Today’s Shared Links for June 30, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 29, 2011

Wednesdays In Review: Two Bay Area Restaurants

This week I wanted to give a quick shout out to two local restaurants I’ve really taken a liking to.

A friend of mine has a sort of hobby — he likes to discover the restaurants his favorite chefs go to when they take a night off from their own kitchens. It’s an interesting way to find hidden gems, and they aren’t necessarily famous or expensive; it’s quality food that comes first.

A recent find here is Vedas Indian Restaurant, which is in Milpitas, not a town you normally think of for great restaurants. In fact, it’s a rather unpresuming place, in a strip mall on a secondary street and from the outside doesn’t look very distinctive. Inside? it’s beautiful, and it’s full of really awesome food.

We’ve eaten there twice now, and I’ve been blown away both times. They have their standard menu, but they always have specials as well, and on our last visit we found out they’d just brought on a new chef in from India, and he’s been using specials to experiment with some new dishes. We tried a couple of those experiments, a cooked chicken wing appetizer that we all loved (“this is how buffalo wings should be made!”) and a vegetarian dish that my friend raved on. They also shared a special bread that was cooked in no oil and had parsley added to the dough that was quite tasty.

Being a carnivore, I tend to eat from the tandoori and curries. This last visit I tried the Basil Murgh Makhmali Tikka, tender and moist, and the Daal, which was one of the best Daal soups I’ve ever had. They also do a mango and avocado salad that’s quite tasty. Laurie tends to eat the lamb or goat, and my friend is a fish vegetarian, so we tend to hit most of the menu over time. Everything we’ve ordered there has been astounding.

The restaurant has a very good wine list, and this last visit we had a rather nice Argentinian Malbec from Filus; that should be a hint that this isn’t a list full of generic Napa Chardonnay by the glass. Pricing on the wines is reasonable, and the servers are happy to talk over the list and help you find something you like.

The service has been fine on every visit; attentive without hovering or trying to be your best friend. We typically set our reservations for 7 or 7:30 and it’s not unusual for us to stay at the table for 90 minutes or two hours; typical for an Indian restaurant, when we arriver they’re almost empty, and when we leave, they’re packed.

Pricing is moderate; we’ve spent about $50 a head on our two visits there, including cocktails, wine and tip. Of the various indian restaurants we eat at (including Maudhuban in Sunnyvale and Mynt in San Jose) this one’s rapidly become my favorite.

If you’re looking for something more Italian and upscale, you might want to try Tigelleria Risorante in Campbell, right on the edge of downtown. This is a small place doing very well-prepared Italian dishes using organic and heritage ingredients. The dishes are generally not complicated, but they are cooked as well as the chefs can make them. Menus are changed quarterly. They do both pastas and meats here, plus they do a full charcuterie with cheese, meat and veggie boards that include both locally sourced artisan meats and cheeses and high quality, imported italian options as well. I strongly — very strongly — recommend that at some point you bring a couple of friends and you all agree to share a few boards off of the charcuterie. You won’t regret it. As someone who’s occasionally driven to speaking in tongues by a well done cheese board, their selection left me speechless and whimpering.

Our last visit, we tried their carpaccio and a gelato al peperoncino appetizer (chili pepper ice cream over arugula with aged vinegar and pine nuts); their soup was a carrot, potato and parmesan soup that was velvety and would have made a great entree, they’ll usually have a gnocchi on teh menu and it’s always been light and fluffy. Our last visit the menu included everything from squid ink noodles with shrimp and asparagus in a paprika and cream sauce to wild boar tenderloint to a seared duck breast that was cooked perfectly and was quite tasty in a wine and orange sauce. Their menu is appropriate for both vegetarians and carnivores, and as you can see, this is not your lasagna and pizza roadhouse.

desserts are just as innovative, and the wine list is extensive and they have a full bar including a selection of grappa.

Tigelleria isn’t inexpensive; we typically end up spending $100-125 a head. But for that price there’s usually two bottles of wine, cocktails before, grappa or cordials with dessert, and a full meal and a tip. The staff is well trained and attentive and it’ll be hard to avoid the owner, since she likes to wander the room and make sure everyone is happy.

It may be headed towards the “special event” price level for a restaurant, but it’s not a formal place like Manresa or Kuletos; it’s that nice combination of really great, serious food in a place that isn’t taking itself too seriously.

Because of the price, though, it’s a place we tend to visit about once a quarter to try out the menu when it changes. It is, however, a very good value for the price, and you can keep the cost more moderate by being a little less — enthusiastic — about the wines and cocktails. Still, it’s fun to once in a while just go and pamper yourself, and this is a good place to do some pampering.

(If you’re looking for more of family-style italian restaurant that you won’t mind going to on a regular basis, we really like Mama Mia’s, also in Campbell, where you can get in for a good meal and a bottle of Chianti without upsetting your bank account). I typically judge an italian restaurant by the lasagna, not just because I really like it, but because it’s a dish that suffers if the kitchen is just going through the motions, but if they really care about the food, it tends to shine. It’s quite good here, and this is a good place to come for a nice italian oriented seafood dish, because they always have one on special based on what’s good in the market).

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 28, 2011

Closing out the hockey season…

With the draft happening over the weekend, now’s a good time to close out last season and take a final look at hockey for a while. At least until free agency, which will happen at the end of this week.

To close out my playoff predictions, I picked the Canucks, so I missed on the final round. Still, I was 11-4 in picking the playoffs, which is pretty good if you ask me. I’ll take it.

I don’t talk much about the draft, because I don’t get a chance to see the prospects and I therefore think critiquing the choices is a silly thing to do. I’ll leave it to the experts.

The Sharks highlight during the draft wasn’t their drafting — a few days before the draft, Setoguchi signs a three year deal at about $3m a year, which I thought was a fair deal for both sides. And then suddenly finds himself a Minnesota Wild when Wilson trades him (and a prospect and a draft pick) for Brent Burns. At first glance this looks like a sign and trade, but Wilson has said that wasn’t true, and he’s typically a straight shooter. I believe him when he says the deal didn’t happen until after the signing — but that ignores the reality that the deal Setoguchi signed was an easy deal to build into a trade, and Wilson clearly was willing to trade him; once Seto was signed, I’m not surprised there were phone calls inquiring about him.

Without actually saying “I called it”, I did speculate on the Sharks deciding to shake up the forward lines, and that I felt Setoguchi was the player most likely not to be a Shark from the top six forwards come camp:

If there’s a top 6 shakeup on the sharks, I would be picking him as the player to shake up, if I could. I certainly would be trying to sign him for a shorter deal for not so much money with incentives.

And as it turns out, that’s what happened. Brent Burns? Very nice pickup. Physical, and he’s the kind of player Wilson finds that makes you go “how did he do that?” — in one transaction, he brings in depth to fill out our blueline, replaces Pavelski on the power play point to allow him to play forward, gets Pavelski off the third line and back in the top six forwards, and adds some nice physical play. And he does it with a player that has one year left on his contract, but seems very signable by the Sharks, not someone likely to jump to free agency.

When pavelski is a third liner, you have forward depth to spare, so using it makes sense. I really like this deal on all levels, even though we lose a good prospect n it. It’ll be good for Setoguchi as well, I think.

So, Wallin, Nichols, Mayers and Setoguchi out, and it’s not July 1. Burns in on the blueline. Desjardins filling in Nicholl’s role. Pavelski slipping into the top six forwards, so there are a couple of 3/4 line forward spots at grabs, and a lot of good talent that played part time last season taht can fill it in,  like Mike Moore. Still some work to do on blueline depth, but the team could open camp tomorrow and I think it’s a better team.

Elsewhere in the league?

It’s great to see Winnipeg back, and that they’re the Jets again. Now the hard part starts, which is making money in Winnipeg. I feel pretty good about that happening, though.

And while it won’t happen this season, Atlanta -> Winnipeg means realignment. The rumors have the league looking at a four division, two conference format, with Columbus and Detroit going east and divisions organized around timezones. I’ve been a strong critic of Detroit going back to the east (because it makes the west look even more like a poor cousin to the eastern conference), but I like this rumored realignment a lot, because th schedule gets re-aligned as well, and the plan is to have everyone play a home and home against every team outside their division. I’ve wanted that for a long time, and if they bring that in instead of the current schedule, they have my support.

The realignment rumors also indicate they’re looking at doing first round playoffs in-division, then reseed within the conference for later rounds. I like that as well, so here’s hoping it all comes through.

Drew Remenda gives his view of re-alignment on the Sharks blog. I like it with one exception. That is that he has two 8 team divisions in the east and two 7 team divisions in the west, and I’d prefer the conferences to be 15-15, which means one team needs to move west. And that means either detroit or columbus, but that admittedly screws that team a bit, so it probably shouldn’t happen. But I’d rather the conferences be balanced if possible (and if the league eventually does expand to 32 teams, which I don’t expect for at least five years, it reduces the probability of needing major realignment again. So maybe we go with drew’s idea, but I’d still like to find one team to move west… although I can see why neither of the logical suspects would like that idea much.

One last item I had flagged to mention: the league is tweaking rule 48, the hit to the head rule. I thought it was a good first try at controlling this problem, but also didn’t go far enough — but how to handle this without removing the physicality from the game is a complex dance and not easily resolved (blanket bans to hits to the head won’t work, not at the NHL level). The previous rule made it illegal to hit to the head on a lateral or blind side hit; that restriction is deleted, and so now any hit where the head is targetted and the principal point of contact is now going to be illegal. You NHL players that roll around the ice with your elbows up, get ready to sit.  At first thought, I think this is an appropriate change, but until we see how it’s enforced and whether the players pay attention, I need to reserve judgement.

Also changed for next year is rule 41, the boarding rule, making it clear that players need to protect a defenseless player and avoid or minimize a hit against one. That’s true both along the boards and in an icing situation, and makes illegal a few hits from last season that weren’t illegal (but should have been), so I like this cahnge as well.

