Moving – the online way
When you start looking into it, moving homes in England has a very modern approach. You can close or move all utility accounts online. Time it right and before you’re in your new flat, all the new bills are waiting for you and (as weird as that may be), that’s a great thing. Technology to the rescue!..
Or rather, that’s the story I would like to tell. What it’s really like is that every utility website will offer these features and, at least in our case, none of them would actually work. The post office refused to match the address it was offering me (which I wasn’t able to manually edit) with the one on the credit card (which I also couldn’t freely edit) and so didn’t do my redirection. The gas website wasn’t able to handle the fact that I haven’t lived in Britain for the last three years. The council website went ok… but really all it did was sign me up to get the proper forms through mail, which I still had to fill out pen & paper and mail back.
It feels to me like whatever money was invested in these websites is being thrown away. Most of what is needed is in place, but if you really want these services to be helpful and save your firm money, you have to be prepared to invest in them all the way to maturity. It just seems like this hasn’t happened and what I’m seeing is half-finished work.
This is also a good example to remind devs of edge cases and graceful failures. If you serve a city like London, be prepared to accept international addresses when dealing with previous address history. If for some policy-related reason that’s just not possible (and this should be your only excuse), fail gracefully. Let the user/client know what the problem is and what they should do.
If you want to do string matching, especially for addresses, you must allow for flexibility (the difference between the address on my card and the one on the postal website was of no more than two characters). I understand that if you’re the post office you tend to think that the address you have in your system is the only correct one, but be mindful of the fact that there seems to be more than one database for UK addresses around the web and they don’t all match exactly.
Of course I forgot to mention that cancelling any non-utility service nowadays must almost always involve a phone-call or office visit. This is a sales-based limitation, probably counting on the fact that talking to a person at the other end (that is well trained in how to persuade you not to cancel your account) will result in fewer cancellations. I’m actually sure that it works, I just don’t think it’s necessary. Try suspending your account on Facebook and you’ll see that you can be pretty persuading online as well, with no human interaction. It just requires a bit of imagination and work. By forcing me to call you (especially if it’s one of those “toll-free number that costs money on every other network except BT”) all you’re doing is annoying me, which is a bad idea especially if I am cancelling because I was previously annoyed by something related to your service.
More Jobs: The biography, the reaction, the legacy
I’m a bit late with this post, because it took me a long time to get it right. But finally here, we go, this is what I have to say after having read Steve Jobs’s biography and like any person with a blog, I need to write about it.
First off, the book itself.
This is one great biography, I really really enjoyed it. It’s telling me a story, it’s almost always giving me different sides of every event and most importantly, it’s not just giving us Steve’s thoughts, but those of many many people around him as well. I can’t even picture how much work must’ve gone into putting all of this together, to me it’s amazing. By comparison, I recently read Al Pacino’s Biography
The reaction
I see a lot of people online that are reacting very negatively after reading this biography and it’s really bugging me, but I will try to keep my anti-rant rant as short as possible. I had actually written several lengthy paragraphs going over why being “angry” at Jobs’s character is wrong on multiple levels, but I decided to cut them out. I think it was a manifestation of “someone is wrong on the Internet syndrom” and I am trying to treat myself from that.
Instead, I’ll tell you a few stories from my own life. In college I was very lucky to work with a few people that were similar to Jobs. No, they wouldn’t shout obscenities at students and wouldn’t drive without a license plate. What I mean when I say that they were like Jobs is that they pushed their students to do more than they felt comfortable doing. I’m thinking of one or two professors and two teaching assistants (I’m not naming them because I don’t think they want the publicity, good as it may be). Today and always, I thank them and I can only hope to work with such people in the future.
You would go into their office with what you would think was your greatest idea ever and they would convince you that it wasn’t good enough and make you leave that office with something that was ten times more difficult and a hundred times more awesome. You would be upset for a day, concerned for a few weeks as to how you were ever going to pull it off… but you’d get on with it and that’s just the thing! They wouldn’t just throw you the idea, they would stick with it and find ways to push you and motivate you until you actually got that new idea done, while it often kept getting transformed into something even better as it progressed.
Or, you would go and do a presentation in front of them and they would not only criticise your slides and text, but tiny details like the way you moved your hands, looked at the audience and projected your voice. I helped with some of that work, as a teaching assistant during my graduate year and there came a point where we knew that we were criticizing stellar presentations, but we still pushed people to make something better by next time. And you know what? THEY DID that, every single time.
