Andres Blast

eBooks and Revenue Sharing—50/50 or bust!

2011-05-05T13:06:00.002-04:00

I've been reading the Tools of Change for Publishing LinkedIn group discussion for some months and felt compelled to respond to a recent thread started by Steve Weiss at O'Reilly:

Who else is ready to consider to match the 50% royalty model?

We at WalrusInk ePublishing are going with a 50% revenue-sharing model. (The old vocabulary with royalties, rights, and advances no longer applies, because we don't intend to "own" the IP, which is another story.) It feels fair and it's really easy to calculate revenue, because it shows up in the bank account at the end of every month, we hope.

The vendor share of eBook sales is pretty standard at 30% of the sale price, though there are a number of extenuating circumstances that muddy these waters. Still, Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble have made this a kind of eVendor standard. For the purposes of rough estimates, most of our books are likely to sell for $10.

$3.00 to the vendor
$3.50 to the author (or authors)
$3.50 stays in the WalrusInk bank account

Is this fair? Who knows? In fact, I'm not sure fairness can be calculated in this way, especially since, at lest for the moment, we're at the mercy of rapidly shifting market forces. But more importantly for the long run, will this allow WalrusInk to survive and prosper as a new venture and will our authors feel sufficiently compensated for their work to want to continue writing for us and to recommend us to their friends?

I suspect we'll be making many adjustments to this model as we publish more eBooks, markets continue to shift, technology changes, and eReading habits take some sort of recognizable shape.

In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash!

2010-12-24T22:25:00.003-05:00

Who Do You Trust?

An Essay on The Transformation of Trust in a Multivariate Universe

Trust is a cudgel. It's not meant to be, or at least it isn't defined as such. But in a world of hidden agendas, hierarchies, and group-think, "trust" has become a keyword for submission, subservience, and general me-too-ism. Here's how it works in this non-trusting world:

I say to you, "Can I trust you?" This is a signal requiring agreement and not a request for a thoughtful answer. In fact, the slightest hesitation to blurt back "yes," is an obvious "no." This is why there are contracts, which become a written form of trust; a very explicit, truth-or-consequences form. Without this sort of explicitness, trust can't be a yes or no question, so don't ask!

Losing the Mutuality of Trust

Trust between two people requires a history of shared experiences. It requires mutuality and time. Furthermore, blanket trust isn't possible and probably not particularly useful except in the closest relationships. Especially in a business relationship, trust needs to have limitations and for good reasons. Let's start with the basics.

I'm generally a trusting person, which means that without any reason to think otherwise, I believe in the goodness of human nature, what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called our innate or uncorrupted morals. It's obviously a debatable point that has raised deep philosophical questions over the ages, but for the sake of simplistic argument, I want to like people and not think ill of them. People who are prone to paranoia come at life from the opposite side of generally distrusting people, a more Hobbesian state of brutishness and misery. If we limit this dichotomy of feelings to business behavior, things start to get confused. Instead of a linear axis with naive faith at one end and anti-social withdrawal at the other, we find people who are able to alternate between trust and paranoia as if personae can be turned on and off like the altered states of quantum mechanics. We'll call this manipulative trust, our cudgel, our bludgeon, our truncheon.

Reversing the Polarity of Trust

I'll extend this metaphor to account for manipulative trust and calculate degrees of behavioral effects, which I know is murky, but bear with me. In a purely reactive world, our trust-paranoia axis can be seen as a measure of mood, where each of us has some resting state along the axis and given a stimulus in one direction or the other, our change in mood can be measured like the arc of a thrown object. The object accelerates, reaches peak velocity, and then eventually returns to the resting state. It's a basic potential vs. kinetic energy formula and it's obviously overly simplistic, but it gives my metaphorical argument a base line.

Let's say I'm working on a project with a group of people. These are people I've worked with before, which means that there's some mutuality and trust between and among us. This hypothetical project is like an accelerating object, and if all goes well, we not only achieve a peak velocity, but we're even able to defy gravity and achieve a sort of escape velocity that launches this project into the altered state known as completion. This trust is focused on work (energy), and the synergy this creates magnifies our individual efforts to create a whole larger than the sum of its parts. One could call this the teamwork effect, but since the idea of teams implies an all-powerful captain, I prefer to think of this ideal state as a kind of natural cooperation.

But since the world is a messy place, even for physics experiments, the ideal state doesn't necessarily resemble the state of the real world. In other words, stuff happens; and this is the unpredictable quantum nature of life. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, human nature doesn't exist in a void or even a two-dimensional space. Instead, individual lives are played out on the axis of time, and our progress along this axis is subject to the constant bombardment of external stimuli affecting our senses and or sensitivities.

Within this complex interaction of forces, energies, and emotions exist many subsets of the "real world." Universities, in their ivory-towered glory, are an obvious example of an idealized subset of the larger world. In my professional persona, I inhabit a more rough-beast-like subset known as the business world. Somehow, these subsets provide an excuse to change the rules of everyday life. In other words, human nature takes on a different energy state when passing from one real-world subset to another, and this is how something as basic as trust can be transformed from a state of mutuality into a blunt object.

Trusting Doublespeak in an Orwellian World

Most generally, business institutions rely on hierarchical organizations to assign responsibility along a chain of command. Ultimate responsibility rests at the top of the org chart, with various divisions of responsibility delegated and spread out into multiple channels beneath. At each layer in this hierarchy, the superior node "trusts" the inferior nodes to fulfill some assigned portion of the larger responsibility. In this hierarchical arrangement, trust loses the idealistic sense of mutuality and is turned into a blunt instrument of subjugation. By the very nature of the org chart, trust becomes a one-way street. The superior node dictates the terms of trust in a process known as the delegation of responsibilities. The inferior nodes are entrusted to deliver, and failure to do so is viewed as a breach of trust. Thus standard business practice alters the nature of trust, turning into a uni-directional force, which is contrary to the very definition of trust!

Where trust in the larger world is built upon interpersonal relationships, trust in the business world is imposed by the nature of hierarchy. From a practical point of view, this allows trust to be used as a productivity tool, as a systematic means for maintaining orderly business processes, and even as a mechanism for team-building (a favorite business metaphor for uniformity). But using trust in these ways is ultimately manipulative and often amounts to a kind of tough love, aka character building, that many find appealing in a macho sort of way.

If George Orwell can create a world where Love is Hate, then why not a world where trust is built on mistrust? We could even call this top-down trust, lacking any sort of mutuality.

Who Do you Trust?

I have observed the phenomenon of top-down trust used to manipulate business outcomes in much the same way parents will use guilt to manipulate children. But it's only recently that I've come to understand the general lack of two-way trust and the pervasiveness of paranoia in acceptable business behavior. This makes better sense when you consider the nature of competition and natural selection; survival of the fittest.

Unfortunately for me, not only am I a trusting sort, but I'm not particularly competitive in most things. These two traits seem to go together and probably account in large measure for my lack of natural business acumen. It doesn't mean that I'm unable to succeed, just that my way of doing things looks wrong and downright misguided to many of the people I've worked with in the business subset of the universe.

I don't think I can change who I am quite enough to become a conforming individual in the corporate organization. But I do try to understand this somewhat foreign world I've been inhabiting for so long. It's difficult to manage this feat in a non-judgemental way, and yet I do intend to continue to build upon my successes in this world. Do I trust myself with this task? Yes, but only as long as I learn how to trust those around me!

ePublishing for fun and profit with WalrusInk

2010-12-22T10:30:00.001-05:00

We love publishing
The WalrusInk partners are all experienced publishing professionals. Not only is it an industry we know well, it's something we love doing. For us, ePublishing is an opportunity to do what we love without the heavyweight burdens of old-fashioned publishing we feel are crushing the industry into oblivion.

We love technology
As much as we love publishing, we are also passionate about technology. ePublishing involves rapidly changing technologies that are ushering in a genuinely new age of publishing. While the publishing status quo sees these changes as a threat, we recognize them as a remarkably exciting opportunity with unbounded potential.

We love paradigm shifts
We see ePublishing as providing a fundamental shift in the way knowledge is shared, which is a pretty big deal and something we'll likely write about at greater length in the future, but for now, you'll just have to take our word for it.

We love authors
And finally, we love working with authors. We learn so much from our authors and it makes us proud to be able to help hone, clarify, and ultimately publish their work and make it available to buyers, the seekers of knowledge, our loyal customers.

WalrusInk: friend of authors, foe of tyranny!

Pricing eBooks—Logical Assumptions Need Not Apply

2010-12-21T22:03:00.001-05:00

There's really no consistent logic to how eBooks are currently priced. Publishers want prices higher to increase profit margins. Amazon wants prices lower to encourage increased sales volume. Apple wants prices more standardized, because that's just the way Apple does things. There have been reports of eBook editions selling for higher prices than printed editions, which makes little sense except that some publisher has decided that they can make more money this way. There have been reports of Amazon capitulating to publishers' demands to raise eBook prices, followed by reports several months later of Amazon forcing publishers to sell their eBooks at lower prices.

There's not much clarity to be gained by watching the big boys try to bully and bludgeon each other over pricing. WalrusInk pricing will attempt to establish a price that is fair to consumers and provides a reasonable profit to our partnership of editors and authors so that we can earn a reasonable living. We have attempted to model this with some assumptions about volume and velocity, but there's very little history on which to base our assumptions. One ends up with a set of variables that is larger than the set of constants, which is akin to looking at the stars to predict the future only to find that there are ever more stars and no predictable future.