So barring a major free agency surprise by the Sharks or a big trade, that’s probably about it until camp opens. The Sharks seem well down the path I wanted to see towards being a bit different and a bit better going into next season; the Jets are back in town (san jose arena music folks, haul out that dusty copy of West Side Story!), and the league is grappling with the hits to the head and pushing the rule forward since it clearly didn’t fully protect players last year. And we’ll see how that goes.

So, when does the puck drop? Can’t wait!

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 27, 2011

So You Want To Be A Pro Nature Photographer

So You Want To Be A Pro Nature Photographer | Outdoor Photo Gear:

Nature photography is one of the toughest fields of photography to make a living in. I’ve found that for me being diversified is the key to making it. Having multiple streams of income keeps the money flowing. Those streams all take a lot of time to keep them flowing.

Here’s something I learned as a fledgling science fiction writer back in the day, and which is part of the reason I retired from writing to focus on high tech geekery:

If you want to be a pro photographer or a writer or a dancer or a whatever, you have already failed. Because these are very competive disciplines, and you will lose out to the people who HAVE to be one.

If you aren’t driven to succeed, you’ll get run over by those that are.

That doesn’t mean you can’t generate some income, whether it’s selling the occasional story or print. But make a business of it?

Want isn’t enough.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 26, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 25, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 24, 2011

Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 2)

Continuing the discussion from this article…

Okay, you’ve blocked out time to handle email. Now what?

You need a plan.

I’ve tried a bunch of different workflows for handling my inbox. I’ve ended up with a very simple one, but it works pretty well for me. Your mileage probably varies, but consider using this as a template and adapt it as you feel makes sense for your situation.

I use my inbox as my “to do” list. Anything in the inbox needs some kind of attention. When I’m done with it, it leaves the inbox, never to return.

I’ve tried using a lot of task-specific folders, I’ve tried using many filing systems. I’ve kept a “todo” folder. I’ve used no folders at all. I’ve ended up with a folder structure that looks like this:

  • Inbox
  • Archives
  • Mailing Lists

Seriously. that’s it. Sometimes I will create a folder for some ongoing task where I want to cloister all of that email together, but then I treat that folder as its own inbox and manage it like one. But typically, I may only have one or two of those, for the duration of the project.

The only thing I use mail filters for today is to automatically sweep mailing lists into the mailing list folder. That stuff is by definition bulk mail; it can wait, so I don’t want it clogging up my inbox.  Many times people are on too many mailing lists, and they try to force their way through them. As I talked about when talked about RSS in On Filters and Echo Chambers, if you can’t get through this stuff consistently without stressing yourself out, start unsubscribing. It’ll be obvious which mailing lists to get rid of because they’re the ones you’re leaving from day to day, or deleting messages unread to keep up. Save yourself the hassle and stress, and just turn them off. Or if they’re something you can’t (an external mailing list that won’t unsubscribe, or a work list someone thinks you have to read that’s pure noise), filter them to the trash. Trust me, I haven’t yet worked at a company where I wasn’t on at least one mailing list by fiat that nobody ever noticed if I just made them all magically disappear.

If you aren’t sure how to filter mailing lists, “full headers” in your mail client is your friend. Most mailing list systems put some headers in the email that are hidden by your client, but which can be used to identify the mailing list explicitly so you get no false positives and no misses. List-ID is a good one to look for. (for the geeky, that’s RFC-2919); many mailing lists also support list-unsubscribe (RFC-2369) and I do wish it’d become more endemic and mail clients had fully adopted some of the capabilities it was intended to allow (and yeah, if you look, you’ll see my name tied up in some of the arguments about those headers…).

So mailing lists are hidden in a folder and waiting for you to have some free time to browse through them. (I’m assuming you keep a work inbox and a personal inbox. If you don’t, you’re crazy, and please set it up right away. And make sure the appropriate emails go to each; so when you’re busy at work, you can ignore personal stuff, and when you’re at home, you can choose to turn off work. If you mix them together, you probably will never get your inbox straight).

I keep email sorted by date received, newest emails at the top. So at a glance, I’m looking at the most recent, unread ones. When I go into my inbox, the first thing I do is check each unread email, one at a time. My goal is to resolve each email on first reading — which isn’t always possible. but that’s the goal. This first pass is triage.

You read the email. Does it need a reply? No? Great. So either delete it or archive it. I delete stuff I know I don’t care about (like Jira update notices) and archive everything else. It’s not 100%, but 90% of the time, I trash auto-generated emails, and I keep almost everything else. It all goes in that one big archive folder (but more on that later).

If the email does need a reply, then if you can reply immediately and can reply quickly, do it. My rule of thumb is 2-3 minutes or less, reply and file. Longer than that, reply if I have the time, otherwise defer. Again, the goal is to get it out of your inbox, and if possible only have to read the damned email once. Any email you reply to you keep, so reply and then stuff in the archive folder. And it’s gone.

I have my mailer set up to cc myself on replies, so I always have a copy of what I wrote. Those all go in the archive, too. This gets all of that stuff out of the way — but I can refer back to it through looking into the archive or my computer’s searching tool (like Spotlight).

So, any time you look at the inbox, anything unread needs triage. Anything read has a pending action (by you or waiting for someone or something to happen). By the time you triage all your unread mail, you’ve deleted or filed most of it, and you’ve answered a large chunk of it and you’ve gotten a huge chunk of that email out of your life forever (or at least in someone else’s inbox to be frustrated over).

Here’s a special case: if there’s an email thread going on where you have multiple emails on the same thing, that’s a good time to switch your client to sort by subject so they all group together. Read them all together, then decide if a reply is needed to the thread. You save yourself (and others) the joy of you answering an email someone else already answered and duplicating the answer — and adding to the sag in everyone’s inbox. Many times, you’ll find someone else handled it, and you can read and file instead of continuing or lengthening the thread, or you can reply only to a specific subset of items and keep it shorter and simpler. And pull a half dozen emails out of the inbox in one bunch instead of plowing through them interspersed with unrelated emails. it’s a judgement call, but once you realize you can reconfigure your client on the fly to resort your inbox, you can learn to take advantage of that. Another sort I use a lot is by sender, so I can see everything a specific person (or mail daemon) is sending me. that can be useful to grab a bunch of things, send a single reply, and file them in bulk.

Some people use a mail filter to color certain sender emails a special color so they stand out (hint: your boss’s emails!). I don’t. My goal is to handle everyone’s emails in a timely and efficient manner so I don’t have to handle my bosses email as special cases. I think doing that sets up a mental workflow that works to the detriment of actually processing the inbox well — but it’s an option to consider for some situations (and people)

If you’ve thought about this workflow,I am recommending that you handle your inbox primarily LIFO (last in first out). That is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing, because the LIFO method puts the newest emails at hand to start, and those are the ones you are most likely to be able to process and file — and in the triage phase, your goal is to get as many emails out of the inbox as efficiently as you can — while answering appropriately and good writing and appropriate content. It’s really easy to empty the email with shoddy replies and faux answers, but that doesn’t help solve the real problem, which is getting things done (another reason why “inbox zero” is a bad goal. the real goal is to get stuff answered and filed).

You can’t spend 100% of your time in LIFO/triage mode, or the older stuff gets buried and lost, so once you finish triaging new emails, start working through the ones you left behind. Generally, I do that by focusing on emails from today and yesterday, but a couple of days a week, I start with the oldest and look at each one; the idea is to put your eyeballs on everything pending often enough that you don’t forget it. Some of them will get answers or become irrelevant along the way — archive them. Some of them you’ll decide you aren’t going to answer; archive them. when you’ve moved out of triage mode, use the time you’ve allocated to do what is needed to get to the point where you can answer emails, answer them, and archive them.

(digression: about now, I hear a few of you saying “but I never even get through triage!” short answer: then you aren’t allocating enough time, so you need to block off more so you can. Or, you need to find ways to reduce incoming email, and triage more emails in less time. The latter typically means responding to fewer emails and filing more unanswered. In a work situation, answering email of your coworkers is part of your job, so you have to make sure you budget time to do it appropriately. In  a personal inbox, you have more leeway to trash emails that came in from unexpected sources. Learning to give yourself permission to NOT answer emails is important, or the obligation will bury you.)

As you get used to this workflow, you’ll get into the rhythm. It’ll take some time. The large majority of emails will go from unread to archive quickly based on one viewing. a big part of the efficiency of this workflow is that most emails only get touched once, and you take an action and forget them. The intent is to minimize how many times you look at an email and try to decide what to do. A few emails will take a long time to deal with and archive; and one or two may refuse to die. Sometimes, the work to respond properly is complex enough that you’ll need to make it its own task and allocate time JUST to deal with that email.

Hey, who owns your time? You? Or your calendar? But that’s a different discussion (hint: if you don’t actively manage your time on your calendar, you’re giving everyone else carte blanche to screw you over by taking up all your time for their priorities. Learning to actively schedule your time on your work calendar is key to finding time/ability to focus and produce; if you don’t, you’re life will get eaten by meetings until everyhting is hunt and peck in the minutes around them…)

And that is how I try to keep my inbox sane. To summarize:

  • Allocate time to your email; the inbox is not something that will magically empty, and you’ll never succeed doing it around the edges of your other tasks. It is its own task, treat it as one.
  • Try to touch an email once. Learn to touch each email as few times as possible before resolving.
  • Don’t let emails die of neglect. Review all non-archived emails weekly to see if you can move them forward or resolve them. Don’t be afraid to declare them resolved or no longer of interest and archive them.
  • Archive aggressively. Get stuff out fo the inbox so you aren’t spending time looking at stuff and trying to remember if you answered them.
  • Delete almost nothing; sometimes, you need to go back to an archived email for context. Or the thread returns to life. Disk is cheap. but your inbox is expensive. Love your archive folder. desktop search (or gmail search) will become your friend.
  • Stuff that isn’t bringing you value, dump. unsubscribe or filter.
  • Keep your filtering simple; otherwise, maintaining it becomes a task in itself and waste time you should use on doing email.

