Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.

As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”

Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.

     Where are you from?

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.

• Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
• Developing skills amidst obscurity
• Meaningful – complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
• “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

     Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
     (e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?

“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
     Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
     Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
     community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
     (e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)

“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).

Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).

To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV – Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI – Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI – Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.

Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.

As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )

Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?

You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.

In closing:

• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• Success is a gift.
• “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…

Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.

Not to forget that today is Earth Day, I’m reminded of being exposed to Chris Jordan‘s photographic art during a flight I took, I think, last year. His images stuck with me, and several seem very fitting to draw your attention to today:

• Plastic Cups, 2008 (60×90″, depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours): fit image, partial zoom and actual print detail
• Plastic Bottles, 2007 (60×120″, depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes): fit image, partial zoom and actual print detail
• Toothpicks, 2007 (60×99″, depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs): fit image
• Cell Phones, 2007 (60×100″, depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day): fit image, partial zoom and actual print detail
• Paper Bags, 2007 (60×80″, depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour): fit image, partial zoom and actual print detail
• Plastic Bags, 2007 (60×72″, depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.): fit image, partial zoom and actual print detail

Of course, there are many more works by Mr. Jordan, and I encourage you to experience them–at least online, if not in person.

Although it began as an Oracle blogosphere community builder, Billy Cripe was kind enough to include others outside his employer, including me, for this friendly game.

First, I am to disclose eight not-so-obvious things about myself. OK:

1. I’m right-minded since I’m left-handed (i.e. a South Paw, a Goofy Footer).
2. My wife grew up in South Africa and we met across state lines.
3. I’m an applied mathematician by training, and I thought I’d be a college professor. Then I had a software internship and started making money…
4. My Dad was a DBA and my Mom was a junior high school teacher. I do envision teaching some day…
5. I’m 6’3″ so I’m asked about playing basketball…until my 6’7″ younger brother shows up. He and I also debate who’s the real architect–my software angle or his traditional (buildings) angle.
6. I enjoy barbecuing and seem to have received the extended family grill master mantle. (If you have any good rub or sauce recipes, please do share them with me.)
7. I prefer Peet’s coffee to Starbucks coffee, and I prefer dogs over cats.
8. I took a job as a janitor just to appreciate life on the other side. As a result, I see folks in this kind of service differently (better, I sincerely hope).

Next, I am to tag eight un-tagged bloggers. So, I now tag David Caruana, Laurence Hart, David Hill, Ross Mayfield, Rob Masson, Jeff Nolan, and Harry Pierson. Cheers, guys!

Lately I’ve seen a number of office and work area pictures in others’ blogs. So, I figured I’d record what my workspace looks like, too.

Editorial cartoonist Clay Bennett sure does make me chuckle–despite the fact that my wallet is indeed emptied by today’s gas prices.

Being focused often comes at the expense of my office desktop surface area. Since I’m known as a proficient pile herder, I thought I’d try my hand at herding the above pile of magazines, ripped-out articles, lose notes and other content into the trash while first mining the following persistent notes of interest.

• “Bits to Atoms” – “…display becomes wallpaper you scroll, and if you want more display, you add more wallpaper. If your server needs more resources, you open the top and pour in more server.” -Neil Gershenfeld, Director, Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT
• After reading John Grisham’s The Broker while on vacation, I now know that adesso is Italian for “now.”
• “No Private Vistas” – “Look at the big picture [of Vista's repeated delays], and you’ll see a nasty object in what happens when you (and others) put too much trust in your ability to deliver software.” -Frank Hayes
• “Simple Minds” -The current obsession with simplicity beats making products stupidly complex. But it’s built on at least one false premise, that less is more. More is more, and it always has been and always will be. Good products can and should be feature-rich, ladden with information, and easy to use.” -Paul Kedrosky
• …but, “Are More Features Always Better?“
• “Evolve or Fail” and “Where’s Your Edge? “
• “Virtualization’s Real Impact” – “[In 10 years] You’ll no longer think of a server as being something other than how you think of a disk in a disk array today.” – Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist, VMware
• “Many Ways to Pretend” – “If misleading terminology were a crime, Microsoft’s Virtual PC for Mac would deserve the death penalty.” – Tom Yager
• “Doing Things Right” (derived from “Web 2.0“) – “The fact that Google is a ‘Web 2.0′ company shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. It’s like the word allopathic. It just means doing things right, and it’s a bad sign when you have to have a special word for that.” -Paul Graham, author, Hackers and Painters
• “Getting Real” – DARPA’s Real-World Reasoning Project (beyond brute force)

Ah…now that was cathartic!