Nonetheless, the eager-beaver budgeteers at WalrusInk have decided to base our model on a standard eBook price of $9.99. We could build a numerical model to justify this decision, but in the end, it seems like a fair and reasonable price from just about every point of view. It's easy to imagine that some of our shorter eBooks will sell for less, but we're more likely to want to split a book into two parts than go for a single book at a higher price. Why? That's a discussion for a future blog.

The End of Words, or South-Bound Dictionaries

2010-12-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

I wrote this last year, Thanksgiving 2009, though why I never posted it is unclear: sloth, forgetfulness, doubt, the usual excuses of an unfocused mind. But I find my work in this case to be of a timeless nature, so I'm publishing it now.

Twas the day after Thanksgiving, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except in the living room. The stockings were hung by the fireplace with care, in hopes that they'd dry out, because it was raining.
We are all reading: Katharine is halfway through Wolf Hall, a 700-page fictionalized account of Henry VIII that recently won the Man Booker Prize. Marian has a script from her friend, Edward Albee, and she's busily underlining with a yellow marker. Wells has left the room to tend to the roasting sweet potatoes and spend some quality time with his chemistry textbook.

I am browsing, rather than actually reading, through the Apple iTunes store for anything having to do with Portugal in general or Lisbon specifically. There are travel apps for guide books, maps, and language study; audiobooks, a walking tour of Lisbon and a recently published book about the great earthquake, tidal wave, and fire of 1755 that is referred to by Voltaire in Candide; and there are lectures from iTunes U. that touch on matters Portuguese from numerous angles, including matters economic and political.

But it is Katharine who brings up the subject of zymurgy—actually, the discussion is focussed on the word rather than the subject. There it is, right in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of the page, in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of Wolf Hall. I've looked it up, now.

zy·mur·gy (zī'mûr'jē)
n. The branch of chemistry that deals with fermentation processes, as in brewing.

So says the American Heritage Dictionary, and Katharine remarks that it is just like the word "enzyme." She can make these rapid word associations because she's studied both Greek and Latin, though only Greek matters in this case. But then follows this gem of randomness; a fact so trivial and yet so profound, that I barely know what to say, except that I shall treasure this bit of knowledge and use it in conversation as often as possible.

The following I quote in it's entirety from dictionary.com by way of the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Word Origin & History

zymurgy
branch of chemistry which deals with wine-making and brewing, 1868, from Gk. zymo-, comb. form of zyme "a leaven" (from PIE base *yus-; see juice) + -ourgia "a working," from ergon "work" (see urge (v.)). The last word in many standard English dictionaries; but in the OED [2nd ed.] the last word is zyxt, an obsolete Kentish form of the second person singular of see (v.).

The Transition Manifesto: Revolution or exaggerated idealism?

2010-12-01T12:01:00.008-05:00

I have written a Manifesto for WalrusInk. It's several paragraphs long, but in essence, it boils down to:

WalrusInk: ePublishing friend of authors and foe of tyranny!

We don't talk seriously about manifestos and tyranny these days, but I'm attracted to the revolutionary fervor of these words. And then I was talking on the phone with my friend, Kenny, and he started talking about one of his former students who wrote a masters thesis about Transition Magazine and Marcel Duchamp. I had never heard of Transition Magazine, so while we were talking, I looked it up in Wikipedia, which is where I live a good deal of my online time.

"Transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris."

I had discovered an example of 20's radical idealism that somehow wasn't included in my studies of utopian architecture and planning from the period. This was pure art for art's sake as a means to save the world. None of the semi-concrete "machine for living" or "contemporary city" idealism of Le Corbusier and his followers. But either way, weather you build it of words or wood, there's something quaint and naive about 20s idealism, especially in light of history, which pretty much goose-stepped all of that creative energy, turning it into hatred, war, and oblivion; a bitter irony.

What makes Transition apropos to WalrusInk, is their manifesto, which is a model of revolutionary fervor and chest-beating; an attempt to cast off what they saw as literary handcuffs in favor of a new world order created in words. Back to Wikipedia:

"The journal gained notoriety in 1929 when Jolas issued a manifesto about writing. He personally asked writers to sign "The Revolution of the Word Proclamation" which appeared in issue 16/17 of transition. It began:

"Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint... Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality" and that "The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries."

WalrusInk is not nearly so militant about disowning our literary heritage. In fact, we're very aware of celebrating the past while accepting change and looking forward to all that technology promises. But we do find ourselves ready to cast off much of what has come before us in the publishing world. In a way, we see an ePublishing revolution as the savior of publishing, which has become shackled to old business models based on 19th century manufacturing, distribution, and accounting. We even believe that by trying to squeeze every penny of profit out of this untenable model, publishing has given up any sort of gravitas or moral center that used to account for much of what was exciting and worthy in publishing.

Like Transition, we welcome new ways of approaching old problems and see this as a timely and necessary part of the general dissemination of knowledge. What gives this the flavor of a revolution is the resistance of the status quo to change, which explains why WalrusInk has chosen to go outside of the status quo to adopt the new models made possible by electronic publishing, pervasive computing, and a lot of forward-thinking writers.

Viva la WalrusInk manifesto! Sic Semper Tyrannus, and viva la revolution!

iPhone OS 4.0 Press Conference Summary

2010-04-08T22:36:00.001-04:00

Steve Jobs announced iPhone OS 4.0 today. The big headline is that multitasking comes to the iPhone. The beta is available to registered developers today and the ship date is for Summer. iPhone OS 4.0 will not run on iPads, which will continue to use either iPhone OS 3.2 or a 3.x interim update. iPhone OS 4.1 (or 4.x), which is slated for Fall delivery, will bring multitasking to the iPad.

Today: Developer beta of iPhone OS 4.0

Summer: iPhone OS 4.0 ships (3GS and iPod touch 3rd gen. iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen will not do multitasking.)

Fall: iPhone OS 4.x unifies new features for iPad and iPhone

No new hardware was announced today, but here are the 7 key new features as enumerated by the master of the reality distortion field, himself.

1. Multitasking

2. Folders

3. Enhanced email

4. iBooks

5. Enterprise

6. Game Center

7. iAd Mobile Advertising

Here's a bit more detail on each of what Apple is calling the 7 "tentpole" features of iPhone OS 4.0. It's worth noting the three of the tentpoles are aimed at markets controlled by BlackBerry (mobile email), Microsoft (corporate datacenter), and Google (interactive advertising). Of the other four, Multitasking is the game-changer, Folders is a nice feature, iBooks is a no-brainer, and Game Center puts a bunch of 3rd-party APIs out of business.

1. Multitasking; it's all about the UI implementation. No limits on concurrency and no "battery drain." It's a very thoughtful and rich implementation that keeps the iPhone user experience well ahead of pursuers.

seven multitaking services as APIs to developers

1. Background audio

2. VoIP

3. Background location

4. Push notifications

5. Local notifications

6. Task completion

7. Fast app switching

2. Folders; not a file system, but a way to organize and categorize apps. Probably the #1 requested feature by people who don't understand why Multitasking is actually a much bigger deal.

180 -> 2,160 apps

3. Enhanced email; one more bastion of BlackBerry superiority falls to Apple's rapid enhancements

Unified inbox

Multiple Exchange accounts

Fast inbox switching

Threaded messages

open attachments with apps

4. iBooks; an obvious addition, but it does allow for buy once and read anywhere and it is the finest eBook consuming implementation currently available.

5. Enterprise; full-frontal attack on IT and the enterprise datacenter (good thing we've got "Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administration" just getting ready for re-launch.)

Better data protection

Mobile Device Management

Wireless app distribution

Multiple Exchange accounts

Exchange Server 2010

SSL VPN support

6. Game Center; incremental improvement currently being provided by 3rd-party APIs

Social gaming network

7. iAd Mobile Advertising; this one's the big sleeper with potentially huge revenues for Apple. Apps are to Apple what search results are to Google.

Emotion + interactivity

Ads keep you in your app

Built into iPhone OS

Apple sells & hosts the ads

60% revenues -> developer

Personal History: On Turning 50

2010-02-16T15:25:00.004-05:00

I found this in my old folders from April, 2002. It has no current significance except for the fact that I happened to find it this week. At the time, I was an editor for Manning publications, my first editing job after fifteen years as an author and journalist. Two jobs and some years later, I'm an editor again, which is a satisfying thing to be, but I think about writing, especially now that all offspring are either in or finished with college. What will I think upon turning 60? Stay tuned…

April 30, 1952

The burden of turning 50, a remarkable if not unprecedented event. It is as remarkable and ordinary as the day of my birth, April 30th, 1952. The young mother, Amelia, aged 27, experiencing her second birth in less than two years. “Twilight sleep” was the common practise for hospital deliveries then, thus saving the mother from at least a portion of her own experience. The young father, Reubin, almost 29, having attended numerous, though not many, births as a medical intern and resident, had a doctor’s authority to attend his own son’s birth at the old Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

The parents’ experience of my birth date me as assuredly as the political events of the day. Truman, a baby of the 19th century, was still president. Can my own children believe that I have lived through 11 presidents and the entire cold war? This should qualify me as something of a veteran, but it in no way defines me; no more than my age.

I do not remember my other remarkable birthdays. The turning of 10, 20, 30, and 40 bring back no special memories of grand celebrations or events of note. I remember a birthday party when I turned seven. We had recently moved to the house where my parents still live. I remember a sunny, mid-spring day and an underfurnished house. My friends, Jan Frisky, Jay Gouline, Hugh Hayes, Stevie Wexler, and Bruce Daniel (who alone remains a friend), joined the celebration of Russian tea, carrot sticks, and strawberry shortcake. Did we have hamburgers and hot dogs? I don’t remember.

