.

The tools

Today is my first day using a traditional text editor to write a blog post. I’m using BBEdit, and I’ve imported my blog’s stylesheet so I can see how it looks in realtime. My goal is to take it one step further, implementing Gruber’s Markdown syntax to create a simple and effective process toward writing my posts in HTML, making transfer to this blog more logical.

Before this, I was an unabashed Microsoft Word fan. What changed? A need for simplicity, first off, and a need for something that I could transfer from site to site. The copy/paste/format/code routine seemed so archaic, as if I was still trying to start a fire with sparks and leaves while a butane lighter sat just inches away.

I jot ideas into Evernote, but typically I use email to remind myself. My to-do list is Things, which I love, and I sketch more complex ideas into a Moleskin.

I used to use ultra-fine Sharpie pens, but they bleed through my current knock-off Moleskin. So I’ve switched to Energel Liquid Gel Ink pens from Pentel. They’re great.

Why does this matter?

It doesn’t.

Seriously. This does not matter.

This routine is mine. It’s not even a routine. It’s barely a list of actionable steps – it’s more like a random list of unactionable drivel.

I write the way I write and you write the way you write. Creativity. Analysis. Creation of any kind. These are not things that can be summed up in a 15,000-hit eHow page, or on a search marketing blog, or even person to person.

I mentioned this in my methodology post over at Eating Elephant: you create your own system by trying and failing and adapting and trying again. Because what I do will not work for you. What you do will not work for me. All we can do with each other is make suggestions, push each other harder, and remember that nothing creative is done in terms of black and white.

By all means, try my method. Try lots of methods. And take the things that work forward to create your own method.


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Issues Considered: Blogging, Meta, Technology, Writing

London Underground, the link collection

August 17th, 2011

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last 11 years living under an unhealthy obsession with Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which I feel is not only one of the greatest works in cartographic history, but a fantastic work of art.

It’s been a subject on this site several times – from a short story about my time on the Underground to my constant pining for this Underground poster. Something about the mix of maps and public transport and England and colored lines really strikes me as the perfect intersection of everything that’s great about the world. And, I think cartography is pretty sweet. It’s the Buster Bluth in me, I suppose.

What’s REALLY great about the map, though, is its dedication to usability. It’s not a perfect rendering of the Underground lines (here’s what it would look like); instead, it offers relative – and parallel – tracks in an effort to both rein in the system’s wandering tunnels and improve readability. From a recent post by Theo Inglis:

The problem was that the train lines were getting longer and this made it impossible to fit everything into one map. Keeping it geographically accurate would have meant that the centre became smaller and harder to read, and the centre is the most densely packed and most important part. In comes Harry Beck in 1931, inspired by electronic circuit diagrams he had the idea of scrapping geographical accuracy and making all lines straight with only 45 and 90 degree angles. Design history was made and the map has barely changed since, becoming an icon and one of the easiest to use maps in the world!

The evolution of the map shows a reliance on traditional cartography giving way to a surprisingly forward-looking design that still holds up today.

Kottke.org has a fantastic run down of this post and a whole bunch more on the greatest map ever created.


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Issues Considered: Linkage, Travel

I talked to my grandmother last night

August 12th, 2011

I talked to my grandmother last night. It was fantastic. She sounded great; full of life, chatty, her voice refusing to betray the fact that she’s 72.

We talked about the kids’ birthday parties, and about Sierra’s shopping spree. We talked about buying ridiculously expensive land in Wyoming, about how the local celebrities weren’t paying their taxes in Jackson, about how if Grandpa were still around he’d be buying defaulted land like it was going out of style.

We talked about the back roads in Jackson, about my job, Kerrie’s job, the kids and how fast they’re growing. We talked about my father’s health issues. We talked about how my brother is going to be a senior in high school.

We talked about how funny it was that my mom kept trying to call her cell phone instead of her home phone, and how my grandmother doesn’t really use her cell phone anymore.

We talked for a long time.

What we didn’t talk about was her health.

We didn’t talk about how she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. About how scared that made her, and how she eventually came to terms with it and realized that there’s nowhere to go but forward, that living life being scared of cancer was no life to live at all.

