Chevron’s new ad campaign attemps to “humanize” our looming energy crisis. While I’m not impressed by some of the ads, I am intrigued by what they’re trying to do, and the obvious thought, effort, and money ($40 million, by some estimates) that they’ve put into this campaign and the associated web site, willyoujoinus.com. Is it sad that Chevron is the group pushing the discussion, and it is the President of the United States who is fighting it? Yes, yes it is. But it makes sense for oil companies to be concerned about this — the oil industry is one that thinks in longer time horizons than many others, and they are in a good position to see the looming crisis and what it will do to their bottom line.

Life hacking and the infinite workspace

One day I walked into the Student Union office and saw Annie with her ginormous Toshiba laptop with its 17" screen of massive resolution hitherto unknown to mere mortals. On it she had one web page taking up the entire screen. Of course, being the savvy Windows user, she knew how to use the Alt-Tab keyboard shortcut to switch between other open programs, like her Word documents, each also expanding to take up the entire screen. As she worked on her paper, she’d keep tabbing back and forth between the web browser and the document, but it never once occurred to her to shrink the two windows down so that she could view them both at once, side by side. Meanwhile concentration, focus, and productivity were just vanishing.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contains a great piece on a movement called life hacking, an attempt to better analyze the distractions of the modern workplace and develop strategies for organization and work that make people more productive.

Years ago I thought that wearable computers were just around the corner. I was hideously excited about the idea of a " remembrance agent ," an interactive software program that would constantly monitor my surroundings as I went about my daily routine, recording everything and constantly analyzing, looking for correlations. A small computer worn like just another gadget — or piece of clothing — would provide important and relevant information through a display in my glasses. It would tell me where I was and when I was last there and what I was doing and with whom and why. It would remind me of people’s names and of appointments and bring up old emails and papers and web pages based on its understanding of what I needed at any particular moment. It would know enough to understand when things required my attention and it should be obtrusive, and when it should just fade into the background and leave me in peace. It was the next evolution of computing technology, and it was just around the corner.

Well, its been eight or ten years and we haven’t seen much progress on the wearables front, meanwhile society has continued to get more and more distracting. I need not list off the litany of devices that we all know are sapping our lives away — cell phones, PDAs, PDA cell phones, cameras, PDA cameras, PDA cell phone cameras, BlackBerrys, laptops, iPods. Things keep getting more complex, our environment more demanding, information more pervasive, and yet not many people have put much serious thought into user-focused organization, prioritization, and productivity boosting.

Continue reading “Life hacking and the infinite workspace”

Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of Ivy League admission practices really makes you think, and leaves me feeling very conflicted about the whole thing. As I spend time working at Harvard, I continue to reflect on the strange phenomenon of Ivy League institutions, how they admit students, and what it says about the students, the institution, and our society. Says Gladwell: “Elite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience — an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an elite — and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.”

No good deed…

Today was a long day at Harvard on a Saturday, which is weird because I’m generally there Monday through Friday as well, and I felt very confused about the whole thing. After 9 to 5 at Startup School surrounded by people who were far more into the idea of creating a startup than I was, I headed over to Berkman for an hour to wait for Matt Sachs and crew to come to Harvard Square for dinner. I wandered over to the square but they had decided to go to Lexington instead, so I ate in the square, went back to Berkman for my stuff (and fiddled for another hour), and then decided to go home.

For reasons that remain unknown I decided to walk around the front instead of my normal route along the back, and it was in my very brief walk to the car to get home after a long day that a man in a coat and hat approached me. The gentleman in question spun an elaborate story about his wife taking his car, getting in a car accident, and him not having any means of getting to her at the hospital, as all of his stuff was in the car in question. There were some (perceived, at least) gaps in the story having to do with how he heard about the accident, why he needed to take an Amtrak train, etc. I felt pretty strongly that he was scamming me, but despite that, and after pretty much calling him a liar to his face, I gave him a twenty and my business card.

For some reason the homeless beggars seemed more persistant today, or perhaps more pitiful, as it was raining. I rarely give these people money, not because I think they are bad people, or that they should “find a job” or that the state will take care of them, but just because I don’t understand why they are in the square day after day, what their stories are, what they do with their lives and with the money I give them, and what my spare pocket change will really do. If it was one guy, I’d give him my fifty cents, but there are a dozen, and how to choose? I can’t give money to every person on the street, and even if I did, would it be making any difference? I just don’t know, and so I don’t give, and I try not to feel bad about it, but tonight I was feeling bad about it.

