All posts by James Reffell

Fifteen years in San Francisco

November 9, 2012Not Design, San FranciscoJames Reffell

Postcard from San Francisco, with cable cars — My grandfather sent me this postcard from San Francisco in 1981.

Fifteen years ago today I arrived in San Francisco. Not for the first time–I’d been here once as a kid on summer vacation–but this time I intended to stay, at least for a little while. The plan (such as it was) was to get some sort of a job, attach myself somehow to Internet culture (as conveyed by Mondo 2000), and maybe go to this new graduate program I’d heard about from my Anthropology professor, who had it turn heard about from Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter. It was going to be extremelycyber.

My plan arrived in the evening, and I was whisked into the city and to my room in a rickety South of Market Victorian rented by a friend who had arrived only a few months earlier (thus saving me the trauma of the early Internet bubble apartment hunt).

The next day I sent this email to the woman who I had not yet figured out I was going to marry. When I tell this story to my grandchildren, I’ll need to explain to them about Internet cafes.

Got here late last night. Wandering around all morning. House is lovely, neighborhood is questionable.

Other than being dazed, confused, unemployed, alone, and feeling so far out of my depth it’s not even funny, I’m doing fine. :)

Fifteen years later, the neighborhood is still questionable, but a room in that lovely Victorian will cost you $300 a night. I did eventually go to grad school. I did become involved in Internet culture, although not in the way I expected. I now live on the far west side of the same city with my wife and our two children, who were born and are being raised in this city.

My life shifted the night I first arrived here. Fifteen years later I’m still living that shift. I’m not alone, I’m only a little dazed and confused, but I’m still completely out of my depth, and I’m still doing fine.

Reading #56: Elites, Apocalypses, and Tentacle Noir

September 25, 2012Book Review, BooksJames Reffell

There are some damn good books in this one.

Nonfiction

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

Twilight Of the Elites: America after Meritocracy – Christopher Hayes
Hayes (aka “the host of that show on cable news where people don’t yell”) has one clear and central argument: the culture of meritocracy in this country is both ineffective and actively harmful. He argues this convincingly, both from theory (this is why meritocracies fail us) and recent political history (here are a bunch of meritocratic systems which failed us). The crux:

The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes will make equal opportunity impossible…. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to to scramble up. In other words: “Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy. (p. 57)

I find it pretty convincing. I’d recommend this book to anyone frustrated with the current state of politics in this country–but also to academics, teachers, and folks who work in that most meritocratic of cultures (in theory at least), Silicon Valley. It might change your mind about some things.

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations – Norman Davies
Vanished Kingdoms tells the story of nation-states that are no longer with us. They range from the recent and well-known (the Soviet Union) to the ancient and fairly obscure (Alt Clud). As history, it’s a mixed bag–Davies makes a strong narrative out of the history of some kingdoms, even when there’s little documentary evidence (like the aforementioned Alt Clud, or Kingdom of Strathclyde) but others, like the various Burgundies, seem more like lists of genealogies. Davies pokes some fun at himself for the last, but less defensible is his decision to promote Byzantium as the most important vanished kingdom of all–only to state that it’s too important to give us only a chapter about and move abruptly on to the next kingdom. Maybe his next book will be on Byzantium? Also, he really hates the British Royal Family. Not sure why, but man, he hates them.

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home – Lucy Worsely
Worsley hosted the BBC television series of the same name, and my main problem with this book is the same problem I have with a lot of TV history: they tend to vaguely thematic historical trivia rather than strong narratives or coherent arguments. Worsley is trying to give us a sense of how different uses of our homes, and rooms dedicated to those uses, have changed over time. She succeeds in bits and pieces–there are some lovely descriptions–but the overall effect is factoids, and those most relating to the British aristocracy. If you want to know a bunch of details about Royal beds this is your book–only not, because you get only a tease. On the other hand, I will always be grateful to this book for introducing me to that sadly-extinct breed of dog, the turnspit dog.