And with a little practice, you’ll be able to keep your email inbox lean and under control. Mostly.

A few words on the Archive folder:

I used to try to organize my email archives. Desktop search cured me of that. Now, I simply shove everything in a folder called “Archive”. Every week to ten days, I take everything older than two weeks, and move it into a second Archive folder that’s dated (“2011-06″). I also do that for my “sent email” folder. Then I delete all of that mail out of those folders, leaving only the most recent stuff. And then I clear my deleted email folder of anything older than a week.

That keeps any single folder from getting too large. My active email is in my inbox. My recently touched email is in Archive. My fairly recent email is in dated folders within easy reach. Email older than three months (“2011-02″) I export those folders as .mbox folders and get them out of my active email system — and then import them into a secondary mail client that makes them visible to the desktop search (in my case, I use Entourage or Outlook for work, and Gmail for personal; my .mbox files get exported and the imported into Mail.app so Spotlight can see them as needed; if I want to open an older email, spotlight will fire up mail.app for me). that removes that email from the server and the mailboxes, which speeds up dealing with the mail servers (those of you with zillions of emails in your folders and lots of emails on the other side of Exchange or Outlook, you’re slowing yourself down). I keep old email indefinitely — just not in a place where it clutters up and slows down what I’m doing.  That keeps your email trim and fast as your server will allow; but keep older email around if you need it, which you’ll find is going to be pretty rare.

Doing that folder management in the archives takes me maybe 20 minutes every couple of weeks; It’s a good investment in keeping the mail server running fast.  Guess how often I’ve talked to someone who’s told me “god, Gmail performance sucks” only to find their primary mailbox has 12,000 emails in it? And yes, sometimes gmail performance does suck, but if you do that to the server, you’re not helping your own cause.

On a typical day, my inbox has about 80 items in it waiting for me. When I’m ahead of the game, about 40. When the inbox is winning, it grows to 300 or more (and I get frustrated) — that’s when I know I have to temporarily allocate more time to email.

Multi-tasking in meetings won’t fix this. trying to squeeze it in between meetings won’t. Realizing email is something you have to dedicate chunks of time to, and learning how to use those chunks efficiently — that’s the solution here. Or at least, part of one for most people. There’s no one perfect way to handle this, every situation is going to be somewhat different. Hopefully, though, this gives you some context to look at what you’re doing and find a way to get your inbox under better control.

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 23, 2011

Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 1)

I thought I’d forward the discussion of email charters and intelligent agents a bit, I wanted to point to a couple of interesting follow-up pieces: Michael McCracken posted Email Charters and Lists as Parties, and calls out Luis Villa’s blog on Mailing Lists are Parties. Or they Should be. Both are well worth a read. He actually makes some very good points, and I’ve touched on some of them a bit in the past (see The Lifecycle of Mailings lists [2002], An Audience of One [2010], etiquette, “standards” and online social environments… [2004]  and just for giggles, How Many Mailing List Subscribers does it take to screw in a lightbulb [2001]).

Yes, I’ve built email systems and run mailing lists since the dark ages, so I have a few opinions on them. I think Luis has some neat ideas, best summed up here:

 

Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.

In which he’s effectively calling for (whether he realizes it or not) the USENET “kill file“, although the modern flavor of that are the various reputation systems that are being invented (and the one I really like and which seems to be the one people are borrowing heavily from these days are the Stack Exchange systems).

But enough linking around for now.

The ultimate failure of mailing lists — and one we never solved over 20+ years of using and innovating them — is that they don’t scale. They seriously suck at scaling. They are a push-oriented, interruptive system that ultimately controls you, and you have to fight to keep some control on it. The easiest way to make a mailing list fail is to make it popular. They don’t scale to size, and they don’t scale to volume.  I can’t tell you how many times a mailing list I ran got into a really interesting discussion and a bunch of users got going and started talking about it, only to have others on the list walk in and start yelling at everyone to shut up and quit dumping crap into their inboxes.

Imagine that, a communication service that works best when people don’t really use it. But when it gets used and gets popular, it causes problems.

So from the very beginning, understand that email bankruptcy is not you, it’s the technology.

And the key to avoiding email bankruptcy is understanding that — and that gives you hints on solutions to preventing it, or getting your inbox back under control.

I’ve been doing email for 25+ years now. Most of my email environments tended to be high volume; people suffering from email bankruptcy. Currently, email is a huge part of my job — right now, I’m sending (sending, not receiving) ~225-240 emails a day on average. My inboxes see about 400 on a typical day. My record for sending email in one work day is around 550.

So if your inbox makes you wince or cry, I feel your pain. Been there more than once. I’ve reworked my email workflow many times looking for the magic solutions. And here are some of my thoughts on how to get out of it if you’re there, and how to avoid it if you’re not.

There are two primary causes of email bankruptcy:

  • Arriving email interrupting you: when you start getting too many emails, it prevents you from actually focusing on things are spending any significant time working on anything.
  • There are so many emails in your inbox you never get to the bottom of it (the legendary “inbox zero” syndrome).

How do you get there? Here are a few rules and thoughts:

Inbox Zero is not the goal. Inbox Management is. So don’t stress yourself trying to get to Inbox Zero. What you want is an inbox that you can look at and know at a glance what’s going on and what needs your attention.

Complex filtering systems are not the solution — unless they are self-teaching and self-learning. Frankly, most filtering systems in most email clients just plain old suck, and they are more trouble than they are worth, except for very simple, “let’s take a broadsword to this problem” solutions.

Keep it simple: you don’t fix the problem by shifting the problem from dealing with the email to trying to maintain the workflow.

If you take nothing else from this article, take this item: in talking to people over time over getting their email under control, the single most common cause of email bankruptcy is that they are doing significant amounts of communication via email, and they have somehow convinced themselves they can do it around the edges of their real work. Email is a task, and you need to commit time to it, the way you do meetings and your other tasks.

This is an amazingly common situation; you get up, you get to work. you try to check emails on the bus or at stoplights; you run to your first meeting, in the five minutes before everyone gets there, you’re madly scanning your inbox. While in the meeting, more emails come in. You have three meetings in a row, and suddenly people are sending emails asking why you aren’t answering emails. So in your next meeting, you try to multitask and do both the meeting and email. And suddenly, you’re doing nothing well.

Sound familiar? Yeah. I do it to at times. We all do.

So the first rule of avoiding email bankruptcy is admitting that email is a task and allocating time to it. Block time in your calendar for it. It is really a virtual meeting (albeit not real time, not face to face). It’s part of your work or personal tasks, and you will fail if you treat it as a hit and run situation. How much time depends on your life, your inbox and how your inbox relates to your work or personal situation — but stop pretending you can just handle it ad hoc, and schedule it into your life.

If you do not do this, your relationship with your inbox will never stop being a guerilla warfare situation, and it will win.

So find time to sit down every day and deal with your inbox. Maybe an hour, maybe 30 minutes twice a day (morning and afternoon, whatever you find works.

 

A side effect of allocating a regular timeslot to your inbox is this: it gives you permission to shut email out of your life at other times. If one of your problems is you’re constantly having email interrupt your other tasks and breaking your focus, learn to turn your email off! But psychologically, people find that hard if they know at some level they’re behind and have emails that need your attention. Your guilt at not having gotten to you inbox tends to make you bounce in and out and check every incoming email for an emergency, whnich breaks your focus, which ruins your productivity and train of thought, which means other tasks take longer, which means you have less time to do email, which….

So set up your schedule so you spend time focusing on email and handling it, so you can give yourself permission to ignore it (because its not out of control any more!) and all of your work will happen better. And when you do have that five minutes before a meeting, you can use it dealing with an email or three, and not feel pressure to “catch up”, because its’ all handled. So even that mini multitasking will be more effective and less stressful. And you’ll be a lot less tempted to multitask a meeting (unless its really boring).

Okay, you’ve blocked out time to handle email. Now what?

We will cover that in the next piece. Stay tuned….

(edited to add: hmm. Looks like Matt Cutts might be interested in these articles…)

Today’s Shared Links for June 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 17, 2011

Help Create an Email Charter (part 2)

In Part 1, I looked at Chris Anderson’s call for an email charter, declared it a failure, and said it ought to be done anyway. Because ultimately, the failure is meaningless and hides a potential for much success, and the fact that we won’t get 100% success out of the project doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

I suggested that protecting the commons of email would require more than asking everyone nicely to behave. I feel comfortable saying that, because 25+ years of history here on the net shows that any commons will ultimately be destroyed if the primary protection to it is purely voluntary.

It’s interesting to compare email and USENET here; email is in fact older than USENET, and they were originally built with the same general design esthetics, which boiled down to “we’re all mature adults here, we know how to behave”. Which worked, as long as the internet was small and we all knew each other and peer pressure had some value in moderating behavior. As soon as the internet grew into something the general public had heard of and started getting involved in, it because a resource to use, and for some, that meant it became a resource to exploit, and down that road lies spam in all its glory.

And yet for all our bitching, USENET is for all practical purposes dead and buried, and here we are, once again worrying that it’s only a matter of time before email implodes and dies. Only if you look at Chris’s argument, it’s not spam burying email, it’s sloppy and lazy usage.

Without realizing it, Chris has declared that the spam problem in email has been solved. And it has. Not 100%, but honestly, for most of us, Spam is rarely more than a minor annoyance. And that’s because a lot of people put a lot of time and energy into building big, nasty fences with barbed wire and electricity and lasers and nasty things on them to protect the commons of email from the people who wanted to exploit it until they killed it, the way they did USENET (where we never did figure out how to build that wall in time).