It’s not possible that this was my only childhood birthday party, but none of the others left any sort of impression on my memory. There are movies of my older sister Julie wearing a tutu for her sixth birthday at the old house on St. Dunstan’s road. There was pin the tail on the donkey and musical chairs, my father had a brand new, pre-stereo, hi-fi, and he controlled the lowering and lifting of the tone arm on the turntable. It might have been a recording of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on a 78 RPM, long-playing record.

If my two younger brothers had birthday parties, I have only the vaguest memories of them. Laurie, one year younger, favored chocolate ice cream and managed get it on his person in the most unlikely places, behind the ear being one that lives on in the family lore. I remember baby Tommy, only three years younger, but the baby much past his infancy, experiencing cake and ice cream for his first birthday. He had a low baby table with a seat practically in the middle of it. There was plenty of room to spread birthday dessert all around in typical one-year-old fashion.

Age 13 was surely important for most of my friends, who celebrated with Bar and Bat Mitzvahs followed by luncheons and dinner dances. I remember many of the individual parties of that year, but not my own. I shall never understand the significance of “sweet 16.” I suppose it is a debutante thing, because only girls had a fuss made over their sixteenth birthdays. I assuredly made none made over my own.

When I turned 19 and was freshman at college in St. Louis, I remember my mother sternly reprimanding me over the phone for a lack of achievement and a complacent manner. I don’t know why she felt called upon to rebuke me on my birthday. I’m sure it is not something she would like to be reminded of. I was in architecture school, a place I had wanted to be for many years, but a place that brought me no pleasure or satisfaction. In my memory, it stands as my worst birthday. Could any others have been so disastisfyingly gloomy? I don’t think I wept, but there was no sense of pleasant satisfaction on that day.

18 was a more momentous anniversary. For the first time, one could both vote and drink at age 18, and there was the sense of insobrietous power. That was 1970, my senior year of high school, and the headlines for my birthday were punctuated by President Johnson’s bombing of Cambodia, which brought about the subsequent shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State, a fateful turn in the ill-fated war in Vietnam and anti-war protests. My first presidential vote was cast for Hubert Humphrey, a personal acquaintance of my parents who had been friends with his sister, whom I remember as a large, brassy, smoker married to another Hopkins doctor.

I have no recollection of my second birthday in St. Louis, number 20, and nothing significant remains with me from my 21st birthday celebrated in Bennington, Vermont. However, among my few memorable birthdays, the 22nd, still in Bennington, is perhaps the best remembered. A few of us went to a Japanese restaurant outside of town. There were five of us: my brother Tom, then in his first year at Bennington; David Shorey, who became a dealer in antique flutes and is now a fugitive living in Amsterdam having been convicted of felony possession of Marijuana charges in Maine; Raymond Gargan, who has remained a friend and has also become a professional colleague, and Katharine Claman. David, as organizer of the event, brought two wild flowers of Bennington’s late spring that he had dug up and potted, a marsh marigold for me and blood root for Katharine, who nearly shared my birthday, hers being on the 28th. We have shared all our birthdays since and though we were just friends and not yet intimates for that first mutual celebration, every birthday since has reminded me of marsh marigold and blood root.

Why can I remember no other birthdays beyond the names of a few restaurants? They did not go uncelebrated. Another Japanese meal in Ithaca, New York with Katie Kazin, whose rare correspondences, including one for Katherine’s birthday this year, arrive by email from Jerusalem. Lunch at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, which was our regular Saturday indulgence at the time. I know that there have been many strawberry shortcakes and many friends to share them all. There were no children when I turned 30 in Palo Alto, California, and three sons by the time I turned 40 in Litchfield, CT.

I think I will remember the tiny wine room at Picholine, an elegant New York restaurant where my parents hosted this year’s personal silver anniversary. It is not so many months since Bush the younger became a war-time President, but the Twin Towerless city is filling its restaurants again. There is still a table of pictorial hero and disaster books at Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center, but the table is less prominent and the books are fewer.

I have never felt the need nor had the desire to mark birthdays in a major way, but I do enjoy a dinner with family a friends. If birthday’s provide an excuse for such gatherings, then they are occasions worth celebrating. But no birthday seems more important or “bigger” than another. I have pointed out to my children that if we had eight fingers instead of ten, the eights would be an excuse for more marked celebration. And if we lived on Mars, there would be a longer time between annual events. The progress of time may be inexorable, but the counting of it is a man-made convenience. For me, personal memories are fixed in time as much by events as by any sense of age. 20 years of school, marriage, births, and the different places I’ve lived hold greater importance than the mere achievement of a half-century of enduring.

Me and Apress; reflections on Two Years

2009-10-18T15:33:00.008-04:00

I don't know the exact day I started work for Apress, but it's just about exactly two years ago, late-October, 2007. Apress is still a publisher of tech books and I am still a heavily-bearded fellow, but neither Apress nor I are really the same. Most obviously,we've weathered a major reorganization at Apress—the move from Berkeley to New York, new hierarchy, new personnel, new systems, new workflow. Yet we are finishing a challenging year strongly. I feel very good about this new enterprise that is Apress.

Less obvious, but much more inevitable, I've changed, too. I'm more knowledgeable having learned to make books the Apress way. I'm more responsible; the MacDev and iPhone "line leader," which includes the awe-inspiring title, Assistant Editorial Director. (I still prefer to think of myself as an editor.) I'm more "important," which I put in quotes to indicate that this refers to the books I publish. There are more of them and they sell more copies than the books I acquired during my first year as Apress editor.

Every organization has its own culture and methods. This is a given, a challenge made more difficult by our virtual collegiality, with no two editors in the same city and spread across three continents, and yet made less challenging because all of my editorial colleagues have been generously kind and unselfishly helpful—the spirit of mutual cooperation I've written about before and still value highly. All of this has helped to make me a more confident editor and I hope a better one, as well.

I fear that I'm sounding too much like a marketing campaign for myself, which is not the intent. While there's something unavoidably self-serving about writing a personal blog, my intent is not to celebrate, but to talk about events and give my impressions. In this case, the story is the simple fact that after two years, I'm still happy to be working at Apress. And I observe that Apress and I have changed together over this period, and there's no separating these two facts.

Much of my life today is defined by my work as an Apress editor, it's very much a part of my identity, something I'm proud of. At the same time, after almost a year of Mac and iPhone books on the market, I think Apress has, if not exactly a new identity, at least become more widely known and respected. Perhaps I've become more widely known and respected, as well. Let's hope we both deserve it. Perhaps year three will provide the answer.

Kiss my Occam's Razor

2009-06-30T16:01:00.010-04:00

I bristle at the mere mention the K.I.S.S. principle. My structures professor at Cornell School of Architecture was the first person I knew who referred to this, but it somehow seemed to apply to the design of steel structures for building. Some year's later, I had an incompetent manager who referred to K.I.S.S. nearly every time he faced a difficult decision. I soon realized that the principle had more to do with stupidity than simplicity. Perhaps this is why it's such a popular refrain of thoughtless decision makers trying to avoid the inevitable hard decisions of everyday life.

Its overuse, over-application, and overly-simplistic nature make K.I.S.S. essentially useless. In fact, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of stupidity. And you can't argue when someone puts their foot down in the quagmire of K.I.S.S., because it just makes you seem contrary for no good reason. It's as if K.I.S.S. were the secret code for "we're not going to talk about this, any more."

However, there is an undeniable germ of truth in this principle that I, too, find attractive. Simplicity really is a good thing and I often speak of the elegant simplicity of designs that I admire. But elegant simplicity is a rare thing and hard to achieve. It's the antithesis of stupidity, and is more correctly summarized by Occam's Razor, or the Law of Succinctness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

Essentially, given two theories that say the same thing, one chooses the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions. In scientific inquiry, one continues to apply Occam's Razor in binary fashion (applicable to computer science) until one has eliminated as many assumptions as possible and produced the most succinct, or simplest, result. Instead of shutting off debate, Occam's Razor invites debate as a means for achieving understanding in complex situations. Which means that Occam's Razor also recognizes complexity as the pre-existing condition. Complexity, debate, and the process of finding the finely-honed solution based on the fewest number of variables, or assumptions, is what leads to informed decision making.

This is not simple and it's not for people who prefer the thoughtless and stupid. It is a process requiring thoughtfulness, intelligence, and a recognition of complexity. I prefer to celebrate the complexity of things, even as I recognize the enormous challenges this creates. But I do not want my world dumbed down for the sake of stupid simplification. Instead, complexity allows us to celebrate truly elegant simplicity and those who are able to find it and define it for others.

Timo on Stage, looking skinny, but powerful

2009-05-14T20:09:00.004-04:00

I'm in LA this week attending a concert of the LA Philharmonics Green Umbrella Series and then sticking around for an Apress editorial gathering in Pasadena. I find that we have many friends here, friends and relatives I've known and loved for a long time and don't see nearly enough. Many of them came to Disney Hall on Tuesday night to hear Timo perform and be performed. They've all known Timo since he was born.

Rather than talk about the recital, here are a couple of articles about it from the LA Times. First, a profile of Timo that appeared before the concert.

Timothy Andres is enjoying his moment in the L.A. sun

And after the concert, this review:

John Adams conducts young composer-performers at Disney Hall

I was asked before the concert began if I got nervous when Timo performed. "I used to, but I don't anymore." I took my seat, row three, front and center, the lights dimmed, Timo bounced out on stage, and the applause hit me. I was nervous. I got hot and damp and needed to roll up my sleeves. Timo was wearing his new black silk Nehru shirt he'd bought for the occasion, and he looked very tall, skinny, and all of the females reported that he also looked extremely attractive. He sat, pushed his hair back with an artistic swipe (there's a lot of it just now), thought a moment, looked a bit nervous to me, but he got right down to work.