Fiction

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
There’s a movie coming out, and I’m worried about it. Tom Hanks? Close to 3 hours in length? Dressing white actors up as Asian? Could be horrific. But give the movie credit: it was a trailer for the movie that reminded me to read the book, which I’d vaguely heard about without knowing much.

Man, this is a good book. Very few novels manage to be ambitious in ways literary audiences and genre audiences will both recognize. Even fewer novels succeed. So, take 6 stories, each set in a different time period and each in a different genre. You have a 19th century story (adventures on ships!) told through letters, another epistolary novel set in the 1930s about a composer, a 1970s crime thriller, a modern day satire, a near-future dystopia, and a far-future post-apocalyptic tale. Just making each of these good would be tricky, but Mitchell breaks five of them in half and orders them so forst you travel forward in time, then back again. And then there are the recurring characters, themes, stories commenting on other stories … it all sounds horrifically complicated but the beauty of this is that it isn’t. I had a little trouble with the first half of the 19th century story (my least favorite character, though the second half is better) but after that the whole thing just flows.

Part of what makes it works–and this is in comparison to many novels where (for example) a literary author tries his or her hand at genre fiction–is that Mitchell clearly knows and respects his inspirations. The best example is the postapocalyptic novel, which is an easy one to do badly. He nods to my favorite pos-apocalyptic novel, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, avoids (or toys with) the common cliches, and by setting it on Hawaii’s Big Island, gives it a novel setting.

Graphic novels

Fatale – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
San Francisco Noir, with additional tentacle monsters. If that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this–and the cover art gives you a good idea of what to expect. It is the sort of thing I like. Brubaker’s dialogue is noir-ish without being too self-parodic, the plotting decent enough, the setting glorious. I am a sucker for old spooky San Francisco (and modern spooky San Francisco, and future spooky San Francisco …) and this gives me multiple eras happily. Or unhappily for the characters, who mostly come to tragic ends, as is only appropriate. San Phillips’s art evokes classic noir films without being cheesy, and his use of color is breathtaking.

Stamen design & why my commute used to suck

September 24, 2012Not Design, San FranciscoJames Reffell

First, go look at this Stamen Design project. Here's how they describe it:

Historically, workers have lived in residential suburbs while commuting to work in the city. For Silicon Valley, however, the situation is reversed: many of the largest technology companies are based in suburbs, but look to recruit younger knowledge workers who are more likely to dwell in the city.

An alternate transportation network of private buses—fully equipped with wifi—thus threads daily through San Francisco, picking up workers at unmarked bus stops(though many coexist in digital space), carrying them southward via the commuter lanes of the 101 and 280 freeways, and eventually delivers them to their campuses.

It's a pretty neat project. I have a few questions in response, and one big reaction.

The questions:

How similar or different would this look if other industries were represented? I know that Genentech has shuttles. Beyond tech, are there other industries moving their workers around l like this? If you did an equivalent map of construction job sites and the day worker centers (formal and informal) where workers hop on trucks for a days pay, how different would the streams be?
Private bus systems are interesting. The biggest factor here is public transportation not cutting it for these workers and these routes–but do the big tech companies really want their workers sitting next to workers from other companies anyway? I know from the Y! shuttle that the commute was culturally considered part of the workday in ways time on public transport usually isn't.

My main reaction, though, was more visceral. I took one of these shuttles while working at Yahoo for two years–starting at one of the 19th Avenue stops. It seemed like a good idea at the time: I'd been doing car commutes previously, some of them pretty long, so a shuttle ride seemed like a great deal. It took me two years to figure out that the problem was the commute, not the car.

(You know your commute is killing you, right? It causes physiological damage, increases stress, decreases happiness, and harms your relationships. Transit commutes, public or private, are probably better than driving yourself, but commutes of over one hour are going to be a bad deal no matter what.)

I might have been fine if I'd lived in the Mission and worked at the closer of Yahoo's then-multiple campuses, but as it was I spent 15-20 hours a week in a van each week. Not good, and worse: as my first child became a toddler and started sleeping through the night, I started going two or three days in a row without seeing her awake. That was completely unacceptable. I needed to either move south or move my job north.