And that’s my point; to solve the problems Chris wants to solve, you can ask and lecture and write charters and build guidelines all you want, and if adoption is voluntary, it will fail. It will partially succeed — and that’s what makes the charter a worthy goal in its failure — but it’ll fail.

If you want to fix these problems, you have to go beyond asking nicely. You have to build walls, with gates, and locks, and people with sharp pointed sticks to keep those people on the outside from climbing over the gate if you don’t want them in.

Where the spam problem was ultimately solved at the mail server level; the issues Chris is worried about are smaller and more personal. He’s going to find that the devil is in the details: 90% of us are going to agree with his recommendations 90% of the time; that other 10% is likely to create endless arguments and the occasional flamewar, and accomplish little more than stress and frayed relationships.

Having been down this path more than once, it’s my view that these kind of things are intensely personal, and we all have different preferences and hot buttons. Remember HTML email? That used to be a hot button that caused a lot of fights. Today, I’d guess maybe 2% of the population gives a damn enough to strip HTML out of email, and 90% of email users would say “HTML? what’s that?”

Remember the days of pitched battles over “reply-to” in mailing lists? Honestly, 20 years later, the only reason we can possibly claim it’s “fixed” is that nobody really cares any more, except that last 1-2%. or top posting vs. inline replies? Or bottom posting? Name your poison.

Given that I’ve been involved in this for so long, and email was what I made my living in for a good number of years, and the servers I’ve built have sent god knows how many billion emails with my hand on the rudder, I’ve been in many of these arguments, sometimes on both sides at the same time. I’ve been yelled at, chastised, ambused, laughed at, ridiculed, thanks, honored, bought beers, offered chocolate, and more times than I can count, been asked my opinion.

And the one thing I’m firmly convinced of is that asking other people to change their behavior to do things that way you prefer is the wrong way to solve these problems, because nobody can, or will, want to remember the email preferences of the various people in their address book. Let’s see, these 80 people want inline responses, but those 15 want topposted responses, and Jeff, he insists on bottom posting or he won’t read it. Yeah, I’ll remember that. And jeremy doesn’t read email sent between 10PM and noon, while jason throws out emails on Saturdays because he’s Jewish, and…

See how quickly that system breaks down? I certainly can’t remember that; it’s not worth my time (and amusingly enough, what Chris is complaining about is how other people’s use of email effectively eats his time; his response is through effectively asking them to do things that shift the burden the other way. So if I were to ask Chris, for instance, to only send me email in 18 Point type colored red and never use italics, do you think he’d remmeber? and actually do it? Or would he see that as a burden on his already burdened time? So right from the start, how are people going to respond to his asking them to take on more of the burden in email to ease his? Like they aren’t also burdened by all of this?

That’s why the “let’s all be nice and play together right” fails.

If you want to solve this, then, you have to take responsibility into your own hands; and that means you need to have (or build, or have built) tools to enable that. That means pushing for better and intelligent email clients that can learn how you want your email — how to format it, how to prioritize it, how to manage it, how to leverage your time to maximize your efficiency and interest. And then teach your mail system to manage your incoming your email your way. Beacuse telling everyone else to do it the way you want fails when you stop to realize 50 other people are telling those people the same thing, and none of the 50 requests match up into a single set of options.

Now, I’ve had this discussion with people over the years; rarely is it well-received. People don’t want to do the work to make their life easier. they want to tell other people to do the work to make their life easier. I did have one person who actually DID send me all my email for about six months in 18 point bright red text, just to try to prove a point, but I’m not sure what point that was, other than it was unique that only one person in all of those discussions actually DID it, and he stopped when he got bored of trying to prove a point. Was I being pedantic in my request? Oh, absolutely. but that was the point.

Ultimately, if you want to fix this, you have to control your own destiny, not push it out on others. Most email clients have rudimentary tools and filters that can do a lot; the technology here is still pretty crude and brutal (although Apple’s Lion looks interesting in how they’re doing some smart formatting things and fixing that wart on email’s face). But; technology clients that learn from what you do to predict what you want done?  intelligent agents that you teach to act as a personal secretary? Nobody’s really cracked this year; it’s long overdue. But if you really want this solved, that’s where the solution lies. Not in documents or playing nice.

Computers have gotten massively more powerful and smarter over the years. We should take advantage of that to solve problems like these. If you push out your ideas of “how this should work” to others, you’ll get some level of cooperation and some improvement for some group of like-minded people for some relatively low level of investment.

But figure out how to enhance tools to learn and predict and leverage your time and do the grunt work for you? That’s where the solution really lies. Because then, even if what you want is 18 point red type and no italics, it’s a matter of teaching your client to do that. I looked into this ten years ago, and the processing power really wasn’t there yet. Now? I bet it is, with the right people and the right attitude — to give everyone the power to customize their experience to their expectations rather than build standardized walls that sort of work most of the time for most people. Mostly.

And that’s where I suggest this discussion really go, if what you want is a real solution; The charter is a good starting point, quick and low-intensity, and can do real good. But the real solution is in enhancing the client tools to empower a user to customize their environment and teach the environment to act as an agent for an individual. Not easy tasks, but maybe now we’re far enough along to make something that’s useful…. Worth a try?

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 16, 2011

Help Create an Email Charter! (part 1)

Help Create an Email Charter! – TEDChris: The untweetable:

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is in fact a potent ‘tragedy of the commons’.  The commons in question here is the world’s pool of attention.  Email makes it just a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention. The unintended consequence of all those little acts of grabbing is a giant rats nest of voracious demands on our time, energy and sanity. To fix a ‘commons’ problem, a community needs to come together and agree new rules.  That’s why it’s time for an Email Charter. One that can reverse the escalating spiral of obligation and stress. I have reserved the url emailcharter.org for the finished product.. But first let’s figure out what the charter should be. Let’s do this as a crowd.  It’s a shared problem. Let’s come up with a shared solution. It will only work if lots of people agree to it. The Charter must focus on reversing the underlying cause. We need a world where it is much quicker to process email than to create it. Bearing that in mind. Here are some candidate rules for an Email Charter.  (And btw, much of this applies equally to other online messaging, such as Facebook.)

 

 

Chris Anderson makes a call that we need an Email Charter. I felt a disturbance in the Force. I had to reply. So I am, in two parts.

The concept of an email charter is an honorable goal.

The reality of an email charter is that it will fail.

The practicality of an email charter is that you shouldn’t let that failure stop you.

Let me explain.

This concept is not new. It has been tried before (but if you need 26 rules to get the point across, it is too complex). Books have been written about it. It’s been done for other protocols.

Back in 1983 I authored A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community, which we would now recognize as a crowdsourced document, but the word crowdsource wouldn’t be invented for another 20 years; it did, however, coin the term Netiquette, which ultimately made it into the dictionary (yay us). It’s been translated into 30-some languages (that I know of), it’s been referenced in thousands of other documents over the years, and it’s influenced countless people’s behavior over the 20-oh-do-I-feel-old-plus* years it’s been in existance.

Just look at USENET today, and see how well we succeeded at managing that commons.

So before you even start a project like this, realize that IT WILL FAIL. You are creating a document with a voluntary set of ruiles (sorry, guidelines**) and asking people to follow them. Doing so will fail if only because there is always going to be an influx of new, naive users who don’t know the guidelines exist and therefore can’t follow them. There will also always be people who don’t want to, don’t agree with them, don’t care what you think, or simply feel like being contrary. And the griefers and trolls who get off on screwing up stuff other people value. And the spammers who only see a free resource they can suck dry for their own personal benefit and profit.

And I am recommending that you accept this failure, embrace it and recognize it. And that you don’t let it stop you from pushing this to fruition.

Because if history is our guide, what you will see are the failures. What you must understand is that behind the failures, if you do this well, is an army of successes that don’t get noticed because, well, they aren’t failures. It took me a long time to really see that. A good document that institutionalizes best practices succeeds quietly — it influences people designing systems, it influences influencers and teachers. It gives a context for creation of teaching and training materials. People crib from it and use it in other documents, and spread it around. Users see it and learn from it and adopt it. Programmers innoculate it’s standards into the tools we end up using. And you’ll see almost none of that; and if you don’t understand that, eventually the weight of watching the failures may cause you to feel like the project failed, when in fact, it succeeded, but just not with a 100% perfect success.

So do it. Because if you do it well, it will help, and potentially help a lot. But understand from the very start that it won’t solve all of your problems or get 100% adoption, so it’s not a complete success. And if there’s something to be learned from the horrors that USENET became, it’s that asking nicely ultimately fails, because no matter how many people agree and abide, the ones that don’t will ultimately overrun the commons and destroy it.

But if your real goal is to prevent the tragedy of the commons in email that we saw in USENET, this is a useful tool, but it won’t be enough. We need to do more, because asking won’t succeed. What is going to be needed?

I have some ideas, and I’ll talk about them in Part 2.

* — you do not need to remind me that this document is older than most people reading this blog posting. Honest.

** — Sorry, usenet cabal in joke. wanna see the scars?

*** — Just checking to see if you realize I only have two footnotes…

(Hat tip: Duncan for finding this gem)

Congratulations to Boston and Tim Thomas

Huge congratulations to Tim Thomas and the boston Bruins, deserving Stanley Cup champs. Vancouver carried a lot of the play tonight, especially early, but the better team definitely won and took home the championship.

While Luongo can be fairly criticised for some of his play in Boston, I didn’t see anything tonight that was “his fault” and he seemed composed and palying well. If you want to consider what went wrong, 8 goals in 7 games means that your goalie’s play was irrelevant. You’re not winning a series if you never score, and you don’t get style points for losing 1-0. This series was Thomas vs. the Canuck forwards and Thomas won by a wide margin, and so Luongo simply wasn’t a factor in how the series ended.