[Via Manuel Clement] If I ever need to blow the mental dust off my college training, I now have one more place to visit.

The fountain approaching work underneath the kinetic sculpture received a touch of holiday cheer this morning…and reminded me of college pranks at the same time…

I’ve been involved in the private beta for several weeks now. This morning, Heath Row at Squidoo gave us all the OK to blog about the service. So, what is Squidoo? Its about discovering and establishing personal expertise via the publishing and subscribing of lenses. You can understand how a conversation turned into this product by visiting Seth Godin’s blog and others. Check it out.

It’s clear from reading some of my recent posts why I get a lot of “you’re an abstract thinker” comments–I’m a bit all over the map. Frankly, it’s a struggle I’ve had for awhile, but especially since I started blogging almost two years ago.

How can I effectively capture something of value? How is value to be measured? What is the right balance between the protection abstraction can provide (e.g. no IP or otherwise competitive leaks) and the bewilderness (at best and dismissal at worst) that the same abstractions can generate?

In order to trend toward more measurable value in terms of concrete thinking, I am giving some thought to how to re-categorize my posts, what to focus my posts upon (e.g. series on various subjects of expertise and curiousity) and how to better engage my readers–assuming they all haven’t bailed of late.

While I may still blog primarily as a personal outlet, those that know me, especially professionally, know that I prefer a conversation–the more interactive the better. How can I change the current void of comments without incurring the disease of comment spam? What subjects do you want to hear me address?

These are all still very open questions for me personally. If you have some thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you.

A coworker of mine was kind enough to share the following photo with me:

In semi-chronological order, here are my notes from Bill’s keynote:

• The “It’s what you bring to life” statement in the opening video before Mr. Gates took the stage made an impression on me for some reason.
• I thought it a bit ironic that blogging is encouraged here and yet the public address person told us all to turn off our laptops.
• Lifestyle … “workstyle”
• Bill’s pun about software being as reliable as electricity was good-humored given yesterday’s blackout in downtown LA due to crossed wires.
• According to Mr. Gates, software is the great enabler and it’s being underestimated in this capacity.
• The college recruitment video was funny. “Cloberate” will now replace “collaborate” in business speak.
• 2005 marks the year where more broadband users exist than dial-up users.
• Tools make platform advances reasonable (approachable, consumable, worth the investment).
• Server-service symmetry is about providing a continuity of features and functions while allowing customer choice where hosting, admin, etc. is concerned (i.e. server – customer-run on premise, service – vendor-run off site).
• Office is still promoted as Microsoft’s exemplar application (e.g. where smart clients are concerned).
• The most compelling element didn’t involve Mr. Gates. It came when the reigns were turned over to Chris Capossela in order to demo Windows Vista and Office “12.”
• Vista took the demo stage first. The “Clarity” emphasis was clearly demonstrated via the new “Flip Bar” (i.e. refactored Alt+Tab UE), the pervasive “Quick Search Bar” and “Virtual Folders.” Virtual Folders as simply XML documents is compelling to ISVs like mine who need to deploy specific views (and metadata painting portals) to their users. The Windows Sidebar reminds me of Google Desktop Search 2′s Sidebar, Apple’s (Tiger) Dashboard and Yahoo!’s Konfabulator acquisition. The fact that it’s a platform in its own right (along with Sideshow) is interesting (e.g. building “gadgets” for EMC | Documentum). BetaNews reports on gadgets, too. The way that IE7 takes tabbed browsing to the next level (i.e. “Quick Tabs”) reminds me of Apple’s (Tiger) Exposé. The fact that Vista has a built-in RSS store (i.e. yet another platform for development) is very compelling. It will be important to see whether or not annotations above feeds will be fully portable and open, too.
• Office “12″ finished the demo (i.e. Excel then PowerPoint then Word then SharePoint and finally Outlook). With the new user experience (i.e. in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook (shell) and Access only), “every user becomes a power user”–because he can more easily discover the full potential the application provides. The “pick before you click” philosophy in the suite is compelling (i.e. new galleries and hover-based preview functionality). When the WSS3 Recycle Bin was demo’ed, it received applause. The “pitchbook” application demonstrating deep integration between PowerPoint and SharePoint was interesting, especially the ability to mark individual slides in the pitch book for automatic synchronization by SharePoint. The “To-Do Bar,” RSS integration and InfoPath integration in Outlook look nice and feel highly usable.
• The same indexer, the same search engine will be shared across MSN Search, Desktop Search (Vista) and Outlook Search.
• On Vista, the Office “12″ open dialog (and the other common dialogs?) is the Vista open dialog.

