I was a little disappointed.  It was a scattershot speech.  He was solid on each of the myriad points he made, but there was no overall message, no guiding principle that drove everything else.  It was an opportunity lost.  I think William Safire nailed it on NYTimes:

‘

Our 44th president’s Inaugural Address was solid, respectable, uplifting, suitably short, superbly delivered, but — in light of the towering expectations whipped up that his speech might belong in the company of those by Lincoln, F.D.R. and Kennedy — fell short of the anticipated immortality.

[…]

A good speech has to have a memorable theme, stated early and reprised at the end. It did not emerge in this address.

To mobilize people to collective action, you have to have communicate a single guiding principle.  Taxation without representation; “Free at last”; man on the moon by the end of the decade–that sort of thing.  This not only gives people a framework for understanding your policy, but guides their own decisions.  It gets individuals excited because they understand how they can change things.  If anything, Obama’s campaign was about change and grass-roots action.  Having a guiding principle in the speech would have been a perfect method for launching grass-roots change in support of his policy.

Shisol was glad that “there was no swinging for the rhetorical fences”.  I agree.  You win more baseball games by consistently hitting solid base hits than gambling on home runs.  Happily, Obama’s team demonstrates a lack of self-grandeur.  Still, you don’t have to have Lincoln-worthy rhetoric to ignite a movement. You just have to make a clear point.  If Obama had done that, I would’ve felt much, much more inspired by his speech, making me forget my unfair expectations of immortal oratory (my expectations are my mistake). 

All that said, I still can’t say the phrase “President Barack Obama” without a big ole satisfied grin spreading over my face.

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Everything is negotiable.  My reason for switching registrars was price: Register.com charges $35/y/domain; the competition charges $10). Talking with the operator, it turns out that there’s some flexibility in pricing. Now I’m renewing at $8/y/domain. 

Small talk goes a long way.  The operator didn’t put me on hold while she was working–she asked about the weather. We chatted about grey winters & snowstorms between trading information for the domain renewals. The net result: I felt like I was being treated as a real human by a real human instead of being a participant in a machine-like, protocol-driven transaction. It made a huge difference and all it took was the age-old conversation tactic of talking about the weather. 

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Here’s an example:  Across the lake from me, Darcy Burner is running for US Congress from Washington’s 8th district.  I really like Darcy.  Instead of just talking the talk about pulling troops out of Iraq, Darcy went and talked to a retired general who had overseen troops in Iraq to get his opinion, and that of other experts.  She put this all in an analysis paper she published on the web.  That’s ballsy, thoughtful, and proactive — all good traits I’d like to see more in Congress.  But I won’t donate to her campaign.  I don’t live in her district (I live in WA-7th), and I don’t know if she represents the 8th district’s thoughts and values.

I pointed this out to the canvasser.  He thought it didn’t matter: in DC, they make decisions on a national level, and not decisions specific to a particular district.  That’s true — they make national decisions by representing the values of local districts.  Each representative applies their local values to national problems.  It’s the diversity of opinions that makes a plurality work.  It’s what makes the wisdom of crowds work. 

Once upon a time, there was a very opinionated man named Sir Francis Gaulton.  Sir Francis believed that crowds just multiplied the ignorance of its individuals, thus producing horribly bad decisions.  One day he was at a fair and stumbled upon a contest to guess the weight of an ox.  Sir Francis thought that these uninformed people couldn’t possibly guess accurately.  The guesses ranged across the spectrum and a few were close enough to award prizes.  After the contest, he took all the guesses and did some math: he found that the median of all the answers was frighteningly close to true answer.  Since then, countless classrooms of students have guessed the number of beans in a jar and, despite class clowns and earnest over-achievers, the median is always incredibly accurate.  The diversity of opinions makes this work.

So, back in D.C., if you actually want Congress to work well, you want a broad array of opinions.  You get many opinions by making sure that representatives actually represent their home districts.  Anything that gets in the way of that representation — lobbyists, Party dogma, and yes, outside campaign donors — gets in the way of democratic decision-making working at its best.  I really don’t see any difference between my donating to a campaign outside my district, and big oil pouring money into campaigns. 

(Special thanks to the always fabulous RadioLab for the ox-weighing anecdote above.  Listen closely to the episode, and you’ll make out Oliver Sacks in the background doing all the voices.  There’s nothing quite like hearing one of our most celebrated contemporary scientists doing goofy voices).

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‘

‘If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,’ Fuller once wrote. ‘But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.’