One huge thing in how this went down to me was the Hamhuis injury, followed by the Rome hit and suspension. That thinned out the depth on defense significantly, forcing more minutes on other defensemen, and I think they just were too fatigued to compete against a Boston team that pushed hard and rolled four lines a lot. Fresh legs beat tired legs. Tired legs lead to positioning mistakes, which lead to opportunities, and Boston buried them. Erhoff at -7 says a lot, but not necessarily about Erhoff as much as the entire blueline having to take on a little too much due to the lost bodies.

That doesn’t mean I give the Canucks a pass here; watching them reminded me too much of the Sharks, in that I’ve seen the “carry play, make a mistake, pull it out of your net, unable to rally and pull even” style of hockey too much this season. Maybe the missing component on the team is that neither the Sharks nor the Canucks had — Mark Rechhi. The veteran influence who teaches by example, and who can pick his spots and carry the team as well as lead it.

Unfortunately, Vancouver hasn’t taken the loss well, and significant rioting has broken out. I’m disappointed, but somehow not surprised. That seems sadly common after major sporting events these days, beacuse the crowd give the idiots shielding to show up and look to create problems. It looks like it started near the CBC studios where crowds gathered to watch on jumbotrons; it may be we simply can’t set up those kind of congregations any more.

A sad note on a very happy day for the city of boston.

But for me, it’s thomas that I’m going to carry forward from this year’s hockey. He joins Lanny MacDonald as one of those guys who defines what’s good about hockey…

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 15, 2011

Wednesday’s in Review: David duChemin

I was listening to this podcast where David duChemin talks about his fall in Pisa and how he’s recovering from it today. duChemin is a photographer very far away from my core competency, which is what first attracted me to him and his work; before his accident he’d made a decision to make changes in his life and was spending the year touring the U.S. — part vacation, part sabattical, part, it seems, mid-life crisis and reinventing himself. That’s something I can sympathize with since I’ve gone through a similar process since leaving Apple, and that he was willing to do so openly and in public made his story fascinating to me and something I’ve really wanted to support.

As a photographer, he’s best known as what I’d call a humanitarian photographer, traveling to various locations and shooting the people and places in ways that help illuminate those people; many of his clients are the non-govermental agencies (NGOs) that work to improve lives around the world. He’s also a strong travel photographer that brings a real humanity to his images. He’s also a board member of Focus for Humanity, a non-profit foundation aimed at supporting and mentoring photographers who are trying to tell those humanitarian and cultural stories around the world.

Given how rarely a human being appears in any of my photos, my being interested in his work may seem a bit odd, but he’s one of the photographers I’m studying because I know I need to improve this aspect of my work, and his technical and esthetic craft appeals to me as a style I want to adopt into my own photography.

He is the author of a couple of books published by Peachpit press, including Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision and VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography, and he has a new book, Photographically Speaking: A Deeper Look at Creating Better Images (Voices That Matter) due out this fall. His books are a bit different than many photo books in that they are less about the knobs and levers of making the camera behave and more about understanding your inner voice and learning to see the emotion in an image and how to translate what you see and feel into an image that can translate that to others. I would define this more as writing about being a photographer than being a book about photography, and I found them well-written and fascinating reads with good insights. The photography he chooses to illustrate his work is solid and the production quality of the Peachpit books is solid.

He’s also behind the e-book publishing imprint Craft and Vision, where he’s been experimenting with this new form publishing by reinventing the photography book. As I’ve written in the past, this is an area I’ve really been looking at as well for future projects, and frankly, I think his publishing model is the one I like best to date and would try to emulate if I ever decide to go down this path. The basic model is that instead of the traditional printed photography book — $30 or more, a few hundred pages and a huge effort to write and get published, the books from Craft and Vision are shorter (around 25-30 pages typically), more focused, can be written more quickly — and only cost $5.00. I’ve written about a few of these books in the past (Michael Frye’s Light and Land, for instance) and I’ve found them to be consistently high quality and well written, and at five bucks a shot, you can make them an impulse buy and not feel guilty.

If you want to explore duChemin’s work or this new ebook form of publishing, here are a few C&V works I can recommend:  Ten Ways to IMprove your Craft. None of them Involve buying Gear (and Ten More). Chasing the Look (ten ways to improve the Aesthetics of your Photographs) and Drawing the Eye (Creating Stronger Images through Visual Mass). The latter two would make a great introduction to this format and to duChemin’s work and philosophy of photography and I recommend them quite highly.

If you haven’t discovered duChemin, you should, through his blog, his online portfolio, and his books. He’s an interesting writer and inspired photographer and his way of communicating his vision has helped me shape and refine mine.

(and in a total coincidence, between my writing this and posting it, David’s announced his next C&V ebook, Deeper. Looking forward to getting my hands on it)

 

game 7 baby!

Game 7. Stanley Cup final. 60 minutes of hockey left in the season, plus maybe some overtime.

After this, both teams go golfing, but one goes with a smile.

I’ve really enjoyed this series. Both are really good teams. The Canucks problems in Boston are curious, but I don’t read too much into the blowout factor. Game 7 is too close to call. Clearly, Vancouver has the advantage since Boston has yet to win on the road either, but I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable putting money on that. I do hope the good Luongo shows up instead of the Boston Luongo, or it could get ugly. If Luongo is off his game, the team seems to fall apart in front of him.

Tim Thomas wins the Conn Smythe even if he loses game 7 5-0. Start engraving.

When I think about Luongo right now, two names come to mind.

First is Evgeny Nabokov, the goalie the Sharks thought would take them to the promised land, but who simply never quite seemed up to that last step up to the podium. Having watched Nabby play for a number of years, and then watched a season of Niemi after he and the Sharks figured out how to play together, you can see the difference. When I watch Luongo in the playoffs, I see more Nabokov than Niemi. And on every whiteboard in every opposing locker room next year will be the words “shoot high glove”. It’ll be curious to see how Luongo solves that little weak spot. Um, big weak spot.

But I also think about Chris Osgood, because he’s a goalie with 2 Cup Rings and a long, successful career where fans and media continue to argue he isn’t really a Hall of Fame goalie, because he played behind a really good team and it wasn’t really that Osgood was THAT good. I’ve come to believe that Osgood is a Hall of Famer and is being disrepected a bit, but I also understand where this criticism comes from. I can’t see those REd Wing teams winning the cups with andre racicot in goal, though.

But that’s a legitimate question for Luongo, too, because his performance in the playoffs makes me wonder about the Olympic gold. Just how much of that was Luongo? And how much of that was the team in front of him? And that’s not a comfortable question for Canucks fans, because unlike the Sharks with Nabby, the Canucks have Luongo tied up for a good while and he’s not going anywhere. Schneider probably is, though, since he could be a starter elsewhere.

It’s clear, however, that even if he wins game 7, Luongo won’t put the critics to bed; nor should they. And Luongo has to stop and figure out how he is going to do that, or he’s likely to become the next Chris Osgood, no matter how many rings he wins. If he does.

Right now, if I were a Canuck fan, I would not be comfortable about game 7 — or the long term sustained success with this team fronting Luongo.

My head and sympathies are with the Canucks, since they’re at home and they win at home.

My heart is clearly with Boston and Thomas now. If Vancouver wins game 7, it’ll feel like they cheated the Bruins, because they haven’t shown themselves to a a better team, much less a dominant one. For me, a perfect ending here is Thomas winning, 1-0, in overtime. Because the series is that close, but ultimately, Thomas really deserves the victory and series.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 14, 2011

The challenge and opportunity of Zynga

Zynga’s Empires & Allies rockets to nearly 10M users in nine days | VentureBeat:


Zynga‘s Empires & Allies game has rocketed to nearly 10 million users in nine days. That’s a remarkable start for any Facebook game, but for Zynga that is becoming a predictable result.

 

Zynga has more than 249 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. Empires & Allies, a combat social strategy game which is akin to “CityVille meets Risk,” has more than 9.5 million monthly active users as of Friday. And it gained more than 5 million users on Friday alone. That makes the game one of the fastest growing in Facebook history.

But will they sustain that number? That’s their challenge. And the numbers seem to indicate no. Zynga’s model seems to be to always have a new shiny for users to flock to, and it seems to work. One wonders what will happen if they have a new game flop. So far, it hasn’t happened. Might now. Mafia Wars, which until Sunday was one of my guilty pleasures, has seen a significant drop in users and is now under 2 million active per day even though over 15 million users have “liked” it on Facebook at one time or another.

As I just noted, I used the word “was”. On Sunday, I completed Ruby level Brazil, which means in essence, I’ve lapped the game designers. I decided that was enough, spent some time distributing my high value items to my loyal mafia clan, set my character name to “gone fishing”, and walked away.

Zynga’s been very successful to date. They deserve it. Hey, I played the game for a long time, and I put some amount into buying upgrades (because I believe it’s worth a few bucks into the tip jar if I get some reasonable enjoyment out of it — this is where money I used to spend on Xbox games has gone for a while…). But they’ve also got some issues they need to figure out.

Over the last year and a half (more or less) Mafia Wars has been my “minesweeper” a pleasant way to take a break and waste a few minutes while waiting for something else to happen or to ponder over something while hacking away and enemies, and during this time, I’ve grown a character to level 1176. It’s now powerful enough that I can complete a game area faster than they can add them to keep me busy.

That is, as they say, a problem, and one Zynga has been struggling with for a number of months; there are many users far senior to me, and Zynga has to build a game that’s balanced enough that it doesn’t obliterate or frustrate new users while having enough to do to keep the more senior members busy and interested. One way Zynga has been attempting to do so is through a proliferation of mini quests and side games. That has in many ways backfired, since the numbers indicate members have found this proliferation not interesting and many of the more senior members in my mafia have gone dark over the last few months. I sympathize; many of these new games are nothing more than

That’s not why I gave up the game. Mostly, it’d just run the course and it’s time to go do something else, and that shows one of the challenges Zynga has to figure out. As someone who’s now a recent retiree from the game who’s actually rather positive about the experience, I thought it might be interesting to write up my thoughts on this.