Freshmen year, I was working on my first major project in university. It was 2am, I had 90% done, there was just a bit more needed to have it all finished, but I was feeling tired, hungry and sleepy, I just wanted to go home. My TA stopped by the lab and convinced me to go the extra mile and finish the thing. I cringed, I opened a new box of almonds (I must’ve eaten something like a pound of almonds that night) and I got back to it. It was 4am when I finally headed home, but the next day I was the only one with a 100% working project.
Sure, the experience would be frustrating at times. Some people wouldn’t go on with it, they would quit (and that’s why Jobs wanted “A players”… it’s a challenging environment and not everyone does well in it). Sometimes I also felt they were exaggerating. Sometimes I got angry, I would get into arguments with them, I’d try to push back on the constant pressure. But in the end, I ended up doing more than I would have ever been able to do without them pushing me. When we were working with those students for their senior projects, the results they produced under this pressure were absolutely astonishing. We knew they were A-players to begin with, but what they made blew my mind. As I watched the final presentations I could see numerous potential startups on screen. It was incredible and it would never have happened without those people leading them.
If you’ve never worked with someone like that, you can’t understand how incredible it is. You look back months or years later and you see yourself having done things that you thought – you KNEW – were impossible. You may be tired, exhausted, crying, but you have an overwhelming positive feeling of “godly” power. You went beyond any limit you thought was possible and you delivered what you never thought you could. Trust me when I say that if you work with a person that can take you on such a trip and you want to go the distance, you are willing to put up with a lot of negative stuff from them just to be able to go on. I’m not saying that the negative is necessary (the people I was mentioning above are among the most polite and kind that I have met), but things in life are never perfect and sometimes that’s what you get in the box. Or are you genuinely expecting someone who builds a multi-million dollar company from the ground-up before he’s 30 to be humble and not at all arrogant?
So what’s my take on the reaction that people have following the biography? To be honest I’m a bit sad that it’s so negative. The negative stuff had been known for a long time, it’s the good bits that I feel are just coming out now. Unlike most of “the Internet”, I like Jobs a whole lot more after reading it because I got to glimpse a bit into how he ticked and how he did what he did. I also find it a bit disconcerting that people would so easily give Steve up just because they now realize his “reality distortion field” extended all the way to their homes, making them think he is some kind of genius-angel. He wasn’t. But that’s irrelevant. What matter is what he WAS and what he DID, not what people imagined that he may have been. And if you’re writing your criticism about a person you’ve had no contact with from a Macbook or an iPad, well… that reminds me of the great courtoom scene in “A few good men”. Just say thank you and go on your way.
Legacy
I’ve read some people online expressing fear that a lot of entrepreneurs will try to imitate Jobs’s style in order to copy his success. I find this fear to be completely unwarranted. If you think that being a jerk to your employees will turn your company into Apple, this is quite probably not your only issue to begin with. Really, it’s a dumb fear. People won’t just start doing that and if that’s all they get out of the book, they probably wouldn’t exactly have taken over the world to begin with.
What’s more realistic though is buying into Steve’s thoughts regarding manners of innovation. This is where the debate gets interesting. Should you try to copy Steve by giving people what they don’t yet know they want (or in other words, try and guess what people will want next)? Or follow the more traditional path of market research? Should you buy into the closed-system paradigm that Apple has made so succesful, or the open one that’s being pushed by other companies (also doing quite well with numerous other examples)?
I think here again, simply copying Jobs or Apple is a stupid idea. My take on it is that it’s great to see Steve’s example. He made those things work. He made closed-systems work, he made the “screw market research” approach work. He clearly shows us that it is POSSIBLE to go about innovation in that way, even though most people and most companies don’t do it. That by itself doesn’t mean that you should or should not try to do the same. I think it’s great that you have this example (and he’s not alone, there are numerous other famous innovators that have taken a similar approach) and that you can see it was done successfully. If you think you have what it takes, you should now have more confidence in trying to do it. But before you go and bet everything on this idea, I think you need to make sure you understand the kind of talent that goes with taking this approach and then make a decision based on that.
Some things in the book are definitely take-away messages in my opinion and here’s what they are:
- Focus on great products, not profit. The former will lead to the latter, but not the other way around.