He played a piece he'd practiced in the living room at home. It's one I know well and particularly enjoy hearing. The sound seemed to fly away in the big hall and I felt how lonely it must feel on stage. I was still nervous, but now Timo was in control; up close to the keys, barely touching them, then BANG with a big motion. He's exciting to watch. He and the piece begin to feel like one thing. He is the master of the instrument and, like a flying carpet, it takes him wherever he desires. The piece is full of inside jokes, references to music Timo has played in his life, and I smile each time I hear them. I'm happy, and moved, and it's hard to believe that he can do these things.

Apress Reorgs: It's Simultaneously Unsettling and Encouraging News

2009-05-10T22:00:00.005-04:00

The Apress Quarterly Call was scheduled for Thursday. I thought nothing of it, after all, we have them every quarter. The publisher, Paul Manning, flies out to Berkeley to gather the forces and deliver the news, good or bad, and urge us on to greater things. He's good at it and I enjoy listening to him. But he sounded nervous when I called in to join the call; cleared his throat quite a bit and wasn't his usual jovial self.

"Springer has decided reorganize Apress, moving production and marketing to New York and closing the Berkeley office."

Silence. He read on from his prepared script, explaining the reasons and adding that editorial, my group, would continue unchanged. But the bombshell had been dropped and I felt that pulsing throb of adrenalin—fight or flight? And yet, my job was safe. My books would be published and my authors would continue pretty much unaffected by this shifting of tectonic plates.

In fact, the reorg seems to indicate Springer's complete faith in our far-flung editorial group and particularly in our editorial director, Dominic Shakeshaft. We will be backed by new, more streamlined and agile production methods that are intended to allow us greater control and productivity. The goal is to allow Apress to grow and be a larger publisher, while recognizing that publishing isn't just about printing books; which is really the key to this whole, unsettling reorg.

I believe that all of us in editorial have recognized the urgency of the new publishing models, whatever they turn out to be. We talk about this a lot and argue over ways to remain relevant as the eBook becomes dominant and the dusty tome becomes quaint and rustic. But none of us doubts that this is happening or sees it as a negative thing. We very much embrace it and want to be a part of it. Apparently, Springer supports this vision, which is a tremendous vote of confidence.

It's interesting that in our thoughts of future publishing, we all pretty much failed to realize that we were discussing a business imperative. In short, it took our relatively young publisher, a Springer lifer with a background in marketing and engineering, to make the business decision and open the gates wide for us to step through into our future vision. It's exciting, but also a little scary. I'm not used to being treated with such trust, but I must say, it affirms my feelings of mutual respect within Apress editorial. It's very encouraging.

Elusive, and yet predictable

2009-05-09T21:31:00.004-04:00

Here, in the second week of May and after five days of showers and thunderstorms, mild daytime temperatures in the 50's and 60's, and just as the lilac are in full bloom, morel season has arrived. This is not an overconfident prediction, but a certainty. We went out this morning with our collecting bag and headed for a favorite, and usually productive trail in Hidden Valley along the swollen Shepaug River. An hour later, having seen kaykers, walked by mature ramps now several weeks old, seen pink lady slippers almost ready to unfold, there was nothing in our bag.

This is how it usually is for us. Were we too late, too early, or just unlucky? Back in the car to River Road and Steep Rock proper. Some years ago we came upon a spot that has produced every year, though never as many as the first time we picked here with Tommy. It didn't look promising, at last not at first. But there it was, followed by seven more small specimens of what are popularly known as white morels. They aren't very white, but they're a lighter shade than black morels, which aren't black.

I don't know why this is always so exciting, but it remains a thrill. It's not much, but Wellie made a lovely morel risotto and I grilled some asparagus. We were all quite satisfied, and Hoover and Rufus licked the plates.

Maybe we'll find some more on our walk tomorrow. Hope springs eternal.

Kind words of the day

2009-01-29T16:02:00.001-05:00

The department of self-congratulations department posts the following compliment for the day. A mis-treated and badly abused author admitted that I was his favorite editor. Just goes to show, the worse you treat them, the more they respect you. I think there's a future for me in the old CIA.

Productivity Perceived

2009-01-29T09:31:00.003-05:00

I got a lot of work done yesterday, or at least I feel as though I got a lot done. But how does one actually measure productivity? Am I fooling myself and do I have a false sense of having accomplished something when there's really nothing measurable? It's a curious thing, and I suspect has as much to do with feeling content as it does with getting anything substantive completed. So what have I done?

Mostly just answered a lot of emails. In fact, I've even caught up with a bunch of old emails that were waiting impatiently, nagging at the back of my mind for action. I shoveled the driveway three times, though with help. I chopped wood and made coffee. I finished a "handover" document (one of the bains of my existence) so that we can sign a new book for August,p[ and worked with Dave Mark to straighten out some of the confusion over our up and coming iPhone books.

It doesn't sound like much, and it's probably about average for any given day; really all in a day's work. But I finished the day without any bothersome and difficult things that should have gotten done. So I somehow have a feeling of having been productive.

Or perhaps it's that I finished the day and nobody was annoyed at me or felt I had let them down. Actually, I could be wrong about this and everyone is angry and annoyed, but just too polite to say so. I'll probably find out about it today, and that little happy feeling of accomplishment will vanish under the weight of today's realities. Time will tell.

Productivity

2009-01-29T09:31:00.001-05:00

Two in one day!

2009-01-27T15:36:00.001-05:00

More from the department of shameless self-promotion department.

"Clay, I think you sell yourself short. You always amazed me. You're so much better than you think you are!

Hugs, Julie"

And it's not even from my sister.

Damn I'm Good!

2009-01-27T13:00:00.001-05:00

Put this one down to the department of self-serving department. I've been feeling rather down and worthless, so I've decided to collect random compliments completely out of context. Here's one I received today:

"You're the best.

James"

Thanks to James, I've had my ego boost for the day and am able to carry on, firm in the knowledge that I'm not a total zero.

Things I haven't written about

2009-01-26T21:46:00.001-05:00

I was supposed to blog about MacWorld. That was three weeks ago in San Francisco and I was working, and very much enjoyed it. I should have said something profound about the end of MacWorld, the absence of Steve Jobs, and the fact that I spent part of one day with Dikran, who had gone with me to the very first Mac World. But I didn't.

Perhaps I should have blogged about the inauguration, which I watched on TV. Wells to the bus from school and stood in the cold in the shadow of the Washington Monument and watched on a Jumbotron. Tommy went, too. He had tickets to watch the parade from inside the the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, but I haven't really heard much from him about it. Wellie had a great time. Katharine wept as she watched. I found the important things impressive and forgave most of the rest. But I didn't blog about this, either.

But these things did make for a more eventful January than usual, and next week, on February 1st, I'll be taking my first trip to Germany for the Apress Editorial Conference in Heidelberg. It's our first chance to meet our Springer colleagues in computer science. Should be interesting, but perhaps not much to blog about.

Anxiety Attacks

2009-01-26T21:38:00.001-05:00

I don't know why I should be so anxious. My outward mien is bluff and hardy in an outdoorsy, tough-guy way. Anxious is for milquetoasts, mamma's boys, and mealy-mouthed Melanie. And yet, I find myself thinking and not acting. I'm nervous about failing and I worry about displeasing people.

For example, I'm always behind in my work; never quite able to catch up to the backlog of emails awaiting answers. Katharine says it is the nature of my job that one can never really be caught up. There's always something else to do, which is true. It's also true that the harder I work, the further behind I become. This is either a truism or a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more I work, the more email I generate, and the more email I need to answer. What's wrong with this picture?

Last week we had our quarterly company call to learn about the end-of-the-year results from the publisher and senior management. These tend to be pleasant conference calls, and relaxing for me since I listen, lounge on the couch, and don't have to say much. Oddly, I started to get something like palpitations during the call. Everyone mentioned the success of my Mac OS X books. I should feel pleased, but instead I feel the inevitable let down when I'm unable to deliver similar successes in the future.

It's perverse. The more my success is mentioned, the worse I feel, so that by the end of the meeting, I feel as if I'm suffocating. I think that this must be what an anxiety attack feels like. However, my doctor tells me that anxiety, or panic, attacks often have no trigger. My episodes, and there are others, are always triggered by something, often the anticipation of a conversation or the disapproval of something I've done; that "bad boy" feeling.

In fact, Dimitri suggests that I have an "unhealthy" relationship with my boss, which comes as something of a surprise. This is the first boss I've had who I actually respect and admire and who treats my with kindness and understanding; more confusion. But he's right. There's some unhealthy, Freudian-like thing going on of trying to please so hard that you can never please enough. I need to work on this somehow. Perhaps I'm trying to hard.

The Tail of Hoover

2008-11-22T09:29:00.002-05:00

This is something of a confession, because it's hard to say straight out that I hit poor Hoover when backing the car out of the garage. It's the undeniable truth, and Hoover has the shaved leg and inability to walk, at least until the damaged tissue around his luxated hip heals in a week or so, to show for it. The vet was able to pop his femur back into his hip socket pretty easily, but she needed to take a few x-rays to find the exact cause and point of obvious pain.