I did the latter–joined a startup in the city. That brought my commute down to less than an hour, and more, I could bike it in good weather (and once I got over my fears of bike commuting in the city). Of course then my startup was acquired and I ended up driving to the Peninsula again for a while. But my goal had been formed–work near my home, here in San Francisco, in the Outer Sunset, near Ocean Beach, on the Western edge of the world. Where my children go to school, and where I can get a damn good cup of coffee with toast and a coconut. And that's what I'm doing now.

Looking back at Stamen's map, I see that not only are there no stops shown for the western 1/4 of the city–the private shuttles don't even cut through here on the way to somewhere else. That may change–I know more than a few folks out here who work in the Valley, but wanted to raise their kids in the city. But for now, they're almost separate worlds. And as much as I love the Silicon Valley tech world (and as much as I intend to continue working within it), that seems appropriate.

A life lesson, or, what is seen cannot be unseen.

August 17, 2012Books, Inspiration, Not Design, ScienceJames Reffell

It was a lesson I should already have learned. I had learned it.

Many years ago, as a teenager growing up in Washington D.C., I worked a summer job at Reiter's Books on K Street. Reiter's was and remains one of the finest science & technology bookstores in the world. It was a great job, as long as I was allowed to avoid working the register (I was terrified of ringing up someone incorrectly) and avoid answering the phones (I was phone-phobic to a paralyzing degree).^[1] I did odd jobs like sweeping and taking out the trash, but mostly I unpacked books and shelved them.

I loved shelving. The backs of these books gave me windows into whole worlds of knowledge that were unknown to me, that I could envision someday being a master of. I developed strong opinions about whole fields based on the covers of their textbooks. Advanced math, as represented by the classic yellow Springer-Verlag books, was serious, imposing, monolithic, and impenetrable. Computers were a muddle of garish covers and unlikely promises (learn C in 3 weeks!), but also contained a placid island of well-designed, nicely bound books that paired engravings of unusual animals with intriguing UNIX terms (sed! awk!). Those, I lingered over, though not as much as I lingered over the tall stacks of Edward Tufte books (only three at that time) placed at the entrance to the store. The Tufte books I returned to again and again as I replenished the stacks, and could even occasionally understand.^[2]

And then there was the back of the store, which was a whole different beast. It primarily served the George Washington University School of Medicine, and stocked most if not all of the core course material. There was never any question of my being interested in medicine, though I flipped through the textbooks as frequently as any other. I didn't like shelving that section, though, for two reasons:

Medical reference books are really, really heavy.
Illustrated textbooks of skin diseases.

This was in 1991 or so, before the World Wide Web. Full-color illustrations of horrifying medical conditions and procedures were not mere clicks away, as they are now. There were no trolls gleefully linking to eye-bleeding visual experiences in innocent disguise just for laughs. There was no reason to see a closeup of some terrifying pustule unless you were a medical professional, or actually had it on your body. Or you were shelving books in the medical section.

I'm not actually that squeamish, but I do remember vividly the experience of idly flipping open one of these books and wincing at what I saw. (And looking again, and wincing, and looking again … I was 16.)

So you would think I would have learned.

Fast-forward 20 years. I'm about to undergo a fairly minor outpatient surgical procedure. The surgeon tells me that the procedure is a fairly new one for this condition, but that his own experiences and some solid studies hadve confirmed its effectiveness. Now, everyone handles these sorts of things differently: some people might pepper the doctor with questions, others might just take his word for it, still others might get a second opinion. Me? I read the study.

I am emphatically not a medical professional, or anything like, but I have the basic "evaluate a study" skills that to some extend go across disciplines. Who were the authors, what was the method, how many subjects, does the conclusion seem to follow from the results, that sort of thing. I don't really expect to find anything when I do this, it's largely a way of both educating and reassuring myself. And as far as those things go, everything looked perfectly fine. But (I was to discover), studies covering surgical methods tend to include one extra thing I wasn't expecting.

Step-by-step pictures of the surgical operation itself.