- As a leader, at any leve, you have to push people to better themselves. You don’t have to be a jerk, do it in your own way, but you have to push people.
- It’s not always bad to be a perfectionist, if it shows in your work.
- You’re not Jobs. Make sure you keep that in mind whenever you try to use him as an example. He was talented and maybe you are as well! But he was also lucky and he was at the right place at the right time. Those are things you cannot just copy. That said, if you feel you have your environment working for you, there’s nothing wrong in getting some inspiration from his life and work.
KLM A la carte… About time!
I’ve been saying for a long time that I do not understand why food on flights has to be so horrible. It’s not the cost-cutting part, I get that. What I don’t get is why airlines don’t try to follow one of two routes which I believe would be a better action:
1. Marketing approach!
Have some caterer provide the food and cut your costs by allowing them to advertise on the flight. Let them tell me who made what I’m eating and where I can find them once I land and I guarantee that they will make sure that the food in front of me doesn’t suck so much. Such a deal should also result in having the airline pay less for the food, since the caterer is getting free advertisement – if I like it, I know where to go eat when I land.
I’m not an expert in this area so maybe there are other problems here which I’m not seeing (greed sounds like something I may be missing).So that brings me to option 2.
2. Make me pay for it, but at least give me options!
Airlines are getting really really good at price segmentation. You’ve got low-cost airlines, regular economy tickets, economy tickets + extra legroom, economy tickets + even more extra legroom and then the business/first class choices. Depending on how much you’re willing to budget for your comfort, you have enough options to satisfy almost everyone. Except for meals.
Meals come in two flavours. If you’re in the expensive bracket (business etc.), I’m guessing your meal may actually taste like food (I wouldn’t know because I was never there, but if you pay that much for a ticket and still get crappy food, I’d be quite furious if I were you). If you’re in the economy section, irrelevant of other upgrades, you get flavoured plastic. Why? Why does this have to be black and white?
How about you give me the option to get even MORE of my money for something that tastes at least somewhat like organic matter? Yes, it will be overpriced, yes I will complain loudly about it, but at least give me the option. Just because I don’t travel business doesn’t mean I can’t get a few bucks out to not eat recycled paper. Yes, it’s annoying that I have to do that and that your regular food serving can’t be at least half-decent, but if I am willing to do it, why not let me?
To my great surprise, someone has finally caught on to this! KLM is now introducing an “A la carte menu” in the economy class. As the title says… it’s about time!
…Of course, soon I will probably blog complaining about how they’re making me pay extra for decent food. Oh well, you can’t change human nature.
E-Books ups and downs
Almost a year ago I blogged about getting a Kindle and how I was pleasantly impressed by it (that’s an euphemism for being totally blown away). It’s been 11 months and in this time I have downloaded 58 books on my Kindle. Wow! Now I say download and not bought because about half of these are free ebooks that you can get on Amazon (mostly classics). Out of all these I read probably about 20-25. In case you’re wondering how do I end up getting more books than I actually read, that’s an interesting topic that I’ll touch on another time.
Regardless, that’s still a lot of books read and a lot of books bought. I can say with certainty that I bought more books this year (using the Kindle) than in any year before because of the convenience. Nonetheless, among these numerous books, free or paid, there is not one technical book. I just never bought an ebook that I would be directly using in my work. There are several reasons for that:
- Kindles are great for reading a novel from start to end, but not that great for flipping through pages and going back and forth
- I don’t even notice the screen lag when I’m reading, but it would bug me a lot if I were going back and forth between a few pages (as I often do with reference books) or if I was searching for something specific
- No color makes many figures and screenshots useless and most others hard to read
- The screen is small by “tech book” standard. This is perhaps a weaker argument since there are larger Kindles, but for me it’s an argument nonetheless
- Old habits die hard… I just like having the reference book next to me so that I can flip through it, make notes and of course throw it at the wall when code crashes!
Recently though I did purchase what is most probably my first technical e-book. I actually bought three of them in a pack. These are the Android Books from CommonsWare and again there are several reasons why I decided to buy these. As tech books go, these are quite cheap actually so it’s not a huge gamble if it turns out to be a bad idea, I could check on the author (by observing his inhuman rep on StackOverflow and the way he explains things there) and they actually seemed quite promising in terms of quality. But really, the one selling point that got me to decide on this almost immediately was getting Free updates for one year.
