Vastly Important Notes

Make it, so?

Geech continues to speak truth to power with this trenchant denunciation of Make magazine.  I agree, Make jumped the shark, whittled with found dental tools out of homemade soap, about six months ago.  And by "shark" I mean "bong".

I propose we start a magazine called Break, dedicated to running well produced photo essays of Make stuff being systematically reverted to their constituent elements.

An alternative to yelling on the phone

Jason Terk has pointed me to a nice post by Seth Godin on how to get customer service right.  It basically boils down to avoiding real-time calls in all but emergencies and using the efficiencies afforded by asymmetric processing to substantially improve the experience for companies and customers alike.

I just so happen to be in a position to try this out on the customer side first hand.  Here's an email I just sent to the support address at Dean & Deluca:

Hi,

I ducked into your 560 Broadway store in New York today and purchased (among other things) a Bodum Bora Bora Thermo Tea Press for $80.  Then I got on the train for Boston and spent the next four and a half hours thinking about how I was going to make tea with it.  Unfortunately, when I came home and opened the tea press box, it was empty.  Doh!  I guess I should have double checked before leaving the store, but I just figured that it was customary for the boxes on the shelves to be already filled with their respective products.  Luckily the hard salami package actually did contain a hard salami, so there was some solace.

Can you help me obtain my tea press?  Unfortunately, I won't be back in New York for some time.  If you need some magic numbers from my receipt, I still have it.

Thanks much,

Phil Libin

Ok, so I'm an rtard.  Let's see how it goes.

Best. Organization. Ever.

I've said it before, and I'll say it for the next 10,000 years: The Long Now Foundation is the most awesomely cool thing ever conceived. 

When I grow up, I want to work there.

What I don't know about privacy

A post on Steve Hunt's blog has me thinking about privacy again. 

A couple of years ago, I was speaking on an international identity and security panel in Rome.  At the end of my remarks, a French journalist asked me a long question that seemed to have something to do with privacy but a lot more to do with trying to bait me to agree or disagree with his stated distaste for some aspect of Bush's foreign policy.  I say "seemed to" because neither my French nor his English were up to the task at hand.  Unfortunately, this kind of game has become routine for traveling Americans and I almost always choose not to play.  So instead of answering directly or, the horror, asking him to clarify his question, I decided to use up my time with an impromptu digression on the nature of privacy.  I wasn't sure what I was going to say and, when it was said, I wasn't sure if I actually agreed with it. I'm still not sure.  It sounded good at the time though and sent the audience a-nodding.  Here's more or less what I said, [with my simultaneous inner monologue in brackets].

---

When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence [good, always start with the Founding Fathers when talking to a French reporter], they put in a curious sentence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," [Uh oh, is that in the Declaration or the Preamble to the Constitution?  Crap!  Ok, just act confident and the audience won't know.] "...that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now there's an interesting thing here: the three rights specified are mentioned in order of decreasing specificity and ease of measurement.  The first one, Life, is pretty easy to measure; most people will agree on whether someone is alive or dead.  Well, not right now in Washington, but most of the time. [Polite laughter, good, they've heard about the Schiavo thing over here.] The second one, Liberty, is a bit harder to define but still pretty good.  You can usually get a pretty good consensus on whether someone is free or a slave. 

Now the third one is tough.  Happiness?  How can you really define it?  Or measure it?  It seems like a really personal quality that's really hard to pin down.  Some people don't even seem to want to be happy.  I mean I've seen French movies. [Better laugh line, but have I actually ever seen a French movie?  I must have.] Aren't standards of happiness based heavily on the ideas of the time? Plus what if my happiness makes you unhappy? Or vice versa?  Don't the Germans even have a word for this? Schadenschnitzel or something? [Big laugh, Europeans love the 'dumb American tries to say something important but gets comically confused with a food item' bit.  JFK knew this as well.]

That's why the Declaration doesn't give you a right to happiness, only to the pursuit of happiness.  We can't guarantee you happiness, but we can make sure that you can do whatever you think may make you happy - as long as you don't get in the way of the other two rights for others.  And this is the real genius of the document: you have a right to pursue.  You may never get there, or I may beat you to it, but you can pursue happiness if you want and we won't stand in your way.

[Now here's the part that I'm really not sure about, but it's such a smooth transition.]

So what about Privacy?  Is it like Life?  Is it like Liberty? [Yes, come to think of it, it probably is like liberty, should have thought this through better before starting.] Or is it more like Happiness?  I think privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be very private, other people post pictures of their vasectomy on their blog.  Don't google for this! [Really, don't.] Some people want to hide every step they make on the web, others don't care at all.  And is there a corresponding right to know?  If I really want to know how much my customers earn, is it really wrong for me to try to find out?  What if I want to find out who's giving money to a politician?  Does your right to privacy trump my right to happiness?