I went into Mafia Wars because I was curious about the game play design, and even more interested in the design and use of virtual goods and the virtual economy. it’s a huge aspect of the online universe (gameplay and not; it’s relevant to photos and writing as an aspect of in-app purchasing, for instance; it’s also a way to, I’m thinking, help fund endeavours without strong physical good aspects like web comics). The challenge of gameplay and game balance are nothing new; go back to the elder days of Rogue or Zork to see that the model Zynga uses in Mafia Wars is a classic one of matching the player’s power inflation to the game’s monsters and challenges.

Rogue and Zork had virtual money and virtual goods, too; you just didn’t put real money into the hopper to buy fake money to buy your virtual goods. What Mafia Wars has that Zork and Rogue don’t have are the words “multiplayer” and “social”.

The word “social” is one of the things Zynga pushed too hard for my taste. Everything at times seems like it’s aimed to get my to send a thing to someone to encourage them to send me a thing (it’s even worse in Farmville, which I don’t play, but my wife has). A point of frustration is that the game and/or Facebook have limits on how often you can throw messages around — and a common occurance if you have a thriving mafia is for you to attempt to send someone a thingie, only to have Facebook tell you you’re out of messages and come back tomorrow. Or for Zynga to tell you that the recipient has already gotten too many thingies, so send them another thingie instead. or that you got too many thingies from your mafia, so they’re converting it to a thingie of no real value.

So if you’re working in a fairly large and cooperative mafia, the message of “here! do this! Fool! we won’t let you do what you just got told to do! ha ha!” is common. Not a great gameplay, and Zynga frankly sucks at this; the system should recognize these limits and pull the requests or something, not have you click the buttons and be told you’ve failed. I found it one of the more frustrating aspects fo the game, and a number of mafia members I know feel the same, and ultimately, it caused me to really scale back on my attempts to join into the social aspects beyond being a good neighbor to my core mafioso. It seemed from watching how others were giving stuff to me that this is a fairly common occurrence.

I admit up front the way I prefer to game doesn’t lend itself to “social”. Nobody knows my Xbox Live account (by design); I’ve never joined World of Warcraft because too much of the gameplay forces you into guild and cooperative dungeoning to achieve many goals. That’s now how I game; I might not touch something for a few weeks, then play it a lot for a few days, then not touch it again for another few weeks; I’m more likely to put in a couple of hours late at night, when I decide I’m just not into geeking any longer — but it’s like pulling up a book, not something I’m going to schedule like I would going clubbing with friends. So to some degree, I’m not Zynga’s demograhic, just like I’m not Warcraft’s.

So I like Zynga’s casual aspect; not it’s social. it does well in “minesweeper” mode, at least until you get senior enough. Then it requires enough care and feeding to start feeling like a bit of a burden, which is why ultimately I decided it was a good time to retire. Having completed the primary challenges and finding the mini-games and side quests all pretty “meh” helped.

Ultimately two things made me decide to move on at this point. First is that Zynga’s design esthetic really started to annoy me; there’s a nasty lack of consistency to gameplay — simple things like when you fight in one city the fight screen rolls back to the top, and when you do the same thing in another city, the screen stays centered on the location where you initiated the fight. Isn’t there someone at Zynga defining what basic gameplay elements ought to be and making sure they all operate the same way within the same game? Evidently not. That may not be something that annoys you, but it started really annoying me, and to me, it shows a relative lack of “fit and finish” — and deep down inside, Mafia Wars was acting more and more to me like Zynga was throwing stuff at the wall and seeing which things the users didn’t hate, not really thinking through the game dynamics many times. Which is weird, because in other ways, watching how they refined and enhanced the game at times was really fascinating. I though the progression of gameplay through New York to Vegas to Italy to Brazil was great, and I really thought the design of Italy and Brazil was good in most ways (Italy was too easy, just as I thought Bangkok was too grinding but not really hard); Fight tournaments in Vegas was an interesting concept, but once you master the levels, they never did anything else with it. It’s a shiny stone that turns out to be cubic zirconia.

But the big thing that finally annoyed me out of the game was the QA. I got tired of tripping over bugs. Over basic rendering issues. Over inconsistencies. Server failwhales (although they seem to have those under control now, for a while, the system was badly unstable). But the QA? horrible. Buying items in Bangkok might seem a basic need; but when it breaks and stays broken for weeks? anyone paying attention? Or for a good giggle, try filtering your inventory on “giftable” and see how many data errors are in the set. Also look at how inconsistently it finds the same number of items in your inventory. oops.

Soultimately I realized it was trying to demand more of my time and I was enjoying it less, and the — the only word is sloppy, or maybe I’ll upgrade that to “hurried” — implementation just took the edge off it. So it was time to go do something else.

And if Zynga wants to better keep people like me, the more senior people in the game who’ve invested in the game in fairly significant ways, this would be me recommendation: fit and finish matter more than lots of crap tossed against the wall. Because what I finally came to see in mafia wars was something being treated as itinerant and disposable — and I finally did.

Not sure what I’ll do instead; Zynga’s new game looks okay, but not something I want to dig into. Honestly, I think I’m ready to spend most of that time with the Kindle, at least for now…. And maybe finally get around to starting up Dragon Age and go kill some orcs or something…

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Editing

OP – The Blog» Blog Archive » The Art of Editing:

So this is an area where I think we can all help each other. Who do you turn to for objective feedback about your work? What kind of experiences have you had with camera clubs, or photo-sharing web sites? Please let us know by posting a comment!

This is something I’ve been chewing on for a while; I’ve found people and groups on flickr who’s feedback I trust and appreciate, but it’s tough to pull these resources together. I don’t know how someone who’s not quite so — outgoing — as I am does it.

I think you could build a criticism site around a Stack Exchange model quite successfully. Don’t use formal groups, but use an ad-hoc criticism setup with a karma/reputation metric to help people understand which opinions are recognized within the community. This was on my short list to design and see about launching this year, until I realized I’d have no cycles for something like this most of the year so I tabled it. But I’d love to see it. I’d love to join it. I’d like to build it some day, if I ever have time to do it properly. (still undiscovered is the underlying funding model; I’d like to charge a minimal fee for critique submission just to keep the noise level down and self-limit posting frequency and try to encourage it towards the serious user; you could waive fees based on reputation and frequency of recognized contribution; you could use fees to build a reward structure to reward contributors — and you could use the results to generate galleries and curated showings that might drive traffic, and perhaps build a sales area off the side. Lots of capability here, both to create a community that might drive something like JPEG or affiliate with an online sales gallery system like Imagekind…)

But one thing I’ve realized is if you don’t have the cycles you can’t sweat the details, and if you don’t sweat the details if doesn’t thrive. so it’s better to not do something than do it badly. But I’ve looked around for a site that organizes critique sessions and the like, and I haven’t found one I’m interested in joining or participating in. So I’m still doing ad hoc things….

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 12, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 11, 2011

Game 5 — one bounce makes the difference

As I said after game 4, until Boston breaks serve and wins a game on the road, this is still Vancouver’s series to lose. And after game 5, we’re now at that “no tomorrow’ point. The next Boston loss is their last of the season, so either they run the table, or Vancouver celebrates.

This series is a great example of how home ice can be huge — if the teams are evenly matched. Home ice has some significant advantages, such as last change, where you can architect matchups to your advantage to a degree. But it also has less obvious ones, like knowing how the boards will react in a given situation and, say, shooting wide on purpose knowing it’ll pop out the other side, and having someone on the other side realize this and be able to take advantage of it. That’s something a home team can do that an away team has trouble being ready for.

In Game 5, that was the difference in the game.

Both teams played well; great game overall. Both goalies were superb. Thomas got beat on — call it a lucky bounce if you want, but it was a lucky bounce that the Canucks clearly went for (and got). So I’ll call it “making their luck”.

I would not be at all surprised if this goes seven. Honestly? I’m hoping, because it’s some great hockey. I’m not convinced Boston knows how to beat Vancouver at home, but I’m also not convinced that Vancouver has the grit to beat Boston in Boston; whether Boston has the grit to overcome Vancouver at home, we’ll have to see. hopefully.

Right now, my Conn-Smythe winner is whichever goalie hoists the Cup. thomas clearly is the reason Boston is contending and two wins from the series. Luongo — you can look at the two blowout losses and being pulled all you want — has a team that has scored six goals in the series one win from winning it all.  Think about THAT for a second, and tell me the goalie wouldn’t deserve the Conn-Smythe, blowout losses or no. Sometimes it’s not how many goals you stop, but whether you stop key goals. If he does that one more time (and with Thomas playing in the other goal, he’ll have to), the award is a no-brainer.

Great series; possibly a classic one. the next game (or two) ought to be some awesome hockey.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 10, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 9, 2011

After game 4: we have a series!

After game 2 I expect lots of folks in vancouver were planning a parade. Now, after game 4, at best Canucks fans are nervous, and should be.

Boston fans need to remember, though, that until the Bruins win a game in Vancouver — break serve — they won’t win the cup. And they haven’t. home team wins all four games, and if that continues, vancouver takes it.

I think it’s been some great hockey. Boston right now looks to me to have the distinct edge because it seems to have dug in and found that extra level; it’s turned the knob to freaking twelve; that and Tim Thomas, who is just unbelievable right now.

My biggest worry for the Canucks: Luongo. I’m watching him, and the Bruins have him figured out and are in his head. He needs to find a way to get back on his game or it will be over.

My thought on Luongo having watched the last four games is a simple two words, Vancouver fans: Evgeny Nabokov.