It makes me feel guilty and incompetent, and every time I have to pick Hoover up to move him to another room to be with us or to take him outside to exercise his functions, he wails pitifully in pain. It's as if the sound were part of my punishment for carelessness. Fortunately, Hoover will be fine, but it's a misery he shouldn't have had to endure.

To make matters worse; actually there are two matters making matters worse, but I'll address them one at a time. The x-rays showed that Hoover's knees are fairly rotted with arthritis, which I can't take the blame for. However, about 99% of the world's dog lovers are convinced that Glycosamine is the answer and yet there are no studies to prove this. I suspect that I will be paying for large quantities of this product. That's the bad part. The good part is that they're beef flavored and Hoover loves them.

The second matter is that Rufus—cuddly, cute, adorable, irresistible puppy that he is, gives Hoover an inferiority complex, though he seems to have noticed that Hoover doesn't feel like playing. But there's nothing like a peppy puppy to make an aging beast feel old.

I also worry, because even five-days after the accident, Hoover is still pretty much immobilized and obviously uncomfortable. He's more alert and hasn't lost his appetite, but there's no real evidence of healing. He's getting lots of pats, though.

Day 6

We've decided Hoover needs to visit the vet and have made an appointment. No sooner is this done, then we take Hoover outside and all of the lack of function we've just explained to the vet suddenly disappears. He hobbles around, does what he needs to do, and though still rather obviously in pain, looks pleased with himself. (Am I guilty of anthropomorphizing?) No vet today, and we're feeling better, too.

Coffee ad absurdum

2008-11-18T23:13:00.001-05:00

My personal coffee roaster, Zero Profit Coffee, sent me a fresh batch of Colombia Huila Concurso San Pedro last week. What I didn't realize without a lengthy explanation, is that the name says it all, but we'll get to that. Nick, the coffee-obsessed poet and head roaster of Zero Profit, likes to know what I think of his efforts, so I dutifully do might best to come up with some adjectives to describe my inevitable pleasure with everything he provides.

I think I mentioned something about a pleasant unctuousness and remembrance of chocolates past. I may even have stuck myself out on a limb to declare it well-balanced and without any sour notes—nothing terribly specific. Mainly, it makes a fine cup of drip, extracts a pleasingly thick shot that stands up well under steamed milk.

But I did recently state that I wished there were a way to categorize coffee more clearly and consistently, so after I sent my comments, Nick sent me the following from his supplier of green beans. I think it' a rating from www.coffeegeek.com:

Colombia Huila Concurso San Pedro (2.5 Star?!?)

Country: Colombia
Grade: Estate
Region: Guadalupe, Huila
Mark: Guadalupe Municipal Competition Winner, Saint Peter Competition
Processing: Wet Processed
Crop: October, 2008
Arrival Appearance: .4 d/300gr, 17-18 Screen
Varietal: Caturra, Typica
Dry Fragrance (1-5) 3.7

Notes about the San Pedro coffee competition: "Hector Alfonso Vargas Mayor of Guadalupe, Huila since 1/1/2008 was elected with the Support of coffee growers and promising an agenda of improvement in the social development and change to the political manners in this remote municipality in Huila. His aim is to encourage the citizens' participation (with the support of the local Church / Pastoral Social) and foster development ("Guadalupe Comunitario" and "Guadalupe Sostenible") by doing "Politics" in a different manner than what this community has seen up to now." So one of the first steps was to hold a small, local coffee "concurso," a competition, judged by national cuppers and an exporter, with the top prize being a brand new coffee pulper! The top 25 received awards and a new coffee maker, and all receoved a premium price for the coffee. This was in June, the product of the mid-year "mitaca" harvest and not the main crop. And the concurso was part of the general celebration for the Dia del San Pedro, hence the name.

We agreed to buy the winning lot, which is a mix of the top coffees, and I wasn't quite sure if it would be good (since I wasn't one of the 3 judges). But we were promised we could reject it if it was just average, and I really WANTED it to be good, and support the event and the efforts of the Mayor and the farmers. Happily, the lot arrived and I love it.

[This is where things start to strain credulity.]
The coffee has intense-yet-subtle aromatics. In the lighter roasts, sweet raisin notes are embedded in layers of chocolate. Darker roasts have a triad of chocolate-spice-raisin, dense and somewat pungent to the nose. There are some unexpected fruits that surface in the wet aroma; a touch of baked pineapple, blackberry, and apple turnover. It has a sumtuous, darkly sweet character. The cup flavors have strong raisin and dry plum notes. There's clove-like spice accents…, but it's this creamy, thick body that gives the cup such balance in overall character. As it cools, an apple flavor is fleshed out, more specifically, spiced baked apple and apple pie. It finishes with chocolate bittersweetness. Such a balanced coffee, I immediately thought of S.O. espresso, and it is a fantastic shot, even at lighter roast levels (FC) than are possible with other coffees.

2.5 Star???: We have a new approach in Colombia, with 4 tiers of coffee: 1-Star, 2-Star, 3-Star, 4-Star. This lot doesn't quite conform, since it was a competition lot, but I did not personally go to Colombia and select it. It was also not vacuum-packed in Colombia, like our 3 star lots, but it is every bit as good. So, rather jokingly, we call it 2.5 Star. I know, that's a lot of stars to keep track of. Consider that 1-Star = fine Specialty coffee you might find at a good local roaster, 2-Star is regional specialty lots that sometimes can be remarkable (so when we offer a 2-Star, you can assume it really stood out on the cupping table). 3-Star and 4-Star are our direct trade program, Farm Gate Coffee, and involve cupping hundreds of tiny farm-distinct lots.
Wet Aroma (1-5) 3.8
Brightness - Acidity (1-10) 8.7
Flavor - Depth (1-10) 9.1
Body - Mouthfeel (1-5) 3.8
Finish - Aftertaste (1-10) 9
Cupper's Correction (1-5) 1 Intensity/Prime Attribute: Medium-Bold intensity / Creamy body, fruited notes, chocolate, balance
add 50 50 Roast: City+ to Full City: FC makes a great, balanced espresso as well
Score (Max. 100) 89.1 Compare to: This Huila cups a bit out of character, perhaps like a Tolima coffee, with great balance. This coffee is part of our direct trade Farm Gate pricing tranparency program.

If you made it to the end of this absurd description, then welcome to the club! I like the story of how this particular bean came got it's name and that the quality is a result of local pride and even free-market competition. There's a lot of silliness here, but I'd be happy to drink these beans in the Zero Profit roast every day.

Perhaps the Worst Movie…, Ever

2008-11-11T21:45:00.001-05:00

Not as bad as "Plan 9 From Outer Space," but we're talking about a big-budget feature of the 21st Century. I'm reminded of "The Producers," in search of a sure flop, but we're in on the joke. This time, there's no joke, and I'm not kidding.

Poor August Rush. He hears things. When he's not hearing things, he thinks about the thing that has never existed in his life; his parents. But fear not. The spirit forces are working in his favor. The spirits are working overtime: with the mother in Chicago, with the father in San Francisco, with the social worker, the black minister, the pig-tailed little girl with the big voice, and the guitar-playing black kid with rhythm. How are they all going to end up in the same place at the same time by the end of the movie and live happily ever after?

Well, it hardly matters. The parents, who don't actually know they have a son and spent all of one evening together in their lives, "it was a very special night," are playing Romeo and Juliet. August is living the life of The E.T., which I'm guessing is why he keeps looking to the stars for answers. Most of the other characters have bit roles in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and are inexplicably drawn to Central Park in New York on the same summer evening. On the other hand, the Pied Piper of musical street urchins, as played by Robin Williams, is really a musical Fagin straight out of "Oliver Twist," complete with hide out full of boys who share their day's earnings on the street with "the family." He spends a lot of time counting money; lots of it.

By the way, 12-year-old August is supposed to be a musical prodigy. Can you believe that he actually masters the guitar, the piano, composition, and conducting in six months? No problem. His parents are also unbelievably talented. We know, because the rockin' father can pick up a guitar that hasn't been played in 12 years and it's magically in perfect tune. The "virgin" mother's (we don't actually know that there was a conception or a birth) cello playing is so remarkable, that after twelve years of silence and an untouched cello, the New York Philharmonic mails her a letter to ask if she'll come play with them. Wow, this is special!

We sighed in disbelief, we groaned with pain, why the hell did we watch the entire movie of "August Rush?" There was one well-played role and it happened to be my mother-in-law, Marian Seldes, in the role of the Dean of Juilliard; a thankless role but one with a small shred of dignity. Marian actually taught Robin Williams in the first years of the Juilliard Drama Department, but it hardly mattered. Absurd plot, bad script, horrific direction, and inexcusably bad movie—its a script that appears to have been written by someone with no knowledge of reality and a high regard for coincidence and miracles.

On the bright side, I've heard anecdotally that the movie was shown on a lot of airplane flights. Pleasant dreams.

What's wrong with Baseball

2008-11-11T21:37:00.001-05:00

I was watching the fifth game of the World Series last night and thinking that it didn't seem like ideal conditions to show off the best in baseball. It was 40°, windy and raining steadily. Why were they playing?

Fast forward. The World Series is over and Philadelphia prevailed after a two-day delay and a two-and-a-half-inning continuation. We could change the subject and talk about how great and exciting this abbreviated evening of baseball was, but I'd like to stick to my original question: what's wrong with baseball?

It's easy. The answer is greed, which is often the answer to questions that begin "what's wrong with." TV is paying for the World Series. TV has it's reasons for wanting the game to be played despite the cold and rain. These reasons also have to do with greed. Sponsors, mainly Budweiser, are paying TV to pay Baseball to broadcast the World Series.