While waiting for David Folk et al to show up for coffee, I noticed that there are a low number of women again at PDC (although it does seem like the ratio is growing) and there are a large number of guys that lack basic fashion sense (e.g. the muted, monochromatic, washed-out look seems to be accidentally in style around the halls).

Tags: PDC05

I’m really not a software architect. I just design train routes for my son.

But, as I’m reading in Emotional Design, laying tracks is making up for the sensory deprivation I suffer from interacting with most software. (More on that read later…)

This question was raised within the 1996 annual report for American Funds‘ SMALLCAP World mutual fund and accompanied by the following Ibbotson Associates chart:

The report goes on to state: “Most people instinctively know that volatility and risk are related. But they’re not synonymous. Volatility refers to the amount of fluctuation–both up and down–that an investment may experience. Risk is the perceived possibility of loss (or the perceived loss of purchasing power to inflation). … The charts above are an attempt to show that olatility, like risk, is in the eye of the beholder. Each uses the same data to illustrate what happened to small company stocks between the years of 1973 and 1982. The first chart (which we tend to think reflects how most people view their investments) traces the month-by-month percentage return. The second plots the cummulative effects of those monthly returns on the value of a $10,000 investment. The third shows the cummulative annual change in value of that same investment, illustrating how short-term fluctuations generally smooth out over time.”

I’ve always appreciated this chart’s visual reminder to perspective when investing, but lately, it’s caused me to think about its applicability to my profession of software development in a number of ways as follows:

• What kind of environment is set by executives, line management and architects like me to those in the trenches? How are decisions perceived once conveyed?
• In the context of mentoring and contributing to annual performance reviews of staff, how does the day-to-day translate into a curve of career development (or decline)?
• What are the equivalents of volatility and risk in software development for my superiors, for me and for my subordinates?
• Are context switches–the bane of most developers–about risk, volatility, or both?

How would you answer these questions? What connections, if any, can you draw here?

After finishing The World Is Flat, I picked up Winning The Future: A 21st Century Contract with America by Newt Gingrich, which I received for Father’s Day. (More on The World Is Flat in a separate post–excellent book on timely subject matter!)

I haven’t yet finished Mr. Gingrich’s book about a 21st century contract with America, but Winning The Future: A 21st Century Contract with America is a thought-provoking read. It’s not as substantial as some of the other books I’ve read recently (e.g. The World Is Flat, Men in Black), but it does offer new connections for the more detailed coverage these other books present (e.g. (threat #4) “America’s economic supremacy will yield to China and India because of failing schools and weakening scientific and technological leadership”, the historic balance of our three branches of government–that two branches combined (e.g. legislative and executive) can reign in the third branch (judicial), etc.).

In “Patriotic Immigration” Mr. Gingrich raises the subject of dual citizenship as “one of the most insidious assaults on American exceptionalism.”