I think maybe privacy is like happiness, and the "right to privacy" should really be "the right to the pursuit of privacy".  If you want to keep certain information private, you should have access to all the tools you need to make that happen.  If you choose not to use those tools, either because you don't care or because you agree to some kind of business or social proposition in return, then I have the right to get whatever information about you that I want.  And the default setting on your web browser shouldn't be "private" any more than the default setting on your life should be "happy".  If you want privacy or happiness, you have the absolute right to work at it, but it's not our responsibility as representatives of government or industry to hand you either one. [Big applause line from the audience, but it's a very business- and government- centric crowd.] Companies should be free to track their customers' actions and people should be free to hide whichever of those actions they want.  Each person gets to choose where they want to stand in that marketplace.

---

This got a good very good reaction at the conference, but the "privacy" guys were pretty severely outnumbered so it wasn't a balanced field.  I'm still not sure how I feel about this analogy.  The biggest danger seems to be the potential arms-race between privacy seeking individuals and information seeking businesses or governments.  For instance, is it OK for Google's default search behavior to be set to log your search history? (Nelson Minar and my brother had an interesting discussion about this a couple of weeks ago).  If so, would it be OK for Google to change the opt-out settings randomly every few months to force people to "really" care about their privacy? Would it be OK for Google to just lie to you and keep records even you've opted out, claiming that you should be using some third-party anonymizer if you really cared? (I think the answers are "yes", "no" and "no", but where do you draw the line?)  Also, are the implications significantly different for government/citizen interactions?

I'm not sure about any of this.  I told myself that I'd sort it out before posting, but my little talk was almost two years ago and I still haven't decided.  Is "privacy" like "happiness"?  Maybe it's not a very useful question.  What do you think?

Oh, the picture at the top of this post is a still from "Fireworks", the School House Rock episode on the Declaration of Independence.  It's how they chose to illustrate "pursuit of happiness".  Note that this kind of pursuit, deemed appropriate educational programming for children in the 1970s, would now land you in jail.

A Plan for Rescuing Star Wars

I always knew that George Lucas harbors a burning hatred for all things that once made Star Wars great.  It's still common for arguments to break out at the office over whether Episode 1 or Episode 2 was the most egregious offender ("Remember JarJar!", "Remember Baby Fett!"), but all true geeks agree that watching the latest trilogy was like having garbage dumped onto your most cherished childhood memories.  Now there's proof that this was literally the intended effect.  Witness this officially licensed R2-D2 trash can on sale from ThinkGeek:

So it was really no great loss when Lucas announced that, although there were always supposed to be nine movies in the series, the anticipated final trilogy was never going to be made.  Better to have Star Wars be 3/6 good than 6/9 crap.  Ok, maybe it was only ever 2.5/6 good as there are some doubts about Jedi.  Still, what if the final trilogy could be made well?  What if it could be so good as to redeem the whole series??  Here's my plan:

1. Give Peter Jackson a billion dollars and send him New Zealand for three years to shoot the new trilogy all at once, ala Lord of the Rings.

2. Do NOT, for the love of god, let George Lucas know that this is going on.

3. Only after the new trilogy is completely finished, approach Lucas and see if you can negotiate the Stars Wars license.  If he says "yes", you've just saved Star Wars!  If he says "no", just re-render the CG with different looking alien models and you've got the world's best sci-fi movie trilogy anyway.

I think this could work, but George must never, ever, know.

Hmm, actually that trash can is kindda neat.  Awww, man, they're sold out.

Friends and Enemies

I've started the semi-annual process of digging my blog out of obscurity.  First step was to reorganize my navbar links section.  I decided that from now on, it's only going to list people I know in real life.  This means that a few choice links had to go, but Boing Boing, Ed Felton and Wendy Seltzer don't really need me to drive their traffic.

On the other hand, you can now follow a single link and see pictures of Geech's kids.  The only way you'd have an easier time seeing pictures of his kids is if you sat every day at my desk, which is right next to his and within the visual angle of all four of his giant monitors.  Web 2.0 is other people.

Jon Udell qualifies as someone I know because I went on a camping trip of sorts with him.  Jeneane Sessum qualifies just because.  Check out the new section on my sidebar.  I'll be adding more links as I remember who I else I know.

Step two of the vastly important reclamation project is going to involve fixing the slightly out of date graphic on my archives page.

Step three is probably to go back to not posting for six months.  Wish me luck.

I'm not good with slogans

Now that my former governor, Mitt Romney, has officially entered the 2008 presidential race, I'd like to propose the following campaign slogan:

You may groan at will.  I'm not yet sure whether this is a pro- or anti- Romney slogan as I don't plan on paying any attention to the race for another sixteen months or so.

On not punting to the user

While I'm getting a bit sick of the new Mac ads, the one about security is exactly on target.  I'm not talking about the actual security characteristics of Vista vs. OS X,  much of the advantage Macs have in this regard is doubtlessly due to their relative obscurity and will dissipate in direct proportion to the success of these ads, but about the security industry as a whole. 

We need to find the right balance.  It's somewhere between:

"Off with your shoes because we said so!"

and

"lanpak32.dll is attempting to increment the CX register [allow/deny]?". 

I'm not sure exactly where the balance lies, but making the user experience the forefront of every design decision is probably the only reliable way to find it.