Learning is Change

Question 161 of 365: How important is bearing a resemblence?

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My son looks just like me, or at least so I am told. He has bigger eyes and a rounder nose, but other than that, there is a striking resemblence that would never leave someone confused about his paternity. I am told that this resemblence in young children to the father is much more about getting me to stick around than it is about getting other people to recognize who’s child he is. In an evolutionary sense, he looks like me so that I don’t go off with someone else or believe ill about my wife. In a much more real sense, I am proud that he looks like me because it means that I knew him before he could talk or show me what he was interested in. I knew him because the part of me that is in him is showing through for the world to see.

I wonder, though, how important is it to bear a resemblance to the organization or company that helped spawn you? Does it matter if Lucent Technologies is like IBM or the Baby Bells are like Ma Bell? Does it matter if Aardvark acts like Google or if Next Computing was like Apple? Should any of the non-profits or schools that are trying to reform long help systems and traditions be held up next to the organizations that helped to create them to check for a family resemblance?

Family trees are becoming increasingly important to me and so I guess it leaves me wondering about the ancestry of the institutions I rely upon. When it counts, the eyes of a company allow it to see competition as well as envision the future unfolding. A resemblance between father and son would allow both to look out for one another, warning of opportunities or pitfalls that are on their way. The ears, too, are ones that matter. They help an organization listen to trends, and they let them hear the customer needs. A resemblance of a more open ear would be welcome to a whole family. Furthermore, a simple curvature of the nose could show how the progeny can detect the sweet aroma of the right ingredients for opportunity coming together, just as the patriarch might.

I also think that sometimes this kind of resemblance can be something of an embarrassment if the traits are too close. The awkwardness of a family looking too much alike is exasperated when the family is made up of large million dollar firms. If they all seem to be readying themselves for a big family reunion, during which there are no differences of opinion, interest, or outward appearance, there is very little chance for progress. While I think that they do some things well, the company Oracle does this kind of resemblance terribly.

In the past few years, they have purchased many companies that are helping to compliment their cradle to grave idea of applications. They want to own all parts of the development and implimentation process for both server and client-side applications. Each of the companies that they have purchased are currently being remade in Oracle’s own image, complete with nearly infinite levels of management and a culture that seems to thrive on people checking things off in order to become certified in their own jobs (take Oracle DBA, for example).

Each one of these companies that was swallowed up by a larger one does not have the cute resemblance of a father to a son. Instead, it comes off as if there is a clone being created, one that is interested only in cloning itself again as many times as possible. I like that organizations can learn from one another and that startups can find successful exits, but I believe that there is something inherently wrong about parents looking too much like their children. It is just creepy.

My advice: Be cute. Be agile. Be a good son.

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Question 160 of 365: When is something both good and true?

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OTTUMWA, IA - AUGUST 13: Matthew Murray of Ott...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We have been warned all of our lives that things that seem too good to be true, probably are. This healthy sense of skepticism is bred into us at very young age. This is done so that we don’t go home with strangers and so that we don’t believe everything that we hear or read or experience. It makes sense to not get your hopes up every single time something good happens, but it is also not as much fun or as exciting as if we did.

On a regular basis I receive tweets and phone calls that could change my life if I let them. It isn’t so much that I don’t want them to, it is just this skepticism that keeps getting in the way. I can’t possibly make myself as vulnerable as I would need to in order to explore each of the opportunities that have arisen. And yet, if I do nothing, nothing exciting will ever happen.

The truth is that sometimes true things are good and sometimes they are even spectacular. He chain of events isn’t always so easy to follow, but after a while, the events really start to take shape.

I once owned a Nerf basketball hoop that I would play with in my bedroom. It was the kind that even my brother could dunk on. We used to all get on our knees and play a half-court press game for hours on end. At was until it broke at the hands of my older brother.