Before I continue, I should state up front that I have a brother-in-law who is a dual citizen. He’s just as patriotic as I am. After passing all requirements and becoming a citizen, when he “interviewed” mutual family members, it was clear that in some cases, he knew more facts about America than some of those born in this country. So, up to reading this chapter, I really haven’t viewed dual citizenship in a bad light–I’m not certain that I do now either.

However, when taken to a logical end, dual citizenship can create a detrimental tension between two national, geographical, culture, ideal–identity–concerns. This reminds me of my own brief, prior post about absolutes versus relativism. On the surface, dual citizenship appears harmless, but when pressed all the way to the wall, it may yield an undesirable, if not unacceptable, result.

For whatever reason–probably because of my profession as a software architect–this got me to thinking about object identity. Java, C# and other languages have done away with the potential nightmare of multiple implementation inheritance supported by C++. However these languages prominently support multiple interface inheritance, which still has the potential for creating tenuous object identity. That is, if FooBar implements IFoo and IBar, is a FooBar object’s existence truly independent of its value? Of course, this depends on the function of IFoo and IBar, but my observation is that there are no formal checks in Java or C# to prevent a condition of “dual citizenship” in FooBar. And in the end, FooBar is conflicted, which will force the software above to accommodate, defend against, isolate, coax, placate, attack or ignore (at its peril) the inherent conflict.

Clearly, I’m “in process” on this connection. Thoughts?

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

By far the biggest impression that this morning’s JavaOne keynotes had upon me was their emphasis on community and the social implications of community-enabling technology. Perhaps this is due to the fact that my previous JavaOne experience was a few years ago and also that my day-to-day focus is more upon Microsoft products and technologies than it is upon Java. Recalling my seated wait for the first keynote to commence (after a rather long wait in the registration line and as Magnetic Poets performed), it seems that this emphasis has been there all along. And I know this to be true having served on two different Java Specification Request (JSR) expert groups (52 and 127). It just didn’t hit me before like it did this morning. Conference MC, John Gage, kept saying things like “introduce yourself,” “don’t by shy,” “community,” “participate” and “meet.”

I doubt that later this year when Microsoft hosts its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA that there will be such a community focus. Instead I expect that technology will lead each day.

This isn’t necessarily a good-bad observation, just a difference in mindset. You can certainly have a great community without focusing on the word, and you can have great technology without focusing on it, too. However, the success of both requires some serious attention and neither survives without the other. It’s simply interesting to see the balance struck by Sun and the balance struck, thus far, by Microsoft.

Seeing the Java Business Integration (JBI) 1.0 specification released and hearing about Sun’s new “trend line” regarding open sourcing aspects of Java technologies, etc. (e.g. Mustang, Glassfish) were also interesting, but the clear articulation around community sticks with me the most.

Aside: In my “know what you leverage” crusade, I picked up another colorful metaphor from a keynote demonstration (DTrace for Java): “A small misstep at a higher level of abstraction can lead to a ‘hurricane’ of extra work in lower layers.” How true!

I wish more software would allow me to express my thoughts rather than force me to think about their expression.

This sentiment came up during a recent discussion with coworkers about the nature of most enterprise application tooling. Tools could be so much more usable and useful if they brought a rich semantic model to bear on the task at hand, whether it be coding against a class library API, visually composing controls on a page or form, enabling click-through navigation to event handling logic, etc. There are examples of this (e.g. JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA‘s refactoring support, Microsoft Visual Studio‘s IntelliSense support, M7 NitroX‘s recognition of JSF and Struts semantics), but overall it seems like there is plenty of room for growth.

Expression is certainly not the concern of developers only; in fact, it’s a general concern for anyone that interacts with software. During this office discussion the evolution of spell checking software was raised as a positive example of “getting it” today (but not when it was first released on the masses). Today’s spell checking, for example, in Outlook or Word is sophisticated enough to flag a potential issue inline and in near realtime without overwhelming its user with UI that forces the user to address issues and non-issues alike (i.e. the green and redline squiggly underline links with contextual guidance via right-click menu options). Is there room to grow? Absolutely! Case in point: when you correctly spell a word but place it in the wrong context, it would be nice for Word to indicate this potential too me in a similar manner as it does sentence fragments, statements vs. questions, misspelled words, etc. However, this is a lot better than having software take control of my task and assert its will on mine with a modal dialog, which used to be the case in most spell checking applications.