So tonight when a strange man approached me, seemingly agitated, with a story that, while probably untrue, could certainly be true, I gave him $20. I had it in my wallet, after all.

I was thinking about a discussion I had with Kevin a while back in which he gave me his rationale for giving money to beggars. He told me he feels fortunate at this time in his life to be in a position to have a place to live, money in his pocket, a stable job, a car, food on the table. But life is a series of ups and downs, he said, and we never know where we might be tomorrow, and when we might need to rely on the kindness of strangers. He also doesn’t believe that anyone would *choose* to beg on a street corner unless they absolutely had to. I tend to agree with him, whatever these peoples circumstances, we as a society have failed them. And I understand his sentiment, and his reasons. This is an issue that I just have not been able to come to any decision about, despite ample pondering.

So tonight when a strange man approached me, seemingly agitated, with a story that, while probably untrue, could certainly be true, I gave him $20. I had it in my wallet, after all. I had just paid $10 for dinner. If his wife really is in the hospital, I did the right thing and helped a fellow human in need. If he was just scamming me for money, well, now he has some money, and hopefully he is better off and can use it to purchase something he needs. Not knowing, it is best not to dwell on it, and now I can at least feel that I’ve given enough to somebody that I can put this question about the homeless to the back of my mind, at least for a little while.

If, by some miraculous event I get a check in the mail next week for my twenty bucks, I guess my faith in humanity will be reaffirmed, or something. But then I guess I’ll have to start worrying again about giving money to beggars.

iTunes videos: slighly more in-depth

Okay, I bought the fun Pixar short _Geri’s Game_ from the now-unfortunately-named iTunes Music Store. As I suspected, the quality is pretty disappointing and doesn’t do justice to the craftsmanship of the people at Pixar. Opening the movie in QuickTime Pro, I see that I can use the editing features to copy out sections and re-arrange the movie, but there is no way to export my results or save it from the menus. When I go to quit, however, it does ask if I’d like to save my changes into a new video file, and I can, with DRM, of course. There does not seem to be any way to get even a short segment of video out without the DRM, so any sort of remixing or fair use sort of goes out the window. I guess that is not unexpected, but it continues to be disappointing.

iTunes your TV

For a while now I’ve been telling people who would listen that a killer use for iTunes would be if Apple could somehow break into television and get TV shows into their online store. I’ve said I’d pay $0.99 or maybe $1.99 for a TV show, if I could get it the same time as it comes out on television, commercial-free.

Well, Apple has taken their first step in this regard, and announced yesterday a partnership with ABC to sell episodes of five of their shows for $1.99 each. Yes, folks, I’m a seer. I should be jumping with joy, right? Eh. First of all, they don’t seem to have the newest episodes. Second, they’re low quality, at 320×240 resolution, whereas what I wanted and expected was HDTV quality. My assumption, of course, is that they are commercial free (they’d better be!) but I can’t really test that cause I don’t feel like spending two bucks to see what all this hoopla is that surroundes Desperate Housewives if I’m getting such a low quality episode. I mean, seriously. 320×240 means that at full screen the video is fuzzy and pixelated. Thanks, but no thanks.

The apparent “target” for these videos is iPods. After many disparaging comments about video on the music player, Steve Jobs ended up coming out with a video player of his own, and it looks like an iPod. No, I don’t get it. The only way I’d get it is if the iPod was being used more for being able to take videos from place to place and plug it into a TV or computer for playback rather than watching on its tiny screen.

One thing Apple did that I *didn’t* predict was get older seasons of these five shows and sell them at a discount — $35 for 22 to 25 shows. Not bad, about in line with DVD sales. But for low quality episodes, no extras, no commentaries, no special features, and no clear path to getting them on a TV screen except through a fancy new iPod, I’m going to pass.

Come on, Apple. You’ve got the right idea. Now make it work. Let’s all hope that soon enough other TV networks will sign on, along with movie producers. iTunes could be a *great* outlet for smaller and independent films. Oh, and you might want to rename your “Music Store” and reorganize it a bit when this starts taking off, as I suspect (hope) it will. And put the videos in my Mac’s Movies folder, not the Music folder.

I’ve talked in the past about the future of television distribution, and I like what I see. But its only one very small step towards greatness. Not surprising, though, that it came from Apple.