He paid me back for the present even though I hwd received it as a gift , and for that I am eternally grateful. With that 20 dollars plus some other birthday money I bought my first ever gaming system (a sew genesis). After a few years of Sonic the Hedgehog and friends, I decided to trade in the Sega and purchase my first brand new computer game (Full Throttle, an adventure game). This commuter game hoped to usher in an era of exploration and experimentation with computers that has not stopped to this day.

And while that path may have been assured by many other factors, it was this single Nerf game that was directly responsible for the events unfolding as they did. In this case, the facts were both good and true.

So whenever I see an opportunity, even now, I look at it as if it might be the next Nerf basketball hoop. I know that there was no way for me to make that judgement upon sinking the first basket, but I try to see it anyway.

I try to see all of the possible ramifications of my choices and figure if they have any truth to them, or goodness for that matter. I start talking to the tweets and other opportunities as if they we ere simply plot devices, and as if I am the director of some cosmic play. Some objects are just props, but even those have meaning. All I have to do is figure out what.

I’ll let you kniw what I figure out.

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Question 159 of 365: Who are the undead?

Everyone who is touched by death but cannot make it better on their own.

Anyone who understands the grieving process but can’t see any movement along it.

All who formerly had a complete circuit but now are left holding on to some dead pieces of wire.

Question 158 of 365: What is the percent complete?

I was told by a coworker the other day that computers don’t know how
to tell time. Specifically, they have no idea when something will
finish downloading, rendering, or installing. They make fictitious
estimates based on arbitrary data and they recalibrate every
half-second. In other words, their ability to predict the future is
just as flawed as ours is.

Yet, we wait there, watching the dialog boxes and progress monitors
fill up and tell us that we are ready to move on to the next step. We
silently count down the percent that we have left. We know that the
process is flawed, but we watch and predict along anyway.

I often wonder if developers put these installation and progress bars
on the screen simply to show us that there is something going on,
regardless of the relationship to what is actually happening.

A real progress monitor would actually visualize the files being
copied and show the code compiling. Just like the old defrag
visualization, the progress could be little blocks of color filling up
and shuffling around. At least then, we would see it as the ridiculous
act that ones and zero allocation really is.

Going to my mother-in-law’s funeral today made me think that we were
all trying to check our internal progress monitors. We were
desperately looking for those little sprites filling up a box. We
looked around at the ones we thought might be likely to go next, but
with just as much uncertainty as to our final download time, we will
be wrong.

In fact, as every moment is being copied from present to past, the
hard drive of our life is filling up. Some of our drives will quit
prematurely and some will be reformatted by events that give us a new
set of experiences. We will never know when the horrible clicking
noise will signal to everyone around us that we are about to fail.

As obscure as this metaphor may be, I would love to know where my
progress meter is at right now. Am I at 20 percent done or closer to
90? Is the bar closing rapidly on the end or will I stall like a bad
internet connection?

Just like computers are not going to get more accurate in predicting
the future of downloads (mostly because of connection issues and
background processes), we are not going to get any better either. Yet,
I hope I am wrong about both.

Sprites are fun to watch accumulate, but living my life is even more so.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 157 of 365: Why won't they sleep?

My wife has a friend that she has known since the fourth grade. This
friend, Mandy, also married a Ben. She also has two kids. She also
understands the value of passion and family.

We are staying at her home, and my daughter is trying to sleep in the
bedroom of her daughter. They have been trying for 2 hours now. With
different rewards and promises (both good and bad), we have tried to
get them both to be still and let their bodies be at rest.

Their bodies have other ideas. They want nothing more than to take the
clothes out of the drawers and make it known that they are awake. As I
type, they are clicking their tongues to one another because we have
forbidden them from talking. I still have hope that they will resolve
this and simply let one of them have the last word. At the moment it
doesn’t seem likely.

I feel this way now about Google and Apple. Their current selves
(post-Jobs’ return) are the spawn of those that have known each other
for a long time. They are seemingly forced into the same bed, whether
they want to be there or not. They keep telling one another that this
is the last jab and that they are civil to one another, but there they
are the next minute whooping one another up into another frenzy.