Close-ups.

In vivid color.

I should already have learned.

[1] I got over the phone thing, eventually. The register thing too, somewhat

[2] An observer could have predicted my non-humanities academic path by noticing my early bookstore preferences: a brief foray into math, a longer but incomplete journey through computer science, a final landing in the world design.

Reading #55

August 16, 2012Book Review, BooksJames Reffell

I've been keeping loose track of the books I read for a while now, on various platforms. I'm going to try doing it here for a while.

Nonfiction

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
Taras Grescoe really doesn't like cars: or rather, he really doesn't like what happens to cities when car-centric development is the dominant mode for decades or longer. I'm more or less in agreement with him on this, so I am a receptive audience for this book. In fact the arguments against car-centric development were for me the least enjoyable part of this book, as I've heard most of them before and agree with them. More interesting to me were the many different alternatives, from the supertrains of Tokyo to the success of Bus Rapid Transit in Bogota to the bike culture of Copenhagen, where a mindboggling 36% of citizens commute by bike. (For a U.S. comparison, even in enlightened Portland only about 6% commute by bike.) This is a polemical book, but its strength is in portraying the culture of each city through its transit.

Graphic novels

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
Nonfiction: Guy Deslisle went to North Korea to work with an animation team there. He doesn't get much direct access to North Korean life and culture of course, so rather, the books is largely about the isolation of being in a tiny Western enclave walled off from the rest of the country for months on end, with occasional glimpses of the world beyond. Funny, and sinister.

The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution by Grant Morrison
I have the full run of the Invisibles in single issues, I'm starting to pick them up in graphic novel form so I can actually read them. Morrison is bonkers, but the pleasure of reading this first volume is the knowledge that he hasn't even really gotten going yet.

Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly
Beautiful hardback collection of Wood and Kelly's Local. The conceit is that each story takes place in a different city (and, less obviously at first, over a span of many years) and stands alone, though the thread through all of them is one young woman, Megan. Not every story works well, and one (with the violent brothers) doesn't work at all with the rest, but many do, and the sum total is magnificent. It's a coming of age story done as elegantly as I've seen in comic form. Wood's prose and Kelly's art work perfectly together.

Fiction

Wolf Hall: A Novel by Hilary Mantel
If you've seen A Man for all Seasons, you can think of this novel as a response of sorts. It's a historical novel, with the general setting being the English Reformation, King Henry VIII and his wives, and all that. (Henry VIII wife mnemonic: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived — which is only sorta accurate but is memorable.) It's seen through Thomas Cromwell, commonly seen as a sinister manipulator — and he still is, in this novel, except you have a bit more sympathy for his sinister manipulations. Mantel has a very odd style for the narration which threw me off the first go at reading it, but it grew on me.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Set in a future history that's sort of but not really the same as his Mars trilogy, Robinson is writing a love story with a little spy action and a lot of world-building and future history telling. The love story is between a mercurial woman from Mercury (-ish, Robinson's future people have some creative gender options and do take advantage of them) and a saturnine man from Saturn. They fall in love in a crisis, fall apart, and fall back together again, while getting to tour some of the bits of the future Solar System that Robinson hasn't had a chance to do yet, and pulls back to Earth again and again. (KSR is trying to make the point to his space-happy fans that Earth is, should be, and always will be the main event, even if humanity does every spread beyond it.) It's good, read it.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow
At some point I'm going to figure out why so many science fiction authors felt they had to write a MMO book. Possibly they all lost a year to World of Warcraft and had to justify it to themselves. This is Doctorow's, and it's pretty good. Young people across the globe, involved in MMOs in one way or another, are oppressed, become radicalized, and organize to protect themselves.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi
I read this thinking I hadn't before; I had. This happens. It's a fine follow-up to The Old Man's War, but not nearly as strong. I am looking forward to the serial novel he has in mind next, I think it's high time more writers experimented with writing for digital devices.

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi
Clever Star Trek parody wrapped around a mild philosophical puzzle with some sentiment tagged on. Fine, but I hoped for a bit more.

The Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer / Count Zero / Mona Lisa Overdrive) by William Gibson
Rereading these for the nth time. My preferences have slowly changed: I would have said a few years ago that Count Zero was the best of the three, now I prefer Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Drones and Automated Trading Systems

August 2, 2012Books, Inspiration, Quotes, WritingJames Reffell

This week I reread William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive for the umpteenth time. It’s the final book of the Sprawl trilogy which started with the more famous Neuromancer. This time, there were some lovely resonances between the books and the world of today, almost 25 years after it was published.

One detail that jumped out at me was the emotional resonance of drone surveillance:

She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop next when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it we5re an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.

– Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson (1988), pps 14-15

A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.

“They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things,” said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the stresses on drone pilots. “At some point, some of the stuff might remind you of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes it a little difficult to pull the trigger.”

— A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away, The New York Times, July 29th, 2012

And while we don’t yet live in a world where Artificial Intelligences control major corporations, we have started talking about things as if we do:

She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she’d failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net’s most important human decision-maker.- Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson (1988), page 123

An automated stock trading program suddenly flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility and instability of the nation’s stock market.

Traders on Wednesday said that a rogue algorithm repeatedly bought and sold millions of shares of companies like RadioShack, Best Buy, Bank of America and American Airlines, sending trading volume surging. While the trading firm involved blamed a “technology issue,” the company and regulators were still trying to understand what went wrong.

“The machines have taken over, right?” said Patrick Healy, the chief executive of the Issuer Advisory Group, a capital markets consulting firm.

— Flood of Errant Trades Is a Black Eye for Wall Street, The New York Times, August 1, 2012

Science fiction isn’t terribly reliable at predicting the future, exactly. But sometimes it does a nice job of predictng what the future will feel like.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilization is … “

March 8, 2012Quotes, ScienceJames Reffell

Clarke's Three Laws are three "laws" of prediction formulated by the British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke. They are:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Wikipedia, Clarke's Three Laws

So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

— Karl Schroeder, The Deepening Paradox

Corporate apologies: An appreciation

February 29, 2012Product Design, WritingJames Reffell

I have a small collection of corporate apologies.

I think software companies in particular are getting quite good at apologies. (Whether they're getting better at not doing things they should apologize for is another matter). Modern software companies generally expect to move quickly and to have relatively transparent communication with their users (at least compared to pre-Internet corporations). Both of these expectation mesh well with good apologizing.

I'm interested in corporate apologies for three reasons.

First, many of the apologies I've collected come from companies whose products I use, like Netflix, EVE Online, Flickr, and Airbnb.

Second, I work for very similar companies, and so while I hope to avoid it by never screwing up, it is entirely possible I'll be in the position of having to write such an apology one day. If that happens, I'd like to do a good job.

Finally, I love looking at different genres of writing. I think of corporate apologies as a very specialized genre, one that is usually written under a great deal of stress (because it usually follows something unpleasant happening), to an unusually critical audience (the apology is happening because some people are very unhappy), in a short period of time (an apology is best delivered as soon as possible).

Here's a few of my favorites:

1. Path apologizes for mishandling user data.

We are sorry.We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts….

2. EVE online apologizes for not listening to the community

Dear Followers of EVE Online,

The past few months have been very humbling for me. I’ve done much soul searching, and what follows is my sincere effort to clear the air with all of you. Please bear with me as I find my way through.

The estrangement from CCP that many of you have been feeling of late is my fault, and for that I am truly sorry. There are many contributing factors, but in the end it is I who must shoulder the responsibility for much of what has happened….

3. Netflix apologizes for a price hike and announces a plan to split the company in two, and then backtracks and apologizes for that.

I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. I’ll try to explain how this happened….

Followed by:

DVDs will be staying at netflix.com It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs….

4. Airbnb apologizes for a truly horrific rental experience and their handling of the aftermath

Last month, the home of a San Francisco host named EJ was tragically vandalized by a guest. The damage was so bad that her life was turned upside down. When we learned of this our hearts sank. We felt paralyzed, and over the last four weeks, we have really screwed things up. Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post trying to explain the situation, but it didn’t reflect my true feelings. So here we go….