[from the New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert]

Often, the biggest hurdle in solving a problem is finding the outdated or invalid assumptions you’re habitually making.  These assumptions are the piano tops in our thinking.  Alaska Airlines provides a great example of how getting rid of an assumption allowed them to redesign the check-in process to save $8 million a year.  (Documented in Hustle & Flow at fastcompany.com; via Signal vs Noise):

‘

The new design will create significant cost savings. Seventy-three percent of Alaska’s Anchorage passengers now check in using kiosks or the Web, compared with just 50% across the airline industry.

I wonder how many old-school assumptions the rest of the airlines are making.  Perhaps if they found them, bankruptcy wouldn’t be the industry norm.  It also makes me think of Amory Lovins’ TED talk on ending US dependence on foreign oil (his book describes his plan in detail).  One of the basic assumptions he breaks is that ending the oil dependency is a costly, complex problem.  He then goes on to show that the solution is not complex and pays for itself as it’s implemented.  How many of our world’s most pressing problems are blocked on the assumption that solutions are complex and costly? 

It’s not just a business problem — this happens everywhere.  Scientific discoveries get hidden or confused by unconscious assumptions in interpreting data.  Writers get stuck resolving their plot lines.  The “ah ha!” moment usually comes when you discover the unnecessary assumption you’ve been making.  Suddenly your thinking is clear and a solution seems almost obvious (though often feels unconventional).

Another example: In Million Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell points out that public policy on homelessness is based on the assumption that homelessness follows a Gaussian bell curve — that the majority of homeless people were permanently so.  He shows that homelessness follows more of a power-law curve — that most homeless people are only in that situation for a few months, then never again.  Only a few homeless people are regularly on the streets.  If you change the assumption, thus the policy, you could save governments millions and better serve both the temporarily and permanently homeless.

All this reminds me of my favorite scene from The Contender.  It’s not actually in the movie, but in the deleted scenes section of the DVD.  While I agree it was superfluous to the movie, it is a gem of a scene.  In it, the White House Press Secretary and Chief of Staff are sitting in the oval office, exhausted by the incredibly difficult process of confirming a new Vice President (expertly played by Joan Allen).  The President (Jeff Bridges) comes in, sits down and says,

‘

“You got five apes in a cage. You got a banana hanging by a string in the middle of the cage. You got some stairs going to the banana. Now, pretty soon, one of those apes is gonna go for the banana. As soon as he hits the stairs, you take a hose and you spray all five apes with freezing cold water for five minutes.

Now, some time passes, and pretty soon another one of the apes is going to make the same attempt with the same result: all five apes get sprayed with the cold water.

Now you turn off the cold water. You never use it again. One of the apes is going to go for the banana. He hits the stairs. The other four apes pounce on him, and beat the shit out of him. OK. Understandable.

Now you replace one of those original apes with a new ape. After a while, that new ape, he’s going to spy that banana, and when he goes for the stairs, the other four apes are going to jump on him and beat the shit out of him. Right?

Now time passes. You replace another one of the original apes with a new ape. That new ape is going to go for the banana. The other four apes are going to beat the shit out of him — including the first new ape, who as no idea why he’s enthusiastically beating the shit out of this poor guy, nor why he, himself, had the shit beat out of him. Ok?

Now, you keep replacing the original apes with new apes until finally, you’ve got a cage filled with five apes who have never had the freezing cold water sprayed on them, and nevertheless, not one of the apes will ever attempt to climb those stairs again.

Why not?

Because, that’s the way it’s always been done around here.” 

By the end, the apes operate under the assumption that reaching for the banana is bad, and must be punished.  But, that assumption is outdated; made, in fact, before any of them came to the cage.  In reality, since we’ve shut off the water, there’s nothing other than that assumption that prevents any ape from getting the banana.  Just like people who clung to piano tops don’t see the life preservers. 

It’s so easy to be ruled by assumptions you’re not aware of.  I think it’s helpful to break these assumptions whenever possible. 

Here’s mine for the day: that the only way for me to be productive on a project is to spend all day working on it (this assumption ignores the evidence that I’ll procrastinate endlessly, searching for a huge block of time to work).   To break it, I’ve spent no more than 1 hour on any given project.  As a result, I’ve gotten a bunch done.  It feels good.

What unconscious assumptions are you making?  Go find one today and break it. 

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I think all creative people excel at this in some way.  Meanwhile, countless mentors prescribe doing some creative work every day.  I’ve often paraphrased the maxim, “When all hell breaks loose, make art.”  So, it’s important to get stuff done regularly.