These two companies have so much in common and they could actually
rest up for the fight that is oncoming from those that are coming up
after them (their younger siblings, in both cases). Instead, they are
choosing to wear one another out and not think about how little energy
or stamina they will really have by the morning.

It is midnight for my daughter’s biological clock and I think that she
has finally gone down for the count. I don’t suspect that Apple or
Google have any such cutoff. They will continue to poke and prod one
another, stealing each others’ toys until no one is happy about what
they have. The rivalry for control of tomorrow will have many
casualties, not the least of which is a total lack of sleep for those
who are on looking. We buy products and make reassurances that this is
the last time we will choose between their interests. We always end up
tucking one or the other in, though. We just need some sleep sometimes
but reason isn’t high on their priority list.

Perhaps, I can squeeze in a quick wink now. Maybe.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 156 of 365: What is the farthest we will travel?

I don’t believe in absolutes. I don’t believe in martyrdom. And, I
don’t believe in regretting what we have chosen.

I chose to get on an airplane with two children under 4 today. I don’t
regret any moment of my son sitting and squirming on my lap. Not even
when he screamed and screamed about me turning off the iPad to
properly stow it under the seat in front of us.

I didn’t do it out of a sense of absolute obligation for my family nor
did I do it so that people would look and me and respect what I was
trying to accomplish (mainly survival). I traveled to see my wife to
be with her as she grieves for her mother. There are limits to what I
can overcome, but I didn’t reach them today.

Love is not an absolute, but it is close.

I am not a martyr, but I do appreciate those who did not glare at my
loud children and instead helped me to get through to my destination.

I do not regret the world in which we have created together. Nor do I
regret seeing who my children are in when they look at my wife in
great distress.

My journey was not terribly interesting or eventful, but my family is
better for having come.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 155 fo 365: Who do we root for?

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Cover of "Spellbound"
Cover of Spellbound

Along with the finals for the NBA and NHL going on this weekend, there was also another kind of competition that garners far fewer onlookers: The Scrips Spelling Bee. Tonight, on network teleivision no less, a girl from my home town of Cleveland took the prize. She spelled every word right for 9 rounds of hopelessly challenging competition. I didn’t really know much about her, but I rooted for her over anyone else because of that one geographical thing that we had in common. I rooted for her because of all e competitors, she was most like me.

One of my favorite documentaries of all time is called Spellbound, which is about the road to the national spelling bee. It tells the stories of about 10 different children who are all vying for the title. It is compelling because of the personalities of the kids. They are so genuine in their quest, and at a certain point, you would be happy to se any one of them win. Knowing that only one of them can win in the end, makes us watch all the more intently to see just which words trip up the young scholars.

The personalities that we root for most in the movie are not neccesarily ones that we are most like, but we do have to be able to see ourselves in them. We do not relate to the child with the lisp who has been studying only away with his tutor for the last 5 years and has never attended school or other social activities. We do not root for the kids who are entirely naturally smart and do not feel the need to study at all. Instead, we root for the second-generation Mexican-American. We root for the hyper kid who can’t quite yet play the star spangled banner on his guitar. We root for the flaws, the ones that we know should lose but don’t because of some drive to be better.

You can’t for too many people, though. You have to choose your favorites. And there in lies the problem. Everyone has flaws. Everyone is like you. Everyone has enough humanity within them to be related to. So, in the end, it is alway about who can tell the best story. I am not talking about the American Idol or Olympic interlude kind of story, but rather, a story of details. It isn’t so much that having overcome obstacles makes me want to root for you because everyone has had to do that to a certain extant. It is how many details of those obstacles are you willing to reveal that makes me want you to win.

A board game is not so interesting as Stratego played every night with a younger brother. A favorite pen is not so interesting as an engraving of a favorite quote from a book on a own that never leaves your side. A microscope is not so interesting as one that is broken in two because you couldn’t see what your father was trying to show you about germs.

I root for the details because there really isn’t anything else to differentiate one experience from another, otherwise. This is one reason that I think trending topics and hyperlinked profile categories are going in the wrong direction a lot of times within social networks. The details are skimmed over as if they weren’t the most important aspect of rooting for someone. There is no narrative in 140 characters, especially in the retweet happy twitterverse we exist within now.