If more software “got it” in this regard–allowing users to express themselves and guiding them toward their success in the process–new levels of productivity would be achieved.

The other aspect of Re-imagine! that resonates with me is its 22nd chapter, “Getting It Right at the Start: Education for a Creative and Self-reliant Age,” which Tom Peters admits he wrote in a state of rage. Education, especially concerning math and science is also a serious topic of discussion in The World Is Flat. More on this later.

Update 12/1/2008: For more of my book reviews and to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein), please visit my Books page.

This post has nothing to do with administration other than an attempt to manage a set of loose ends I’ve been contemplating to post. This post’s title comes from Tom DeMarco’s excellent project management book called The Deadline.

• Isolation is not always bad; alignment is not always good.
• Themes and rhythms (cross industry scenarios and product solutions, respectively)
• If you want to know where your raise went, read this. Key point: Benefit costs are driving a wedge between the revenues that businesses collect from their products and the size of the paychecks that workers receive.
• One of the articles that inspired my why isn’t collaboration free? question in my previous post was this op/ed piece in CRN.
• Confidence (n.) – the sweet spot between arrogance and despair (from Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End). Arrogance involves the failure to see any flaws; despair involves the failure to acknowledge any strengths.

I seem to have started two new workflows in the office: (1) using a digital camera to capture whiteboarding, etc. and (2) using a combination of tools to record meetings, knowledge transfers, etc. Processing the pictures I take for (1) is easy enough via Office 2003’s Picture Manager or in a few cases via Adobe Photoshop CS. However, although I have a pretty effective process for (2), it certainly would be nice to automate it.

I use Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 to capture the original voice recording in (WMA) format, which offers good quality and good file size (e.g. an hour meeting consumes 6~7 MB). The original recording is processed in Adobe Audition as follows: center wave, normalize (90%), amplify (varies on original), obtain then apply noise reduction profile to entire waveform, remove whitespace, remove um’s, hmm’s, and’s and other speaker extras, maximize amplification without distortion, and finally save a copy of the processed original to MP3 format. The final product can then be replayed faster than real-time (e.g. 1.5x) as time-shifted audio.

While effective, the above process is somewhat tedious and hands-on. It would be great to have a program that could be trained to recognize the speech patterns of individuals, categorize those profiles, and apply them to subsequent recordings.

Yesterday my brother-in-law told me about JibJab. If you haven’t already seen this fantastic animation that spoofs both Bush and Kerry, it’s worth a visit. As someone said yesterday on a news program, it does indeed seem like we live in one country of two nations. America is deeply polarized and unfortunately this polarization has raised certain forms of ugliness in public discourse (e.g. pure vitriol, statements out of context, ignorance taken as truth, agenda taken as objectivity, character assassination, etc.). If nothing else, This Land creators Gregg and Evan Spiridellis remind us how silly this all has become. Ironically, the animation mirrors reality in that pundits and fellow citizens seem more focused on mud slinging than on a thorough debate on critical issues facing our nation.

Oh yeah, one last thing, if you aren’t registered to vote, what are you waiting for?!? Voting is one of this country’s greatest privileges. When it comes time to cast your ballot for our next president, if you don’t bother, then please do the rest of us a big favor: keep your opinions concerning the outcome to yourself. Being a citizen is not a spectator sport!