Now let met just stop there and expand on that. Free updates for any period of time is a HUGE thing in technology documentation, especially with something young like Android that mutates into something new every 10 minutes or so. My previous book on Android was outdated by the time I purchased it. By the time I finished it, Android was something else altogether. Updating books is something that you can’t have with “dead trees” and I cannot overstate its importance for tech books. I believe this to be the strongest argument for getting tech books electronically. Unfortunately, not all ebooks come with this benefit (actually…most don’t as far as I know), so the argument becomes rather null. It’s sad to have a medium with so much power, but find it not be used to its full capability.
Of course, I’m now back at my original concerns. Having this new ebook I was faced with the challenge of…well…using it. This is for personal work and I’m doing that off a laptop now which means that I don’t have three screens so that I can put the book on one and just work as normal. Lion’s fullscreen mode plus gestures actually helps a lot, it’s easy to switch between the book and the environment… but I still have to switch, which is a bit annoying (for those of you confused, I was spoiled by working on two 24+21 inch screens for a year; you just can’t really ever get over the experience of 40″+ of screen space).
Among my numerous options with these ebooks, I could get a Kindle version of the book so I could put it on my Kindle, but I run into the problems I was previously mentioning. Again, call me fussy, but I just can’t see myself using my Kindle for a tech reference.
I think this is where I become interested in having a tablet. I can genuinely see that be useful for something like this. A 10″ screen is decent size and if going through pages is as smooth and quick as it is on the computer, that’s great. Since the reasons for getting a tablet are adding up, maybe once the Kindle Fire makes it to the UK, I’ll look into that.
(You know, it’s funny how when the iPad came out I was completely unmoved and considered it a dumb idea and as time went by, I slowly started buying into the whole tablet thing; I hate to admit something like this, but in this case Steve was absolutely right… I had no idea what I wanted until he shoved it in my face. Damn!).
Recycling is great, but…
I think recycling is great. I’ve been supporting recycling since before I was able to actually do it (Romania is a bit behind on all that). I think we need to push the technologies further to the point where the concept of “recycling” is the norm: always reuse everything! I don’t want my future kids to have to recycle, I would rather they didn’t know what throwing away was. I could tell them fun “war stories” about how when I was their age I would actually sort things into stuff that can be reused and stuff that just has no more purpose and will be thrown away and burned. I’d hope their world will be so different that they will find it as hard to imagine as I may find the milkman.
I digress… but let me just make it exceptionally clear that I think recycling is fabulous and I’m a big supporter of it (done the right way).
However…
What would be even more awesome is using less stuff to begin with!
Here’s my “tipping-point” example (though I’m sure everyone has their own that’s similar). When I don’t make it to a farmer’s market, I buy organic tomatoes because they taste vaguely closer to what I believe tomatoes should actually taste like.
Here’s an example of what I may purchase on an average day:
Source: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=8717653
Can anyone explain to me… why in the world do I need my tomatoes to be placed on a plastic tray and wrapped in a plastic bag, before I even touch them? The fact that I am bringing my own bags to the store pales into utter insignificance in light of the fact that lots of the produce that I buy comes prewrapped in egrigious amount of plastic*! Sometimes, after I get home, I spent a good several minutes cutting everything open and throwing that stuff in the recycling bin because I simply can’t fit all that plastic in my tiny fridge.
So sure, yes, it *IS* getting recycled. But why does it have to be there in the first place? I fear that because we can recycle, we’ve become too relaxed about using extra stuff.
I could even go as far as suggesting that more things that come in plastic bottles be instead put in glass bottles that could be later returned. Milk comes to mind as a great starting point. Most families buy it periodically and they could bring back the old bottles every time they come get the new ones.
I could go even further, suggesting that we should be able to use some containers (like small baskets) in the store for grabbing produce and carrying it to the counter (so that they can be weighed and priced) and then leave them there at the counters. This way I could genuinely come to the store with three bags and leave with three bags, instead of three bags plus a dozen other smaller bags.
And don’t even get me started on the toxicity of plastics and how all of this may come together to an even bigger concern regarding health and the environment.
I won’t go there now, maybe some other time. In the mean time, I have to ask my council for more recycling bags again, because we blew through the last lot in a matter of weeks.
* that may have been a Jack Sparrow moment. Or not… We’ll never know.
