Dan's Blog

Dr. David Gelerntner

A lot of convenience and power could be gained, and a lot of unhappiness, irritation and missed opportunities avoided, if the industry thought about design, instead of always making it the last thing on the list. We need more people who are at home in the worlds of art and the humanities and more or less diffident in the presence of technology. There are not enough articulate Luddite, anti-technology voices.

A quote from Seth Godin’s Blog is stuck with me [emphasis mine]:

Learn to produce extraordinary video and multimedia. This is just like writing, but for people who don’t like to read. Even better, be sure to mix this skill with significant tech skills. Yes, you can learn to code. The fact that you don’t feel like it is one reason it’s a scarce skill.

Whenever I “don’t feel like it” that quote pops in to my head, then I go and do it.

(Film short concept)

Wendy Torrence is returning to her room at the Overlook, having just been chewed out for interrupting her husband’s writing. She passes a closed door sporting the sign: “Success through Goal-setting”. Curiosity piqued but still insecure, she sheepishly goes in.

Inside, the speakers are charismatic and exude success. It is infectious.

Her spirits buoyed by inspiring talk, she decides to give it a try. She heads back to Jack. She talks to him about her feelings, her goals, vulnerability, using I statements and all that: “I don’t like it when you yell at me for bringing you a sandwich. I was just trying to be nice. I felt small, unloved… no, worse… hated. I don’t deserve that Jack, I deserve better. I deserve someone who will be decent to me and not drop the F bomb every time I bring him a sandwich”… etc.

What the...

Cut to Jack— even his possessed brain does not know what to make of this development. Jack, irritated, kills self.

Wendy walks away, with a mixture of being pleased and distraught.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Charles Darwin

Here I sit in front of my iMac, with my wireless keyboard and trackpad. Also in front of me are my iPhone, iPad, Magic Mouse and my MacBook Pro. In the living room is the AirPort Extreme, in the kitchen the AirPort Express to stream music. My wife has her MacBook Pro, her white iPhone, and her postage stamp-sized iPod. Since we started buying computers, our household has owned at least 6 Apple computers. In my basement is a Mac Classic.

I use built-in iChat screen sharing to troubleshoot other people’s computers on a daily basis. I use built-in videoconferencing to talk to my son while I am traveling (and I have FaceTimed with my wife, her dad, my brother and my co-workers, all sporting iPhones). We capture countless pictures and videos on our phones, that we will all have to share from now on.

My 7 year old son installs more apps on my phone and iPad than I do.

I have used AppleScript to automate many of the tedious repetitive things I have to do at my job, so that I can push one button or issue one voice command and my computer will do for me what it used to take me many steps to do. I use these a hundred times a day, no exaggeration.

I’m not one to watch a movie more than once… it needs to be great for me to want to watch it again. We have a half a dozen Pixar DVDs that we have each watched many times over.

It is truly difficult to understate the impact Steve Jobs has had on my life.

Steve, where the rest of your industry saw things as “good enough”, you had the awareness to know better, the brilliance to imagine how things could be, and the drive to make it so. May we all learn that lesson.

Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

An anthropology professor told me that in some cultures people like to play a game called “what if everything is a message for you”. It’s a great game because it promotes regular reflection and introspection, always a healthy thing to do. I also like it because when seen in this way, it is irrelevant whether divine forces really are trying to talk to us or not; it’s just a healthy habit to adopt.

Relevant here is the reticular activating system: the part of the brain whose job it is to distinguish relevant input from the mass of sensory data that we receive constantly. It’s the part of the brain that sees Volkswagen Jettas everywhere immediately after you purchase one, or wakes mom up from the slightest whimper of her infant two rooms over while otherwise sleeping soundly in an urban environment. The reticular activating system naturally likes to play this game and makes you excellent at it (though it’s not as good at sniffing out metaphors). Let me get you started with examples:

• Toilet clogged? Where are you having trouble eliminating shit from your life?
• Joint problems? Where are you inflexible?
• Throat trouble? How are you at speaking up for yourself?

There is a Taoist tale from the Lieh-Tzu about a man who loses and gains different things.

Among the people who lived close to the border, there was a man who led a righteous life. Without reason, his horse escaped, and fled into barbarian territory. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said : “what makes you think this is not a good thing?”

Several months later, his horse returned, accompanied by a superb barbarian stallion. Everyone congratulated him. But the old man said: “what makes you think this is cannot be a bad thing?”

The family was richer from a good horse, his son enjoyed riding it. He fell and broke his hip. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said: “what makes you think this is not a good thing!”

One year later, a large party of barbarians entered the border. All the valid men drew their bows and went to battle. From the people living around the border, nine out of ten died. But just because he was lame, the old man and his son were both spared.

from The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, translated by Angus C. Graham, New York: Columbia University Press (1960, revised 1990)