Can’t wait for game 5…

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 7, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 6, 2011

The funniest comedian you (probably) never saw…

 

It’s with some sadness I read today that a couple of people have passed away — Wally Boag and Betty Taylor. Boag was 90, and Taylor was 91.

Unless you’re an entertainment geek of the proper age and persuasion, neither name will mean much to you. But Boag and Taylor were hired by Walt Disney to perform in the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Frontierland. Bpag played Peco Bill and Taylor was Slew-foot Sue and emceed the show. The show ran from almost the opening of the park in the 50′s to 1986, and Boag and Taylor did the show live 5-6 days a week, 3-5 shows a day for thirty years. They and the show are in Guiness as the longest running stage show with over 47,000 performances.

As a kid growing up in SoCal, I visited the park a lot, and later, worked there for four years after high school. My job there gave me a lot of opportunity to explore the bowels off hours, as I worked mostly swing or graveyard, and left me days free, so of course I spent a number of them in the park as well (because I self-admit to having no real life).

One of the places I went to a lot in the park was Golden Horseshoe; it was a cool, quiet place in the heat of the day where you could get a sandwich that wasn’t a greaseball and a cold drink and sit for a bit. And the show was a lot of fun, especially for someone with a fondness for slapstick humor. I’m not exaggerating when I say I probably saw it around a hundred times over the years.

Taylor was a strong performer with a classic vaudeville/broadway voice, the singer that could fill a room, much like Ethel Merman. Boag was your classic slapstick comedian, very mobile face, a good sense of timing. Steve Martin, another former Disneylander who’s schtick I saw a couple of times when he was  working in the magic shop, has said Boag was a major influence of his; I think it says something about Boag’s influence that he hosted the Muppet Show when most people watching the show likely had no clue who he was.

What made the Golden Horseshoe fun time and time again was how these people kept it fresh; I honestly have no idea how someone could do effectively the same routine for 30 years and not end up phoning it in or losing enthusiasm for it — but if they did, I never saw it. What they did wasn’t Shakespeare (and wasn’t intended to be), but the quality and consistency stood out. They were pros and they were proud of what they did, and they made sure the people there were entertained, every show, every day.

So this is one of those little pieces of my history that’s now moved on; I never met either, although I saw them both backstage a couple of times in my work there. So enjoy, if you will, a couple of youtube clips of their work and raise a glass and a fond wish on their passing.

 

(this clip seems to be from, I’m guessing, the mid or late 60′s)

(this bit by Taylor is from some special broadcasted performance much later, probably late 70′s or close to retirement time)

(and finally, Boag on the Muppet show, doing his Horseshoe routine with Miss Piggy as Slewfoot Sue).

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 5, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 3, 2011

On filters and echo chambers

Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? Tech News and Analysis:

 

 

 

 

 

Will there be people who have such a uniform social graph that any form of social filtering will just allow them to live in an online echo chamber? Of course there will be — but then, those people already exist, and seem to have no trouble living in a cocoon with or without the Internet. Social filters aren’t going to make that phenomenon any worse (J.P. Rangaswami has a very thoughtful post about filtering, and business blogger Tim Kastelle also wrote a great post recently about the virtues of different kinds of filtering).

 

 

 

This has always happened online, going back to the days of USENET where kill files could virtually disappear someone out of the social circles of a group if they didn’t follow the party line well enough. One of the great struggles I’ve seen with mailing lists going back 15 years and more is for a tendency for a list to stagnate over time. I used to look for ways to break that stagnation and try to keep fresh blood entering the community, but one of the side effects of keeping a group of people together for years is they get really comfortable with each other, and whether they realize it or not, they don’t always make newcomers welcome. It may not even be a visible “we don’t want you here”, but a more subtle lack of being welcoming where people just don’t end up feeling comfortable so they don’t tend to stick.

In today’s environments it’s easy to set yourself up so that you only see what you want to see; I think that’s inherent in the unknown and uncomfortable causing stress and as humans, I think most of us unconsciously try to minimize our stress where we can — as such, whether we realize it or not, we filter for the known and comfortable because it’s, well, known and comfortable.

There’s no place where this is more overtly visible than what I like to call the Silicon Valley tech bubble; you know who they are, it’s the high profile A-lister bloggers who are a large part of the group that writes or influences what’s written in the tech and analyst press about high tech, especially here in the valley. This group all watches each other very closely, and stuff found by one tends to circle around to all quickly, and when they get it in their mind that something is (or should be) true, disagreeing opinions rarely get much visibility.

Worse, when they are wrong, the mistakes tend to get quietly buried. Look, for instance, about the hype and predictions leading up to the release of the Verizon iPhone. In the view of many, that was going to be the death of AT&T and that there would be mass riots of AT&T customers chasing Verizon iphones. Could this be influenced by the fact that AT&T networks are particularly bad in some areas of silicon valley and maybe that influenced their thinking? Well, maybe. But that thinking also clearly influences the tech and financial analysts, and the whole “Verizon iPhone diaspora” concept because kind of a running meme in the tech press, until finally, Apple and Verizon actually shipped the damned thing.

And it turns out, it was a nice, modest success on all accounts, but… Where was the massive shift of customers that everyone was predicting? And how many of these people actually stood up and said “well, heck. I guess I got that wrong?” — few. And how many actually analyzed why so much of the predictive coverage of this was wrong? Almost nobody, that I saw. And how many of you actually held them accountable for being wrong and demanded accountability, or stopped reading them because they proved themselves to be more about wishful thinking than real analysis? Hmm.

That’s one problem here. Analysts and writers with frankly pretty lousy track records aren’t held accountable, especially if they’re interesting/fun writers and because we as readers love the rumor/gossip aspect and don’t actually seem to care if any of that is actually correct. There’s a strong aspect of Entertainment Tonight to all of this, which is amusing because many of these folks would pluck out their eyes rather than admit they pay attention to that kind of stuff. Unless it’s in the geek press.

There are a couple of things in play here. One is the tendency over time to focus what you follow away from things that cause stress, meaning a quiet tendency towards narrowing to the comfortable and familiar. On the flip side is what I think is a subconscious worry that you’re going to miss something important, which leads to bringing in more sources and more feeds, which means you’re spending more time going through all that stuff (and skimming, so you’re actually seeing even less detail and capturing less info) — until ultimately, you hit information bankruptcy and blow everything away and start over. Do that two or three times and you probably find yourself and you find youself simultaneously stressed over adding new sources to the things you’re watching (because you’re already overloaded and struggling to keep up already) and also stressing because there’s stuff you wish you could follow if you weren’t already stressing over being overloaded. And once you hit that point, you’re firmly in the grip of your personal echo chamber.

I’ve fought those issues; we all have. I continue to, but I feel like right now, I have things set up in a way that I’m comfortable with and which seem to be working pretty well. And I figured some folks might find how I simultaineously fight the echo chamber while avoiding information bankruptcy useful as hints to adopt into your own information surfing workflows… So here are a few thoughts on what I’m doing today:

(1) If it’s important to me, it will be brought to my attention. This is a core concept to get your head around; it’s the core of all of these social networks we’re in, yet one of the hardest lessons I had to teach myself was that I didn’t actually have to find all this stuff myself, but to relax and leverage the networks I’ve built myself into. This is easier said than done, but I think it’s very true: if you touch the right points in the network, then stuff you should know will end up being within your attention space. And if it doesn’t, you probably didn’t need it. Those exceptions you will run into (because no network is perfect) are those places where you need to figure out how to tie into the right networks to get  that information the next time). Embrace this concept, and you will likely wave bye-bye to bankruptcy forever, because you are embracing leverage over sheer volume.

(2) Budget by time, not size or number. I finally got over the “how many feeds can I read?” mindset. It ignores things like how busy a feed is and how noisy a feed is; you can’t treat a feed that updates weekly but is full of gems the same as some of the sites that post 30 articles a day, 20 of which are crap. I finally realized what mattered was time, so I budget time: my goal, about 90 minutes of surfing for information a day. If you come up with a budget for how much time in a day this is worth to you, you can start adjusting what you do to maximize the value of that time investment. I don’t know about you, but time is the one commodity I can’t flex and the one I very much tend to need to be creative about. If time were available in packages at Lowe’s, my credit cards would be maxed permanently.  So decide how much time you are willing to invest in this, and then that gives you permission to explore (if you’re under) and makes you edit (if you’re over); and through the editing you’ll keep yourself pro-actively away from bankruptcy.

(3) At the end of the day, throw it all out and start over. How often do you find yourself around someone who fires up Google Reader and it shows they have 1,000 unread articles? 10,000? And they peck at a few things and then leave the rest of that mass there, and rpobably say something apologetic. They’re in bankruptcy and won’t admit it. The amount of time they’re willing to commit is clearly smaller than the wad of information they’re trying to process, and they’re choking on it. They are in reality editing (by picking stuff on the fly) without editing (by leaving the rest behind in this faux fantasy they may catch up soon). And they’re stressing themselves out by doing so. So my suggestion: at the end of the day, if it’s not read, mark it all read and move on. Start fresh tomorrow. Remember point 1; if it’s important, it’ll be brought to your attention. Of course, if you’re that far overloaded, you may be too overloaded to see that it was. Which is why you need point 4.