We didn’t talk about how she had her third treatment, and how it was the worst she’s experienced, and how she’s often too tired to do much but sit in her room and watch Court TV, but damn it that hasn’t stopped her from entertaining and inviting people into her home and continuing a long tradition of being the most welcoming person in Teton Valley.

We didn’t talk about that.

Because my grandmother has lived through seven decades of Wyoming winters, through the slow and inevitable passing of her brothers and sisters, through the loss of her own soul mate – my grandfather – to cancer (fucking cancer) and the loss of lucidness that came with it.

She raised two children on her own for years while my grandfather was in the army, and she helped run a small engine shop and a gas station and whatever else my grandfather felt driven to do.

My grandmother is strong. She’s going to be okay.

So we didn’t talk about it. And I think I’m okay with that.


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Issues Considered: Family, Grandpa Boyer, On...

On making beer

August 8th, 2011

Someone, somewhere, discovered that, when kept at a constant temperature, grains submerged in liquid will eventually ferment. Into something drinkable. Into something with alcohol.

Someone else, somewhere else, discovered that this fermentation happens because of yeast. Someone else determined the steps to replicate the process. Someone else figured out you could save this and sell it.

Each of these steps may have taken years or decades to discover. Through trial and error, connections were made. From grain to beer, hundreds of things can go wrong. And that’s with a set of steps that have been practiced and perfected for thousands of years just to make the basic product: an alcoholic liquid.

Someone, somewhere – thousands of times, this happens – makes a slight change that updates the process and pushes it forward. Making it safer. Improving the taste. Creating a way to save it. Discovering ways to make beer better.

Overly complex, the history of beer making is a form of evolution, each new batch the product of a new set of steps, the better products saved and passed on, survival of the fittest brew.

Someone harvested and bred the right yeast.

Someone narrowed down the best starch source.

Someone decided a weed called “hops” would help improve taste.

Someone added sugar to provide carbonation.

Someone perfected the sanitation process.

Someone, somewhere, organized the timing and products needed to create a batch of beer. Someone, somewhere, standardized the methods we use today. And we ride on the backs of that history, taking for granted the amount of work that went into evolving the brew process, assuming it was always there, created by some overarching power.

Forget the eye: if there’s any evidence in favor of that crazy intelligent design talk, let’s present beermaking as exhibit A.


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Issues Considered: On...

The trials and tribulations of shopping with a four-year-old

August 3rd, 2011

With $50 in random birthday gifts, we took a four-year-old to Target.

“Shopping spree.” “Anything you want.”

She picked a too-small princess dress. “Anything but that.” She picked the princess wand. “Okay. Put it in the cart.” She picked the Dora microphone. “Oh, God. No. Please.” Then, she picked the Strawberry Shortcake set, which was perfect because that’s what we were leading her toward the entire time.

The Dora microphone was the point of contention. Our goal: get it out of the cart. She wanted Toy Story, but she got distracted and wanted the Tangled book with the fake brush that made noisy magical sounds, and then she wanted the princess book with the crown.

We made a deal: she’d get the Tangled book if she put the Dora microphone back. It’s a book, at least, and this was an upgrade. We then tried to upgrade the Tangled book to something else. Anything else. Remember Toy Story? What about the new Ladybug Girl book? How about this new Mo Willems book?

The cart held one princess wand, one Strawberry Shortcake set, one noisy Tangled book that had thankfully replaced the noisy Dora microphone. It was 15 minutes past bedtime, but we had begun to gain ground with the anti-noisy-Tangled campaign.

And then she had to go to the bathroom.

Distracted, she didn’t see me put the Tangled book back. I added Ladybug Girl (as a gift from us). We headed to the front.

After the bathroom, she checked the cart. Strawberry Shortcake – check. Princess wand – check.

Tangled book?

Preschooler meltdown.

I had underestimated her. I paid and went to the car, while mom and four-year-old went to grab the Tangled book.

In the parking lot, as they walked to the car, her bag was decidedly unbook-like. She opened up the bag and showed me her new pair of tennis shoes.

And no Tangled book.

Sometimes, things work out for the best.


Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Family, Sierra

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