Category Archives: Uncategorized

Through the Looking Glass

Look what I found in the attic!

It appears to be a small old book, but actually it’s a game for the 1984 Apple Macintosh.  It appears for a moment at time stamp 2:41 in the original Steve Job’s announcement for the Macintosh.  Oh dear, he’s wearing a bowtie!

The game was written, originally for the Lisa, by Steve Capps; and there is a nice story by Andy Hetzfeld of how it and he came to be moved over to the Macintosh.

You can play a somewhat limited version of the game, implemented in Javascript, on here at Steve Capps firm onedoto.  And there is an iPhone version.    For the search engines, let me note that this is Apple part #914-0183-A.

Curiously I have no memory of playing this game.  I’d sell it, but it’s a rare object with a very thin market; so I have no idea how to sell it :).

Cost of that Car

I just sold a car I bought back in Sept. of 2003.  Back in 2005 I wrote a posting attempting to estimate the cost of owning a car.  At the time my estimate was $12.65/day or 42 cents per mile.

I’m not going to attempt to redo that calculation having just handled the  appropriate  bits of paper I know that if I consider only amount I paid to buy the car and how much I just sold it for; then the two odometer readings the it comes out to twenty five cents per mile.

Where I estimated the depreciation as $5 per day back in 2005 it turned out to be $6.30 per day.  You can take 3 bus and subway rides for six dollars in Boston.

$13 dollars/day is $4745/year.  Which is enough to buy two unlimited bus and subway passes along with 500 hours of zip car rentals.  Food for thought; and that’s before tax rebates and bargaining.

Moved Permanently

bash-3.2$ curl -I http://www.sun.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-Java-System-Web-Server/7.0
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:39:03 GMT
P3p: policyref="http://www.sun.com/p3p/Sun_P3P_Policy.xml", CP="CAO DSP COR CUR ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi TELi OUR  SAMi PUBi IND PHY ONL PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL PRE GOV"
Location: http://www.oracle.com
Content-length: 0

bash-3.2$ 

Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.

“Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.” –  Matt Haughey

Nice.  But.  There are reasons for that.  A bunch of the reasons are prosaic side effects of the conventions of story telling and the appetites of the audiences of reptilian brains.  Setting those aside, but near neighbors, are reasons arise from our perverse fascination with creative destruction.  And that has a tangle of threads, the most toxic of which is the confusion caused by a preference of robber barons to be called entrepreneurs.  A trick made possible almost entirely by virtue of our presumption that a hero must appear in any story since all the stories we tell have heros.

But once you get past all, well.  Simple businesses tend to be road kill waiting to happen.  Simple businesses tend to lack a solid competitive advantage.  For example a potent barrier to entry.  They also tend to fail to accumulate sufficient body fat to survive a vicious downturn or the arrival of a game changer in their midst.  When you step back, simple businesses are often just tragedies waiting to happen

MeFi is a delightful institution, a business that has worked for years.  Or has it?  It took six years to achieve lift off.  So it’s been a functional business for maybe five.  MeFi’s 10%/year growth is low for an durable internet business, but it’s not that exceptional. Just possibly what he means by simple is businesses with non-cancerous growth trajectories.  Reading  the interview where Matt says that you can see how other businesses have appeared around it.  Many of these didn’t survive and some of these are much larger.

I have opinions, but certainly no predictions, about MeFi’s trajectory going forward.  It would be tragic if it fails as a business, if only because of what Matt would suffer.  MeFi is a member of a class, i.e. places where questions are answered.  Yahoo has one. Google had one.  The puzzle in these is how to leverage crowd sourcing on the one hand and control quality on the other.  If MeFi succeeds in the long run it will because they found a course thru that space.  Doing that isn’t simple.

All this resonates with the blurb from a paper (pdf) in my to read stack:

Good word of mouth requires a simple, compelling argument.  Stock clubs and individuals select stocks from the same universe of choices, but members of clubs have to convince each other to buy a stock whereas individuals need only convince themselves.  This paper shows that stock clubs tend to choose stocks that have a compelling rationale that is easy to communicate.  Unfortunately, those compelling rationales don’t lead to better stock-picking performance.

I guess the good news is there is they don’t write “leads to worse performance.”  But all this, brings us to a curious detail.  That many businesses that are celebrated for their simple virtuous nature, well they usually aren’t that simple.  It’s more likely the story teller didn’t know what to ask.  Those stories are usually a fairy tale.  They may be virtuous though, but that’s hard to say.

Conversation Hacking

This long essay on Trolls (or Conversation Hacking) is quite fun.

“… people rarely refrain from biting on Steve’s baits. He relished every minute of the argument …There you may find the antique equivalent of Trolls : what people at the time called ‘sophists’ or ‘philosophers’ – two words that were used interchangeably by the man on the Forum. Many Sophists did not want to endorse the label – sophistry was frowned upon or downright illegal in many places – and insisted on being called Philosophers
….
To quote our informant again: “those who do not know about trolling troll unconsciously”. …”

John’s Desire for Self Bondage

John Hobo has a short piece on his desire for tools for self binding.

“So I maintain that Western Civilization can be saved … if only someone will come up with a simple app for time-locking our computers and mobile devices. Indeed, it would be such a basic and powerful productivity tool that it should come standard on all devices.”

I like how people are in the comments are admitting to their techniques for self binding.  Put your network cable out of reach.  And, this is too funny!

I think I’ve written before that I’m surprised that User interface designers haven’t done more to help with the focus of attention problem. It really ought to be standard equipment to be able adjust how hard it is to get to other programs and require that only the current program have control of the screen, etc. etc.

In this interesting essay on distraction by Paul Graham, who argues that distraction has evolved to become increasingly virulent. Which reminds us that the platform vendor isn’t entirely your side here. Apple’s recent announcement that applications on their iP*d’s will only be allowed to use location in “beneficial” ways is an example of this dynamic. Beneficial to who?

Insta-theories on where the boys are?

I find this chart extremely thought provoking.  It illustrates a huge change in American society over the course of my life.  Very roughly 10% of the male working age population no longer work.  Each time we have a recession a few percentage points never return to the work force.

Economagic: Economic Chart Dispenser

A few insta-theories:

  • The discriminatory wage differential means women are cheaper.  As employers overcome their prejudice against women in more roles they are displacing men from those roles.
  • The shift toward a service economy has created roles that employer’s tend to fill with women rather then men.
  • The complementary unpaid home child rearing role is increasingly acceptable, desirable, or the best option and so is filled by men.
  • An increasingly large swath of the low end labor performed by men takes place off the books, i.e. in a gray market.
  • Men are inherently lazy bastards and as the standard of living has risen 10% of them have puzzled out how to act out on that.

More insta-theories?  Please.

Play

I liked this tentative list from Peter Gray’s “Freedom to Learn” blog at Psychology Today.  Writing on the Value of Play he begins with a long definition, in short:

  1. Play is self-chosen and self-directed;
  2. Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; 
  3. Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; 
  4. Play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and 
  5. Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.
I’m stuck, saying that all web sites are massive multiplayer games, for a decade now.  Plays, one would presume, is central to that.  Manipulating users is key to talent scraping business models.  Best if they think it’s play rather than manipulation.

Just a bit of counter point.  The above list aren’t something people strive for.  People strive for: appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role.  Peter’s list makes play almost synonymous with a somewhat brutal kind of freedom.