5. Livejournal apologizes for overzealous enforcement of policy violations

Well we really screwed this one up…

For reasons we are still trying to figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I’m sorry, explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely….

6. Flickr apologizes for the mistaken removal of a photograph

I have to be a little quicker than I'd like because I'm writing this on a Treo in a car in the desert, coming back from a vacation (I'm not driving – no worries). I've gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up — and for that I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility)….

These are all worth reading, take a little time to check each of them out.

Each of these apologies get the basics right. They're from a specific person (usually the CEO or similar figure) and written in plain, direct language with an admiral minimum of corporate-ese. All of them contain some variation of "We screwed up."

The EVE online apology and the Flickr apology are probably the most personal (which makes sense given the history of those two companies), but none have that strangled sound we've come to expect from a canned, PR-approved response. Which is not to say PR people weren't involved — only that good ones were.

All of them contain some variation of "I take full responsibility," so there's no pushing of blame onto another party. Most include explanations of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what the company intended to do about it. On the other hand, the first Netflix apology contained a remedy (splitting the company in two) that was arguably worse than the initial problem (essentially a price hike). The lesson here is probably: don't get too fancy with your remedy, and don't let it get hijacked by some other corporate priority.

Context is also interesting. All of these were posted in the company blog, rather than a separate press release. Flickr's is a little different since the initial apology from Stewart came in an active community thread, and then was reposted in the official blog.

I've talked mostly about the apologies themselves, but, as most of the apologies themselves point out, actions subsequent to the apology also matter.

Do you have a favorite corporate apology? I'll add it to the list.

Added 4/16/2012

Here's one found by Andrew Sandler, from RunKeeper, a fitness tracking app:

With all of this good stuff happening, we wanted to write this post because we feel like we owe you an apology. You see, we have always prided ourselves on being a user-driven company. A company that cares about your feedback. A company that makes decisions with you, our users, in mind. We feel like recently we started to stray from those values. We spread ourselves too thin. We had too many initiatives going on at once. And most importantly, we stopped listening to our users as much as we should be.

I'm sorry photo CC by shandopics

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2011

January 12, 2012Book Review, BooksJames Reffell

This is a list of the best books I read in 2011. The list is not a Top 10. For one thing, it's not in order. Also, not all of the books were published in 2011, though more of them were recent than is typical for me. All of these are books I read for the first time this year: I do a lot of rereading, but none of the reread books struck me as strongly as these did.