YouTube is flying directly in the face of this trend toward homogenization of people to root for. We can look at many of the videos available on most channels and immediately know which ones we are interested in rooting for and which ones just do not have a compelling story. Video is where we are going to get back to our competitive and idiosyncratic ways. Even with the prevelence of parody, each remix is unique and speaks with a single voice. Even with the enormous amount of crap being uploaded every minute, it is through individual action that we are contributing to the mass of people ready to be cheered on. We are truly an audience to approve or disapprove of the details, which is more than can be said for the fast paced news feed on Facebook.

But I still think we need to work on rooting online. It still looks too much like voyeurism. I should be able to rate and cheer for a particular idea of detail, and not jut simply “like” something. I want to find a way to wave a pompom at an individual contribution. If rooting is in the details, I want to be able to search by detail and perform my own commentary and support for it.

Essentially, I want to be able to focus on the backstory and let the actual competition gradually become less important. It will still matter, but because I know that background, I will be able to better cheer on the people that I find valuable.

Go red wheelbarrow, Go!

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Question 154 of 365: What are fences good for?

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Nearly all of the houses in my neighborhood have fences, many of which are in severe need of repair. They are coming down because they were all built in the early 80’s. So, every few days I see new fenceposts being dug and placed. Pretty soon, all of the fences will be new again and we the peer pressure will mount on any house that doesn’t pony up.

But, whenever I see a new fence I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem about good fences making good neighbors (or not, if you read the poem according to the author’s intent). The fences that are around our houses are serving to separate us and to ensure our isolation, and for the most part, we are all in agreement that they are a good idea. We know that we are demarking the land that is ours versus the land that is yours. It isn’t egalitarian; it is ownership.

We know that we will never be as good of friends or find the kind of close community that places without fences seem to be able to achieve, but we are good with that. Until we learned that the people who live behind us are the most loving and amazing family. The husband and wife are genuinely attracted to one another and the three children play together and with their parents in a real and wholesome way. There are fits and there is yelling, but they love each other just the same. And my family and their family anticipate living in these two houses for years to come. We are looking forward to that, too.

So, what else would we do, but start planning to put a gate or a enormous slide between our two houses, circumventing the fence in the hopes of bringing our two families even more together. We have decided that it is more important to have the ability to roam freely and rely on one another for things than it is to preserve all of the privacy that was originally envisioned.

And that is the way that I feel closed platforms like the iPad are moving. In the beginning, all of the apps worked on their own and could only speak to their own data. This was great for focusing your attention on a single thing (this goes for many facebook applications and even Google web apps as well), but it was terrible for portability and ease of use. Now, though we are starting to see a sort of convergence where apps can open up files within another app. For example, the mail app now allows you to open productivity documents in any program that allows for editing of those documents. Apps like Documents to Go allow you to edit Google Docs and then sync them back up or upload them to another service like Dropbox. We are moving away from the default of emailing yourself objects and moving much more toward the requirement of syncing objects with all of the things that need access.

All closed systems need to be able to do both. I get the benefit of a neighborhood of applications or houses, with walls seoarating them. This allows each one to be the best house or app it can be. But the value of a neighborhood is when people come together. Be it through slides or garage sales, we all need to find those others that can add value to our existence. The fences are good for preserving privacy, but they are terrible at creating new spaces or relationships.

I want both. I want to be able to have an unique identity and also find a way to see how that idenity fits in to the greater picture. Without the grater picture, there really isn’t much left but being a shut-in without the capacity for collaboration or knowledge sharing of any kind. As enticing as that sounds sometimes, I don’t think it is in anyone’s long term interest,

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Question 153 of 365: What is bad?

I have pretty consistently told others that nothing bad ever happens
to me. I say this becuase of my generally positive outlook on the
events that unfold in front of me. So long as I can see the end of
them or rationilize them in some way, they are not bad.