(4) Edit. Ruthlessly. Often. Whenever you start falling a bit behind, start dropping things out of your feeds. Find the things that are least useful, least interesting — the least value for your precious time commodity — and unsubscribe them. don’t just mark them read, mark them gone. How often do you look at at site you’re following and wonder why you subscribed? Or the last time you got a useful article from it? Or clicked through a link to  something? Or did you research how to write web apps in Dec/RSTS three months ago and are all of those feeds still in there even though you ended up adopting Node instead? Edit. Edit. Edit. Even if the feed you drop is mine, drop it. seriously, I won’t mind. Think of ever piece you’re committing to follow as needing an ROI, where there’s an investment of time and a return of information of value. Anything that doesn’t meet that ROI that isn’t a boss, co-worker, spouse or your mother’s blog, should go (there will always be a need for VIP sites, of course). Think about it this way: the act of editing what you read can be intimidating because the process of going through all of those feeds can be time-consuming, and time is what you’re most missing anyway. If you get in the habit of editing out low-value feeds on the fly, one here, a couple there, you won’t hit a time where it all overwhelms and becomes a big hairy monster. And you can build the habit such that as you’re going through things, you’ll find yourself mentally suddenly do a sanity check: “when was the last time this site gave me value?” and if you can’t answer it, you drop it. And by building that habit, you’ll find your feed management almost becoming automatic within the time you’ve budgeted; if you start spending too much time in the feeds, you’ll edit more seriously, if you’re well in your time budget, you won’t. but by building that habit, you may hit a point where you rarely even notice your time budget any more; it becomes almost automatically self-sustaining.

(5) Fresh Blood. Lots of it. Always be adding new things to the mix; don’t be afraid to audition a feed. About 80% of the feeds I add get removed again within a month, but that’s okay. Many times I’ll check something out because of a particularly interesting piece someone linked to, but I don’t see much else that keeps me interested. Rather than continuing to skim and hope, I know if something else really interesting pops up, I’ll get told about it, so that’s okay. Also, don’t forget that your interests and needs and skills change over time; as I’ve grown as a photographer, the list of sites I follow on photography has changed by about 80%.; that’s not because those sites stopped being good or interesting, it’s because I stopped being their demographic and I started wanting different kinds of information to feed on. That’s good, but adapt your feeds to it, don’t just keep stuff around because it was useful once….

That’s another aspect of the edit ruthlessly; it not only helps you avoid bankruptcy, it gives you permission to explore ruthlessly, too. That’s how you avoid echo chambering yourself. My typical pattern seems to be that I subscribe to a number of feeds roughly equal to 5% of my feed collection every month. Most of those don’t survive the month, but many do. Along the way, I drop out weak feeds that come to my notice, but not as many as I add. Eventually (it seems to happen about every two months) I decide I’m spending too much time on all of this stuff, and I go in and do some more enthusiastic editing that typically takes me back to about 80% of my time budget. Note that all of this is thought of in terms of time expended and the value received for that investment in time — but if you want a raw number, my Google Reader subscriptions tend to cycle around 400.

You can almost think of it as an agile process; lots of short iterative acquisition/editing cycles instead of massive binge/purge projects.

And the core determining value is a simple one, in theory: are you getting a good return on the investment of your time? If the answer is no, then you need to adjust and edit until you do.

Of course, that’s still easier said than done, but I’ve found it definitely worth doing…  And if this helps, great. If not, well, maybe this site isn’t a good investment of your time… (grin)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 2, 2011

That was a pretty darn good game 1.

Did you pick Raffi Torres for game winning goal?

Nope. Neither did I. but how often do the experts point out that the top lines tend to neutralize each other and it’s a role player that steps up? Anyone want on the Raffi Torres for Conn-Smythe bandwagon?

No, me, neither. Laurie and I talked about that tonight (I categorically refuse to worry about Conn-Smythe until final round, because it’s silly speculation earlier (and will change). But now? surprisingly, we agree 100%. If Boston wins this series, it has to be Thomas. If Vancouver does, it’s either Kesler or Luongo, and we both add in Bieksa as a possible candidate.

By the way,  on the close call that led to the goal, two different camera angles showed me the linesman made the right call. In one angle, you could clearly see him dragging the skate and the skate was vibrating, showing that it was in contact with the ice and not raised going across the line. In another angle, you could compare when it crossed the blue line with the puck, and the puck entered the zone JUST ahead of the skate by maybe a couple of inches, but it was there. Very difficult to get right with multiple angles in slowmo with repeated viewings, and the linesman had the angle to get it right on the spot in real time with no second chance. well done.

Well done, both teams. A great play and a timely goal and Thomas had no chance, and hopefully the entire series will be this completive and close.

Going into game 1 was Bettman’s annual “state of the game” talk, which is fascinating reading. League revenues break $3 billion, and the cap is going up (again) because the league continues to grow.  George Malik has the details, and they’re fun to read.

Colin Campbell is stepping down as czar of discipline and Brendan Shanahan will don the hair shirt in his place. My sympathies to Shanahan. If you read around the press and net the commentary on this change, watching all of the people with axes to grind at Campbell throwing sparks is a good indication of just how much fun Shanahan will have stepping into those shoes.

My take on Campbell: he did a very solid and fair job in a role that’s guaranteed that no matter what you do, people will gripe. He had a strong vision of how discipline should be managed and he was very consistent within that vision. There are many who disagreed with that vision, but in my view, most of the complaints aimed at him were more about people not agreeing with decisions (and therefore they’re wrong).

My one complaint about Campbell was that I felt suspensions needed to be longer to be a true deterrent (there are other changes to the system I’d like to see, for instance, teams shouldn’t be allowed to replace a suspended player on the roster but be forced to play with that slot empty for the duration — but that’s a Board of Governors and rules committee decision, not something Campbell could mandate), and from Bettman’s talk today, it seems clear that’s on the docket. Otherwise? whlie I didn’t always agree with the suspensions, I got to be pretty good about guessing how long they’d be.

I think Campbell did a yeoman’s job in a thankless position, and maybe some day I’ll get to buy him a beer and thank him.Everyone else should, too. I’m sure glad I don’t have that job, I’d probably have gone postal on a GM more than once…

Mostly, the state of the league speech is of course merely an excuse for everyone who hates bettman and the league to spin everything he says negative. It’s really rather sad, especially some of the canadian press (yes, I’ve been bashing the canadian press pretty heavily recently. for good reason). they have growing revenues, attendance is up, ratings are up. a nice new TV contract with great exposure — and if the league had done what the “experts” had demanded and gone back to ESPN, it wouldn’t have been remotely this much money or exposure. Is everything perfect? Of course not. name a three billion dollar company with 30 organizations that is? Some are always going to be stronger than others; some things are always going to need fixing. It’s interesting that the two leagues that seem most stable and in the best shape right now are the NHL and MLB, both places with long-term commissioners that are generally disliked by fans and media; probably because both aren’t afraid to make tough decisions rather than popular ones. And while I’m a bettman fan and not a selig fan, I do have to admit that MLB had done well overall with him as commissioner.

But let’s enjoy watching the media spin all this to crap and not worry about the facts backing them up. Remember, good news doesn’t sell newspapers or drive pageviews, which is what’s really important.

Want to toss a quick congrats to Winnpeg for getting a team back. It won’t be mentioned, of course, that it was fundamental financial chances that Bettman pushed for — and yes, the shut down fans hate him for drove a lot of this — that make going back to Winnipeg possible. I remember when the Jets left, handing out blue ribbons around san jose arena and pinning one on Greg Jamison, even though it was clear it was too late to save the team. That the league can go back there is awesome.

I feel bad for the fans in atlanta. Unfortunately, as Winnipeg can attest, having fans isn’t enough, you also need owners, and if you don’t have enough, or the right ones, then all the fans in the city won’t be enough. This wasn’t a failure of the city, but of the ownership. and I don’t know that Atlanta will get a third chance to make it work for a good while. which is sad.

Next up in the franchise merry go round (let us not forget, Phoenix is not fully fixed, but seems under control; and the islanders are still in various troubles, although they’ve finally agreed to a vote on possible funding for the arena deal; it’s far from a guarantee it’ll succeed) is, I’m guessing, Kansas City. expect to see chatter pick up about that location again.

But you know what? No matter what some like to say, the league’s doing pretty well and the hockey is pretty damn good. There are problems in the league but there are probelms in every pro sports league, if only because when you have 30 owners some are going to be better than others and some will be more successful than others, and the commissioner can’t dictate, he has to create consensus. and if bettman does nothing else well, it’s his ability to get 30 competitive owners to work together well enough to let the league succeed. That’s pretty good, IMHO.

What really matters, though, is that game 1 rocked, and game 2 should, too. I just wish they weren’t in June (but I understand why….) — looking forward to saturday to see how these two teams adjust to each other.

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 1, 2011

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving Into the Wreck

This week I’m reviewing Kristine Kathryn Rusch‘s Diving into the Wreck, first book in a new SF series. This is high energy space adventure about a wreck diver, someone who searched space for derelict spaceships and then explores them for usable material. The lead diver, Boss, is a loner who discovers an ancient ship in a location where it shouldn’t be and decides to bring in a team to explore it. The ship may hold great value and great secrets, but it carries risks beyond the obvious one of going inside amid the ruins of a dead ship. There are also other parties interested in the ship and contents, not all of them your friends, and along the way Boss finds herself dealing with various interpersonal conflicts among her team and some unexpected personal history from her past.

This is a high energy story, a fairly quick read, and very entertaining. What attracted me to this book — other than Kris being one heck of a writer — is that I while back I worked with a guy who was just getting involved with scuba wreck diving and it was something we talked around a lot; it is an extremely rigorous and risky hobby with a lot of care and detail put into a dive to explore safely and carefully (and get out alive), and Kris has translated this quite well into the even more dangerous vacuum of space.

I thought the characters fit the story well; they aren’t exceptionally deep or complex, but they aren’t really the focus on the story and I found them internally self-consistent and there were enough conflicts and complications in the relationships to make the story interesting without getting in the way of the action that’s the base of the story.

All in all, a very successful evening’s enjoyment.

The second book in the series is City of Ruins and it’s just come out in paperback and audiobook. A kindle version will evidently be coming along later, and I’ve definitely put it on my todo list.

If you like a good rip-roaring read and space drama, this one is one you should add to your list. Definitely recommended.