Ship Breaker (Paolo Bacigulpi)
Absolutely the best novel I read this year. I enjoyed the one previous book of his I've read (The Windup Girl) but it did seem a little bit as if he were trying too hard to be dark. Ship Breaker has no such problems. It's ostensibly Young Adult, set in a post-apocalyptic (weather apocalypse version) Lousiana and starts among gangs of ragged youth breaking down old oil tankers for scrap piece by piece. The world-building is perfect, the structure is a concise, perfectly executed update of a classic adventure novel (Kidnapped or Treasure Island) and I would recommend it to anyone.
Zero History (William Gibson)
Finishes up the Blue Ant / Hubertus Bigend trilogy. When the trilogy started it felt lighter than the previous trilogies; having recently reread them all, I think it stand up very well. Plus, this one is largely about pants, and I appreciate a writer that can take pants seriously.
What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
Still mulling this one over. Kelly has a manic mix of total full-on messianic tecnology changes everything woo, but is more grounded (and more literate) than 99% of people with equivalent tecnophile woo. If you want a taste, go read this post on how few technologies truly die out. If you think that's neat, you'll like this book.
A Night in the Lonesome October (Roger Zelazny & Gahan WIlson)
Weird & wonderful. I have a soft spot for books narrated by dogs. Gahan Wilson does the illustrations, he's a gem. This is an older book I would never have heard about without Jo Walton's series of book reviews on Tor, she has a knack for highlighting semi-forgotten books that deserve to be read.
I Shall Wear Midnight (Terry Pratchett)
Another adult novel. I think the Tiffany Aching books are Pratchett's best works. They have a different tone than the other Discworld novels, and stand alone while working within that world. I think somehow they feel more serious (even though the Discworld novels have tackled some quite serious topics), possibly because Tiffany herself is never played for laughs, though funny things do happen around her. Especially when the Feegles are involved.
Nobilis: The Game of Sovereign Powers (R. Sean Borgstrom)
This isn't a novel, it's a very strange role-playing game in an extraordinarily beautiful physical book. It's disastrously out of print, tend to go for more than $100 on eBay, and I was lucky enough to find out about it by actually getting to play it at a friend's house, though briefly. I was hooked. I am one of those people who buys gaming books just to read them sometimes (sorry) and this book is a perfect example of why that is a terrible, and yet irresistible habit. On the one hand, it's an interesting game, and should be played. On the other, it's a grand and lunatic work of plotless fiction. Ask nicely, and I may let you look through it.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford History of the United States (Gordon S. Wood)
I am in love with the Oxford US history series. This one and the next are long, cover basically everything, and are pretty well paced considering how complete they are attempting to be. If, like me, your understanding of US history between the Constitutional Convention and the War of 1812 is "something something XYZ affair something" then this will get you caught right up. My personal takeaways are mostly about how tenuous the early republic was: all worried about a return to monarchy, re-absorption by England (or some other power), or just falling apart into pieces altogether. From our point in history it all seems so inevitable, but really, none of it was.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford History of the United States (Daniel Walker Howe)
Still in love with the Oxford US history series. Lots of juicy stuff here about the increasing role of religion in public life, our emergence as an imperial power, and the truly terrifying white supremacist edge to it all. It's a pretty dark era, with few real heroes: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the early abolitionists and activists against Indian genocide. But the presidents are a pretty nasty lot: Jackson (evil), Van Buren (inept), Harrison (dead), Tyler (useless), Polk (imperialist). John Quincy Adams comes across well. Reading about the "acquisition" of California was fun, though, as I now know the genesis of about 50% of the street names in my neighborhood.
Reamde (Neal Stephenson)
Probably not one of his important books. Totally one of his fun books. And sometimes, it's OK to have a really long, highly improbably adventure story written by a weapons-obsessed nerd. I'm also becoming convinced that, much as many novelists needed to get a 9/11 themed novel out of their system in the last decade, some novelists need to get a World of Warcraft novel out of their system. This is Neal's, and that's just fine.
Finder: Voice (Carla Speed McNeil)
Finder is one of those graphic novel series that fans get obsessive and evangelical about, and yet somehow most people have never heard of. It's science-fiction with heavy fantasy overtones, is written in this incredibly layered and dense way while having art that is clean and simple and spare and somehow pulls off tricks like having whole clans of characters that are near-clones of each other, and yet you can tell them apart on the page. If you haven't read any Finder, start with the new Dark Horse collected editions, but when you've read those, read this one next.

There are 3 nonfiction books and 7 fiction books on this list. One of the fiction books is a graphic novel, one is an illustrated novel, two are marketed as Young Adult, and one is a game. Almost nothing takes place in the present-day real world, I do tend to science-fiction, fantasy, and history. The YA fiction is fully the equal of the "adult" fiction, and these days I appreciate a well-done "slight" novel as much (or more) as a more ambitious work.

What I’m thinking about this week

November 1, 2011Books, Clothing & Costume Design, Games, Graphic Design, History, Inspiration, Not Design, Product Design, WritingJames Reffell

Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten’s boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That’s them up on the right there. I’ve owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to “garden use only” for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I’m in love all over again …
Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg’s usual group of slightly dotty British academics.
The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I’m being guided by Adam Nash’s personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one.
Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess. Think 2001 and Saturn 3. Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom.
Occupy Wall Street. There’s a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling’s 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn’t usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn’t nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it’s moments, and it certainly resonates today:

“Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

Designcult

James Reffell writes about things.