Aside from the obvious greed motive, why does baseball need so much money when the result is a watered-version of the game? It's obvious. Owners and players are also greedy. Owners couldn't pay the players nearly as much if it weren't for all that TV money. I think we're finding a consistent them in this discussion. Lots of the problems with baseball, and all of professional sports, have to do with greed, which has very little to do with the sports.

Interestingly, there's a big greed thing going on in the world of international economics these days, as well. If sports is a metaphor for life, why shouldn't greed permeate every aspect of the game? This one's got me stumped, though it does seem as though greed isn't the best thing in all cases when it comes to figuring out the world's finances. So maybe there is a lesson here, afterall.

The Obama Heard 'round the World

2008-11-07T21:59:00.001-05:00

Of all the people I work with, including colleagues, freelancers, and authors, I only know of one who said he preferred McCain to Obama. He's an Israeli living in New York City who thought that if Iran needed bombing, McCain was the one most likely to get it done. Talk about your one-issue voters!

Even a sampling of international authors turned up nary a wiff of support for McCain. A colleague in the U.K. expressed great relief that Palin would not be representing the U.S. at World meetings. To him, that was the scariest thing on the Republican ticket.

An author in the Netherlands couldn't understand how anyone could believe Obama was a socialist. He seemed rather conservative by Dutch standards. He also felt that 90% of Dutch voters would have supported Obama.

A German friend living in the Philippines expressed horror at the thought of any more years of Bush's failed policies. How could American's have kept him in office for two terms?

Another colleague in the U.K. commented that he hoped the Secret Service was being particularly watchful, which seems to be something that many people are worried about, including the CIA. I read today that they've got a whole new team attached to Obama (almost literally).

The fact is, the person we elect to be President is important to nearly everyone in the world in a way that no other world leaders can quite equal. What has made this so painfully obvious is the current failed administration of Bush and his cronies. Our cowboy president's reckless, heedless, and greedy reign may have diminished our stature in the world, but not our importance. We really can wreck the world's economy without any help from our allies.

Obama makes me proud to be an American. When was the last time I could say that?

Reading Coffee

2008-10-25T16:50:00.001-04:00

Nick, our private roaster, has sent home a new blend. It's like the floor sweepings at the end of the shift at the spice factory; a little bit of whatever happened to be around that day. Everything Nick roasts is wonderful, simply because he buys high-quality beans and does roast more than a pound at a time, it's very fresh.

I've become somewhat coffee obsessed, not nearly so much as Nick, but knowing Nick only makes my obsession worse. For instance, we like to talk about the coffee he makes, which makes us sound like wine snobs. For instance, I'm sipping an extraction from the beans that have just arrived home. There's a flavor in this coffee that is reminiscent of something Nick roasted a while back. I'm going to assume that it's not a Central or South American bean flavor, perhaps one of those oddly assertive Harrar beans mixed in. It definitely affects the balance, but balance, per se, isn't necessarily an important quality for me.

It does not taste fruity, at all. It's a bit on the sharp side, like a sharp cheddar, if it's fair to say this about coffee. I'm really stretching my limits of credulity on this one. I probably prefer something less assertive, but this is definitely good; better than the mocha java I brought home from Willoughby's, which was okay. I think they specialize in french roasts. Most of the beans in the store are quite dark, but with a beautiful oily sheen. I also recently had some french roast beans from Starbucks that were blackened to a dull lifelessness, just burnt-looking.

People leave the room when Nick and I get started. The problem is, it's all nonsense. We're trying to adapt standard vocabulary to describe flavors and sensations that are complex and esoteric. They're really just very personal impressions that don't help much when buying coffee. Today, my mother asked me what kind of coffee she should buy in Baltimore? I can make suggestions, but there are standards in the industry that will help her the way there is for wine.

Essentially, the labelling of roasted coffee beans, is pretty much unregulated. It helps that there are a lot of single origin beans on the market, but they're most labeled only by country of origin and there's plenty of variation within countries. It also makes a difference that there are organics, shade grown, and bird friendly beans, but this says nothing about the quality of the bean. Of course, things get more complicated when you start mixing beans for balance.

Nonetheless, I want to know where the beans are from, country and region, or even finca or plantation name, like wines, which I know nothing about. I want to know some designation of bean, including size, wet or dry process, and harvest year. I suspect Sweet Maria (Nick's mail order, green bean supplier in Oakland) must list all of these things, so I'm sure the information is available.

Then I want to categorize the roast from light to dark and I wish there were a way to quantify darkness. French Roast, Viennese Roast, Italian Roast are only relative terms, not good enough unless someone can establish an industry standard. And I don't like the term espresso roast. We need a completely different vocabulary for beans meant for steam extraction.

When I first became familiar with Starbucks we were visiting our friend Joy in Portland. It seemed like a revelation at the time, but I realize now that we were wowed by the brilliant marketing. I didn't drink coffee at the time, so the whole thing was a brand experience for me. I was especially taken with the rolls of nicely-designed color stickers they had to put on the bags of coffee. I remember the fishing boat logo for the Yukon Blend. On the other hand, what the hell is Yukon blend? It's all image and connotation. For us manly types, this should be a positive association that makes us feel manly about drinking a manly brew before reeling in the day's catch from the roiling and frigid Arctic seas. Blood and Guts Blend wouldn't sell as well.

On the other hand, tea packagers have been doing this for at least a century. What is Orange Pekoe? It's not a tea leaf, but a grade of black tea. It's quite generic. And what about English Breakfast, which is a rather non-specific blend of various black teas that are meant to be hearty enough to stand up to dilution with milk? It's not even necessarily all Indian tea. And then there's Irish Breakfast which is usually all Assam tea. So why not call it Assam? Because marketing trumps full disclosure. Shall we go on to discuss John McCain's difficulties with truth in campaign advertising? Perhaps another time.

Blogging in Verse

2008-09-30T21:44:00.001-04:00

Whose blog this is I think I know.
His laptop's in the study though;
He will not see me reading here
Watching this space fill up with words.

I've been asked to blog in verse, but such is not my bent. I'm not even good with doggerel and am terrible with rhymes. On the other hand, I did blog once about the poetry missing in our lives. Interestingly, I have no idea how to find that blog since poetry is not one of my designated categories and I don't remember what I was referring to.

It was not too long ago that I asked one of our project managers, Beth, if she was familiar with the Stevie Smith poem, "Not waving but drowning," and she was! This delighted me. My colleagues Dom and Frank are both knowledgeable about poetry and have had occasion to discuss poetry with Katharine when we were all meeting in Chicago. There's something in me that finds this kind of abstract knowledge deeply satisfying, even though I possess so little of it myself. It's a knowledge for knowledge's sake, and yet I've only known thoughtful people who care about it and I like thoughtful people.

Please forgive the awful opening of this blog. I suppose I could do better with some effort, but like drawing for me, it's an effort that is more painful than pleasant. I don't mind writing, I do mind writing verse. When I was studying architecture, I actually enjoyed drafting, but I didn't like drawing. When I was studying music, I liked playing, but I didn't like composing. And when I was studying theater, I liked everything: tech and acting, though perhaps not directing. The only thing I was any good at was drafting, and that wasn't anything to be particularly proud of.

I will have to find the poetry in my life from other things besides writing verse. Perhaps my friends, like Nick, will do me the honor.

Taking it Personally

2008-09-27T14:10:00.001-04:00

I couldn't sleep last night, which for me is quite unusual. I dozed, I saw the hours pass on the clock, I thought about the work I need to get done, and something else kept running through my sheep counting. I couldn't help thinking about last night's presidential debate and it made me feel angry. It was keeping me awake!

Once again, a distinguished, articulate, thoughtful, well-informed democrat was meeting a self-satisfied, inarticulate, rude, and ill-informed republican. Once again, pundits called it a draw. I knew they would, but it outrages me every time, a trait I've inherited from my Mother. First of all, why are the pundits such cowards? The only news broadcast claiming to be "fair and balanced" is Fox, and they wasted no time declaring a victory for McCain. All the other networks seem to bend over backward to be "balanced" to the point of political correctness.

But what really agitated me was the missed opportunities for Obama to skewer McCain, who repeatedly insulted his soft-spoken opponent by calling him "naive." What if on the third or fourth repetition Obama had retorted that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?" Or perhaps something more along the lines of: their was no act more naive than voting to approve the Bush war in Iraq.

It's hard not to get defensive when your opponent makes up facts, distorts the truth, and shows a lack of respect and knowledge. But how much better to turn the tables on name calling? How much better to respond to a rambling, repetitive answer on Afghanistan (but not about Afghanistan) by saying "so you have no plans for Afghanistan?" Let's put the little pugilist on the defensive, instead.

In fact, I think the next New Yorker cover (I thought of this while laying awake last night, as well) should feature a boxing ring with a map of the world on the floor and centered on Iraq. Jim Lehrer is the ref. On the left side, with his feet in Israel is the short, sweaty, McCain swinging wildly at the air. On the right side, with his feet in Pakistan, is the cool, tall Obama, holding off his opponent with one boxing glove to the forehead. I think Barry Blitt would do a fine job with this image.

I'm feeling better this morning. Many of those calling round 1 a draw are also saying that the tie goes to Obama. That McCain needed a victory on foreign policy, but Obama held his own and looked more presidential (a vague notion if there ever was one). In fact, McCain looked as if he'd rather be almost anywhere but Oxford, Mississippi.

My father, ever the physician, noted that McCain looked like he might have Horner's Syndrome
(droopy eyelid), a sign of various neurological problems, including Alzheimer's. Fortunately, there's nothing to worry about. Palin will make a great president.