I’m becoming a huge fan of incrementalism: doing tiny bits of work instead of huge projects.  This practice is a great remedy for my delusions of grandeur.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been satisfying myself with tiny little projects: given 15 minutes, I’ll set up lights for a photo.  I won’t shoot; not enough time.  But I’ll set them up so in a future 15 minutes, I’ll get to shoot.  The result — other than my dining room being filled with photography gear — is that I’m getting work done and feeling better for it. 

Early this week, I got several bits of bad news in just a few hours time.  I was all geared up for a lovely bout of melancholy.  Instead, though, I looked at my list of stuff I wanted to do, and just started back on the list — doing little things I know I wanted to do.  In about an hour, I was feeling great again.  Doing microscopic creative projects was a better remedy for the blues than anything I’ve previously encountered.  I guess they were right: “make art”.  (I note that it doesn’t say “make great art”). 

Today I was noodling on this, and for whatever reason, JFK’s famous quote came to mind: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”  Yeah, I don’t know why it propped into my head either, but I decided to riff on it a bit.  It always helps me to have a little catchy mantra to remind myself to do things — like make art when blue. 

Here’s what I came up with: “Ask not how time constrains you — ask how you can exploit your time.”  Not as melodious as JFK, but it gets the job done.  And, I like how it demonstrates the master/slave role reversal.

However it’s phrased, the lesson I’m learning comes down to — accept no excuses; make stuff; I’ll feel better for it. 

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The economist points out that because there is no competition in government — you get only one per country — there’s no competition or drive to make things efficient.  “Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos, and at worst a transfer elsewhere. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created.” 

Further, implementing efficient online services often require a different personality than is often found in bureaucracies: “The examples of good e-government in our special report have a common factor: a tough-minded leader at the top, willing to push change through against the protests of corrupt or incompetent vested interests.”

So what happens if we have universal health care?   The health care & insurance industry is already horribly laden with paperwork and bureaucracy.  It’s ripe for online & electronic efficiencies.  But, if you eliminate the already slim competition, and encourage more bureaucratic personalities to have power, will it just get worse?  Will medical costs (which everyone would bear) actually go up because of system & information inefficiencies?  

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Up until recently, I was only merely curious about the TV show Heroes.  (Having my TV hooked up only to my DVD player gives me lots more free time, but takes me out of pop culture).  That curiosity ended when I walked into Hollywood Video ten days ago to rent the first disk of Heroes.  Two hours later, I looked at the clock and thought, “11:30… They’re still open for another half hour.  Plenty of time to get the next disk.”  I managed to hold out for a day, but I gave in.  One week and 21 episodes later, I’d seen the entire first season.

The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem.

I’m completely addicted to Heroes.  Sure, the writing falls flat every once and a while (Why did Niki help Peter in the finale when she’d never met him?), but it’s fun! A good mix of comedy, suspense, and catharsis (who wouldn’t be attracted to as story about average Joes fighting back the evil malaise many of us feel?).  I need more.

But there’s a problem in Metropolis: to catch up with the current season, I need to watch the first seven episodes of season 2 — and these are kept under the lock and key of my nemesis, DRM.  The premier and 2nd episode are only available on Amazon’s Unboxed — which only plays through Amazon’s DRM-laden downloadable player — and I have sworn years ago to boycott all DRM products.

Curses.

I hate DRM because it puts the burden of maintaining the media industry’s aging business model on the shoulders of technology companies.  I hate it because it assumes that all customers are unscrupulous.  More practically, I hate it because DRM schemes prevent me from playing my media the way I want.  (e.g. Amazon’s player makes it impossible to watch those two Heroes episodes on my big TV in front of my comfy couch).  Thus, years ago, I vowed to fight DRM by boycotting all things DRM (including iTunes), and donating time and money to fellow crusaders like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and iPac. 

But I really want to see those episodes.  I need them.  It’d be so easy to just fork over the $2 each, install Amazon’s damnable player, and feed my addition on through my laptop.  Who’s going to know? 

It’s a battle of short term gain — satisfying my Heroes craving — vs long term gain: eliminating DRM from the marketplace.  Selfish needs vs the common good.  A multi-dimensional conflict of desires.  All heroes must go to their Personal Hell.

And so I must wait.……

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Over the years, I’ve hosted many wine parties, and have been collecting the bottles of my favorites. I had grand plans for building a scanner that would roll the bottles over the scan head to generate a perfect, flat copy of the label for my archives. That never really happened. I realized that it was far easier to just take pictures of the bottles. I’ve uploaded these to flickr with a few comments. Since I shared the wines originally, I thought I’d share the list. Enjoy. I did.

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• #1: new house (401k searches)
• #2: steak house (370k searches)

We may have the internet, but some things never change…

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