I can’t see to the end of this at the moment. My wife’s mother died
today. She isn’t my mother, and I wasn’t there when it it happened.
But I see the hurt that is coming, and I can’t get beyond it. Someday
soon it will happen, at least that is what everyone is telling me. But
when my wife calls, there are no words that work. They break in my
mouth, each half waiting for some sort of self-medication to take care
of the muck that this day has been. This hurt isn’t mine because I
didn’t know my mother-in-law but for a few years. But a piece of the
only woman to ever know me died today. And that is bad.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 152 of 365: What do we do with uninvited guests (or, the CC effect)?

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There is a disturbing trend in sharing.

We share with others (as we should), giving them the ability to edit and observe. This allows them to contribute and for everyone in the collaborative process to move forward. However, this is where the trend emerges. Once this becomes a norm within our institutions, there becomes an expectation of sharing. Ordinarily I would say that this is a good thing. I have spoken many times about the “collaborative instinct” thqt I believe to be essential. But it isn’t the people that we intend to share with that are causing the trend. It is the expectation that everyone needs access to all collaborative processes. It is the CC effect. Because so many people are being given the rights to edit and add to the conversation, everyone believes these rights are inalienable now.

We share documents now because we think we have to. We let the collaborative space be the way in which we communicate changes in direction, and we let the single act of contribution become the end all and be all. We are cc’ing the collaborative process by keeping our bosses in the loop. We are shortchanging the power of the brainstorm because we need to be setting up protocols for future times to come together. Drafting areas are becoming final solutions.

The unending email thread is no longer the worst thing to happen in office politics. Now, the wiki with an agenda that doesn’t take into account all those with editing rights, is dead in the water, as are its originators.

But, what do you do with a list of people who have access to a google doc, all of which matter but one? What do you do with a Wave that can’t get the work done that it was designed for, simply because of who it was shared with? How do we get rid of our unwanted collaborators?

We used to be able to hold meetings at awkward times to try and smoke out those with a hidden agenda. We used to be able to write one another notes and leave them on the desk of certain people. We used to not have to worry that the edit button was just a single click away from the very people who seek to derail our change or cross out our best ideas.

When the unwanteds speak up, there isn’t anything to be done other than to sit and take it. Much of the time they occupy very disarming positions of power. And they are the folks who recognize when they have been removed from the access list.

Much like my wife’s high school boyfriend noticed when she unfriended him on Facebook. She gave the logical reason that she didn’t want to be friends with him on facebook if they couldn’t be friends in real life. I can respect that, of course. But this former flame noticed his sudden unfriendly status with Kara and called her on it. She refriended, but that wasn’t fair. Clearly she could (and still can) take a harder stance with him, but she shouldn’t have to. It should be okay to set boundaries on everything that is shared.

While I am no expert in privacy settings, here is what I propose:

  • Along with the ability to share a document or piece of information with specific people, there should also be the ability to bleep it out for certain users. No matter if they were shared with directly or received a link, I would like to see a way to specifically and preemptively ban the people who are willing and capable of creating havoc in our collaborations.
  • I want to see the staggered share. I want he ability to edit the live document and then publish a more sanitized version of the document whenever it is appropriate to do so for a second tier of users. Right now, everyone either has view or edit rights. I think it should be edit, view, see. As in, you see what we show you.
  • I want the ability to kick people out and not have them know it. I want to keep letting them see the same version of the document or site that they originally accessed, but nothing more recent. Perhaps this is too underhanded for most communications, but I think that addressing the security of information is all about taking snapshots of what that information is and providing them as evidence of the collaborative process. Kicking uncollaborative people out of the environment is the only way that they will see just where the value comes from. An alternative to this solution would be to simply be able to tag every element of a collaboration with users who can edit, view, or see them. This may be more cumbersome, but it may allow for more transparency. Essentially, we are telling people that the web isn’t the same for everyone, and there is no one source of truth, unless you create it. I think that most folks are going to have to get used to that soon enough anyway.

    • So what do we do with uninvited guests? Nothing… Yet.

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