Lying is Good For You!

2008-09-27T11:55:00.001-04:00

You have probably been told that you can get away with crying wolf once, but come the third time, your lies will catch up with you and the wolf will have you for supper. I say it's broccoli, and I say to hell with it. This fable has more to do with foolishness than with lying, which I maintain is a sign of sophistication. After all, it is only the youngest children who tell no lies and by a very young age we have taught our children how to prevaricate.

I am not making a value judgment. In fact, I am removing any sense or good or bad from the act of telling lies. When the president tells you that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he's decided to misrepresent the truth for the greater good. He did a really good job getting lots of important people to believe him, but his little story got a lot of people killed. History is full of such lies that shouldn't have been told. What looks good to some can look bad to others, even when the lie is revealed as unpurified snake oil.

On the other hand, let's say someone asked me if I was looking for a job and I said I'm always looking for a job. And let's say the person asking was my boss who was expecting a lie along the lines of I'm happy, contented, and despite the vast array of job-seeking tools, listings, and information at my fingertips, haven't sent out a resumé since the day I was hired. The only surprising thing is that I didn't tell a lie when I should have.

Yes, your royal highness, that suit of invisible clothing is very becoming to your paunch. A child would never know to say the expected if it weren't true. The emperor has no clothes! Kids do say the darndest things, but we all grow up and learn to say the expected. We learn the art of smalltalk, the subtleties of the compliment, the politically correct (even when it's factually incorrect). Why do we do this?

We lie because we must. We even lie to ourselves. We are our own worst flatterers, unless we have a poor self-image, in which case we are our own worst enemies. The necessity for lying is two-fold. One is that not everything is black and white, on or off, meat or fish. There are algae and germs and all sorts of gray areas open to interpretation, which leads to dogma, differences of opinion, and divergent views of reality. Which is why one man's god is another's devil, why all capitalists are lying pigs, and all who disagree are enemies. It's the stuff of Orwellian worlds.

The other necessity is forced on us by human nature; we lie to gain some sort of advantage or avoid embarrassment. (I think these two amount to the same thing.) "I finished my homework, can I go out and play?" What do homework and play have to do with each other? Pretty much nothing, so this lie works, as long as it's not scrutinized too closely. We invite lying and then reinforce it every time we try to lay down the law in a controlling, yet arbitrary way. (I'm not going to get into a discussion of child-rearing tactics, here.)

It's not so surprising that children lie to their parents, but I'm amazed how often parents feel they must lie to their children. "You mean Santa Claus isn't real!" But the most amazing is how much grown-ups lie to each other, especially at work. There are any of terms for this - manipulation, hidden agenda, managing to an outcome - but it's all the same and it's all untruths.

My problem is one of naiveté. I believe in mutual respect, which greatly obviates the need for untruths. It works across age groups and office hierarchies, but it only works when it really is mutual. Otherwise you end up like Atahualpa, whose Incan empire was defeated by a puny force of Spaniards led by Pisaro, who was so cunning that Atahualpa couldn't believe he'd been defeated.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

2008-09-27T11:52:00.001-04:00

It is the day after Thanksgiving. A day known in retail circles as "Black Friday," but a day otherwise without significance. It is a good day for the official launch of The Bloggregator! I have invited Callie, Chris, Jamie, Nick, and Lisa to join in a group blog for no other reason than to exercise our thoughts and further attempt to make sense of them in written form. Who else would like to join this endeavor in writing to friends and strangers?

The Bloggregator is my name for the tool we are using to collect and publish our writings. Right now, we are simply a group of WordPress members contributing to a single blog, which I have given the name Manifold Predictions. This refers to a story that occurred to Chris when I first attempted to explain my idea for a Bloggregator to him. It is the story of the blind men and the elephant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Men_and_an_Elephant

In one version of the story, there are many ways to state the same truth, and it is this open-minded view that is known as the theory of Manifold Predictions. So chew on this and digest in good health and harmony. On to further feasts!

-originally published 11/23/07 on Manifold Predictions

A Cold Winter's Blogging

2008-09-27T11:45:00.001-04:00

It is cold. The windchill was -9.5° this morning with more of the same for tomorrow. But we took a walk up to the Clamshell Pinnacle in Steep Rock with no ill effects and tonight's chicken was grilled outside. I'm wearing my long-sleeved, zip-neck Patagonia long underwear and my flannel-lined blue jeans from L. L. Bean, but the weather doesn't really affect us, much.

Then I think about the house we live in. It is known as a center-chimney colonial and was built in 1796 around a massive brick chimney that occupies about a fourth of the square footage of this house and includes four fireplaces plus a beehive oven. There was certainly no insulation and there were no storm windows, and it was considerably colder 200-years ago. And they knew not of Patagonia or L. L. Bean. How did they keep warm?

This is also the time of year when sap in the maples starts to rise. It won't be rising much today or tomorrow, but Valentine's Day is in four days and it is the traditional beginning of maple syrup season. They were already boiling sap down the hill in Woodbury this past weekend. We'll be putting out a few buckets again this year, but we won't be boiling over an open wood fire in an outdoor sugar house. That's an activity that could keep one warm, but we've got a gas stove for the job.

I wonder if our lack of necessity and abundance of conveniences and comforts has put an end to a natural sense of poetry in our lives. There just isn't a need for Robert Frost in an age of polyester insulation and waterproof boots—no horses harnesses, no muddy tramps, no swingers of birches. We are warm, but with very little poetry in our lives. Is there a solution?

-originally published 2/12/08 on Manifold Predictions

Kindergarten Readiness

2008-09-27T11:42:00.001-04:00

When Timothy was four, we were told that our eldest son was “not kindergarten ready,” but we didn’t believe it. In fact, we were incredulous for a number of reasons. Despite the fact that Timothy, with a mid-October birthday, was young for his class, he was tall and had an extensive vocabulary (according to his pediatrician). He seemed creative, responsive, and outgoing. Perhaps too outgoing for the perfect little Berkeley, California nursery school he attended. Outgoing enough to cross the line into what his teachers thought was more like the selfishly, anti-social behavior of a three-year-old; definitely not kindergarten ready.

We moved back east that year and trusting our own judgement over the dire warnings of the professional educators, enrolled Timothy in kindergarten, where he immediately learned to read, add, and function at an advanced level in the classroom. This past weekend he graduated from Yale University with distinction and received half-dozen prizes, including one of the five college-wide prizes awarded to undergraduates.

Not Kindergarten ready? The phrase seems to have more to do with the readiness of teachers and administrators to accept the full range of challenges that a classroom full of children from diverse backgrounds presents. There are obviously children who thrive in school and others who fail. We praise the former and humiliate the latter, but it is difficult to categorize with any sort of consistency those who will advance to the highest levels of achievement and self-esteem or their opposites. Again, Timothy is a case in point.

In eighth grade, now at his second “Montessori School” (which I put in quotes because one Montessori School is as different from another as one student can be from another), Timothy again ran up against the anti-social behavior problem. His teachers found his actions so upsetting that, we were told, they would go home crying at the end of each day. So it was explained to us that for the sake of the teachers and the class, that Timothy would no longer be welcome in the classroom or even on school grounds.

Admittedly, our eighth grader was wonderfully adept at outsmarting his teachers and making them feel as though they had lost control of the entire class. He was not violent nor loud, simply peevish and disagreeable, what used to be called a “smart-aleck,” but in the extreme. By this time, Timothy’s gifts were abundantly clear as a musician, artist, original and analytical thinker, and writer. He was also arguably the worst athlete in his class, the most self-absorbed, the least concerned with conforming, and the most likely to lead his classmates into some new interest like birds, mushrooms, or fort building.

Being thrown out of a Montessori school eighth grade is not good for the self-esteem of the eighth grader. He felt like a failure, was cut off from his friends, and was even black-balled in his application to prep-school for 9th grade admissions. Was this Timothy’s failure or the school’s failure; a failure of teachers and administrators who we trust to recognize and reward talent while knowing how to deal with difficult developmental issues?

Ah, you might say. He wasn’t kindergarten ready and it came back to bite him. Nonsense, he was bored with work he understood instantly and saw as demeaning. To have held him back a year would only have exacerbated the problem. Given the opportunity to advance rapidly, Timothy thrived. When treated with disrespect, Timothy bridled and rebelled, which to the teacher bent on conformist learning, looked like bad, willful behavior.

So what about high school, how did Timothy survive, thrive, and regain his self-esteem? We couldn’t find a school that seemed to fit with who Timothy was for ninth grade, so we enrolled him in an alternative school for students in the performing arts. At the same time, he was accepted in Juilliard Pre-college as a composer, which allowed him, for the first time, to see that he was not so different from other children—he no longer felt like the weird odd-ball. This had nothing to do with his relative age, his emotional growth, or his innate intelligence. For the first time in school, he got to be who he was, and being true to himself, even before he had developed this advanced sense of self-awareness, was immeasurably more important to his education than the date of his birth.

I realize that my descriptions make Timothy, with all his gifts, eccentricities, and odd and difficult behaviors, sound like something of a freak. For instance, he never finished high school, opting instead for a year of directed study that included weekends at Juilliard, piano studies with a well-known pianist (the pianist arranged for a grant so that Timothy could study with him), literature and french tutorials, classes at the local art association. His year’s independent study culminated in a lecture performance on Ives’ Concord Sonata and American Transcendentalism that was presented at Juilliard.