During this week I had business in Redmond. Due to focusing on my conversation with a coworker while driving instead of paying attention to the road, I missed the 520 exit off the 405–I mean REALLY MISSED it. (That’s funny…there are a lot more trees than I recall from previous trips…never seen that strip mall over there, either…!) Cell phone rings, it’s Microsoft. Where am I? <I answer> Oh! Man, you need to double-back to get to us. When is the meeting? When you get here. Great! So, I high tail it back towards the 520. As I’m rounding a bend on the 405, I spot a patrolman on the shoulder, dismounted from his motorcycle pointing, that’s right…a radar gun. I brake. Doesn’t matter. He signals me to join him on the shoulder. My coworker is chuckling. As my guests would later record, I received a pre-meeting introduction by the Washington State Police in the form of a traffic violation for going 76 in 60. The officer was polite and even brought down my fine slightly since I was out of state. (Hmm, how does traffic school work for out of state citations?) While I’m not making any excuses–and before braking I was probably going faster than 76 due to missing the exit–it’s interesting to note that on my way back home from the airport (both in California), I noticed that I wasn’t even keeping up with traffic while driving 76. (Our local freeways top out at 65, too.) Oh yeah, the final action item for me from the meeting is pay the fine. At least it was a sunny, pleasant day in Redmond.

This past week on FOX News, political strategist Dick Morris had this to say about President Bush in the context of making a compelling case for the war in Iraq: “if he’s doing it militarily and substantively but not politically, he’s not doing his job.” That is, politics (selling a position, view, belief, vision) matter! Even if you believe that you are right, you have to convince those who put you in your position–we the people in the President’s case. Results obviously help, but they’re not enough. Left standing alone, results are still open to individual interpretation, and the consensus judgment may not be expected or desired. Your rationale, your evidence or proof…all of this must be presented to your constituents in a convincing manner. Decisions will be made regardless of your influence and involvement in their formation and execution. Of course, politics aren’t just for elected officials, they’re ever-present in the workplace, in the places we live, worship, etc. The word politics may be maligned but it’s important nonetheless.

The following logic seems to be more prevalent these days: if something is wrong but someone else does something worse, then what I’m doing isn’t so bad. The actions of others don’t excuse my own. My environment doesn’t prevent me from making the right choices either–granted some environments are more difficult than others. Choice is not free; it always has a cost–not that cost has to be bad. If choice were free, what would be the point of choosing? Need some practical examples? I only downloaded one song, one album, one… I was only driving five miles over the speed limit… I was only in the car pool lane for five minutes…

In no particular order:

• It’s been 11 days since your last blog entry.
• After teaching him how to make coffee every morning, your son decides to play with Mr. Coffee after realizing that something is missing in his morning routine.
• Your work email address and phone number have been rediscovered by your olleagues…and exploited (er, leveraged).
• There are 175 flagged items in your news aggregator that deserve to be re-read, thought about and blogged.
• The TODO list for your web site/blog is getting out of hand. (Having said that, that’s the one thing I have tried to manage since my last post–the design and functionality here. Most recently intra-site search has been implemented, leveraging Google. I’m also hoping the new table-based, columnar layout is more usable by folks with smaller monitors or monitors running at a lower resolution. Not everyone has a 20 flat panel running at a pixel resolution of 1600×1200–or has to squint on occasion if they did.)

I recently come across a number of useful sites dealing with color usage on the web:

• Color Wheel Pro – a program that allows you to see color theory in action: you can create harmonious color schemes and preview them on real-world examples.
• Handprint
• Color Matters
• Color Theory Overview & Tutorial

The January 2004 issue of Wired magazine includes a full-color, full-page image similar to this one (cropped from Uzumaki (Rabbit Spirals)). Both images are the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Department of Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.

Update (1/6/2004): the first color image is released.
Update (2/20/2004): insightful article on why Spirit ran into trouble–or was this the reason?

The quality of imagery today compared to the state-of-the art back when I was in grade school is awesome. Funny thing is that it will likely be taken for granted by my son when he learns about our solar system, etc.

One item focused on images captured by the latest Great Observatory in NASA’s fleet of such vehicles, the Spitzer Space Telescope.

There are three active vehicles in NASA’s fleet of four Great Observatories as follows:

• Hubble Space Telescope (1990-present): visible light (example image)
• Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (1991-2000): gamma rays
• Chandra X-ray Observatory (1999-present): x-rays
• Spitzer Space Telescope (2003-present): infrared (example image)