To most of his former eighth grade colleagues, none of whom attended the performances, I suspect this would have seemed like mighty dull stuff—dry, academic, and certainly not as important as checking off all the items on the assignment rubric so the teacher can figure out how well you completed the work. And he didn’t win any varsity letters. But was happy as a non-conformist—happy to be who he was, happy to have peers and teachers who liked him the way he was and who respected him for what he was.

Should children be kindergarten ready or should kindergartens be child ready? I think I’ve answered the question.

-CA

Disciplinary Inaction

2008-09-15T21:54:00.002-04:00

Discipline is not my strong suit. I lack the discipline to eat with restraint, to exercise regularly without constant reminders, to get my homework done. It's not surprising that I'm unable to keep up a blog with any sort of regularity. For a while, when I started this blog, writing entries was a form of relaxation. This was while I was hating being tortured at work and writing provided a break, an opportunity to clear my mind of demons as a necessary exercise in mental health. And since I enjoy writing, I started this blog-as-therapy. Now what?

I used to be a writer or at least I write a dozen or so computer books, depending on how one counts them. I wrote hundreds of articles: reviews, features, profiles. Mostly I wrote about computers, but I wrote about local businesses and people as well as a number of music reviews. I tried writing fiction, some stories, an unfinished screenplay, and half of a novel. And I liked writing, which isn't to say that it was easy.

One of the things I liked best about writing was saying that I was a writer. It's embarrassing to admit this because it's so narcissistic, but it did my ego good to be a writer. I like saying that I'm an editor, which is what I am now, but it does sound as creative and it's pleasant to think that what I do is creative. Nonetheless, both writing and editing require a good deal of discipline, which is hard for me.

As an editor, I work with a lot of other people and so there are regular expectations, which keeps me honest. And there's a schedule. Work needs to get done in a timely way, which forces discipline. Professional writing has that nice scheduled quality and so I was able to act like a responsible citizen when I had deadlines to meet.

Perhaps I could pick up where I left off and start writing computer articles again. I might even get paid to do this. There's a lot of sense to this, but now that I spend a good deal of my time listening to pitches from others, I'm loathe to pitch my own ideas. Dare I say that pitching ideas stifles creativity? On the other hand, perhaps it's this ridiculous idea that I need to be "creative" that is stifling my ability to express some thought in writing. Oh, what irony!

The fact is, I'm spending too much time being an editor to find time to write. Writing is time-consuming and there are always more chapters to edit. This may be the real conflict, which is reasonable and justifiable. Hooray! No need for self-flagellation with guilt. But it is hard to write infrequently. So I will endeavor to write more frequently. I'm going to keep a list of ideas to write about. It's a list I started a while ago, but haven't even been able to keep current. But it's a new school year and so I shall try to be disciplined and keep something fresh in my blog, even if no one is reading it. But that's a subject for another blog.

On Being an Editor

2008-03-28T16:58:00.003-04:00

I like it.

This is not the first time I have been an editor. That was in high school when I was selected to be an editor of our school literary magazine. The faculty advisor chose me because he liked me, but I was not a very active member of the editorial board and I made no contributions to the magazine. I didn't like writing and had no idea what I was supposed to do as an editor. But I did like my fellow editors, who were all smart and interesting. I felt like a fraud.

It took 15 years and the advent of personal computers and WYSISYG word processing, but I did learn to write. It also took a ruthless editor with no patience for errors and ceaseless demands for clarity and concision. I might have picked up a few tips on editing from Katharine along the way, as well. It was certainly good training.

But writing didn't pay very well, at least, not for me, which is when I became a real editor with a full-time paying job for a publisher. It was exciting and seemed ideal—small press, smart publisher, a dozen or so good books a year, and all having to do with software development, but our best laid plans can go astray. After an 18-month training period in how not to be an editor and how not to treat authors, colleagues, and pretty much everyone in the world, I got fired and spent the next three years not being an editor or a writer. Axes will fall.

Despite the negative experience, I liked editing. I like working with smart people who are passionate about what they do and are so far beyond office politics that they can seem almost childishly naive (which is just like being honest). As an editor, as opposed to a writer, you actually have to work with other people, and despite the fact that bosses tend to make my life miserable, I actually like working in an atmosphere of mutual respect. This is perfect! I like writers who don't know how to write but are experts in their fields. They like techie editors who know the vocabulary sufficiently to guide the writing process, but can't code their way out of a "Hello World" example. I believe this is known as a mutually-beneficial relationship.

So now I'm editing, again. I talk to smart people every day (or at least exchange email). An atmosphere of mutual respect is practically written into our contracts, and this carries over to all levels of the organization. I don't dread the bosses, they don't seem to want to have me fired, yet, and I don't sigh loudly throughout the workday. I don't even feel like a fraud. Perhaps I should thank that high school teacher who liked me. Kenny, where are you?

The Death of a Friend

2007-12-13T14:51:00.000-05:00

I did not know Marc Orchant well. We worked together on a couple of projects and even met at a meeting not too long ago. I liked him, respected him, and even envied his ability to chatter on about the latest gadgets in geekdom. He was active, slim, and about the last person I'd expect to die of a massive coronary, which is what happened last week.

At the same time, I've had a number of male friends and acquaintances of about my age recently diagnosed with hardened arteries after complaining of chest pains or simply showing up for their blood tests. My friend, Dikran at Stanford, a life-long skinny person, swimmer and healthful eater, underwent triple-bypass surgery some months back. Laurent, who's been not married to our friend Jane for a number of years, had the same this month, and blamed it on too much imported camembert. (He's French.) Juliann's husband, Alan, complained of chest pains when exercising and ended up suddenly in the hospital for a bypass. It's anecdotal, but there's something real going on, and I hear the warnings.

For my part, I was discovered to have a triglyceride count over 700 (in whatever unit of measure is used). This was about two years ago. At the time I weighed 215 pounds, my heaviest ever, and at 5' 9", was definitely on the obese side by any measure. I've weighed between 180-185 for the past year, we exercise most days (vigorous long walks and visits to the Taft gym), and I have been taking Tricor, a fibrate medication that lowers triglyceride levels. It's a combination that by all measures (blood tests) seems to be working.

But what of Marc? I deleted his name from my address book the other day and it felt like an important gesture of recognition. He's the first person I've deleted in such a permanent fashion and the thought of what I was doing caused me to hesitate over the delete key. And yet, it is an act of acknowledgement, and in this sense a healthy act. So I acknowledge Marc's death, my own mortality, and, this shouldn't sound dismissive, I go on. I'm reminded of the importance of attempting to live my life in a healthful, vigorous way.

Why I am not a Team Player

2007-12-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

Several times and by several people I have been told that I am not a team player. This was meant as a negative assessment of my performance, but every time it felt like confirmation of what I wanted to be; which is not a team player. I don't understand why being a team player is the desired behavior unless you're really on a team; the kind of team with a coach who tells you what to do and you do it because you're a team player.

Somehow the team metaphor has become corrupted in its migration to business. The problem is that bosses don't want to be seen as bosses even when they act as bosses. They want to be a member of the team just like me. The team vision in business is more of a socialist equality, which is very far from the reality of any business I've worked for or with. It's more of an Animal Farm socialism where some animals are more equal than others. Unfortunately, the irony is lost in the stultifying dishonesty of bland sincerity that pervades business behavior.

I can remember my first day on the job at the Allstate Research and Planning Center in Menlo Park, CA. Everyone, without exception, said "welcome to the team." This was the most hierarchical company I ever worked for: supervisors, managers, Directors, VPs. It's pretty standard practice in old-style companies and not so different from the military. It's easy to see that there's a certain necessity for following orders as a combat team member in the heat of battle, but we were just running statistical summaries on millions of insurance policies.

Most of the work I've done for the past twenty years has involved quite a bit more thought than action. I've been paid for taking responsibility, not needing supervision, working independently, all things that are pretty much the opposite of anything having to do with team membership. To be sure, there is much collaboration, but collaboration and following the boss's orders are really different things. Yet bosses, even the ones who say they really welcome your honest opinion, seldom want to hear what you have to say if it doesn't agree with what they think you should be doing. You might as well be a traitor as suggest an alternative to "the way we've always done things."

What it all boils down to is a metaphor gone amok. Team playing is supposed to be good, but I never want to work for a company that values blind, stupid, lock-step agreement. I am no sycophant. I do not play for a football team. I am not valued for my physical prowess or my ability to block when told to block or run when told to run. No suicide missions for me, no unquestioned obedience or respect when respect is not due. I can do many things, I can even be a leader when called upon to lead, but I cannot and will not be a team player.

Next time, it's "welcome to the cooperative," for me!

Nothing Civil in a Civil Suit

2007-10-23T11:46:00.000-04:00

Got served with papers on Saturday. I was cleaning gutters and turning compost, an apt activity for such an occasion. I was about as dirty as I've been in a long time and was up to my elbows in wet, decomposing leaf litter when I heard a car in the driveway. I thought it was the postman with a package too big for the box. Instead, it was an obese gentleman with a FedEx envelope that he had opened. Strange, I thought.

He had been hired to serve the papers to me. He does this for a living. I think lawyers pay him and that he has some sort of official status that can't be ignored. So when I said I didn't want them, he explained the federal and state laws that gave me no choice in the matter. He liked Hoover, told me about his dead dog and dead cat and how they were going to co-mingle their ashes and save them so that their own children could add their ashes at the appropriate time and throw the blend off the dock of their house in Florida. How is one supposed to respond to such a story?

A man finds happiness remembering his animals. Another man is angry and seeks revenge. A third is deeply involved with compost and leaf litter. I like to think that I'm easily contented, but I need to find a way to detect underlying anger before I become mired in more legal mudslinging. On the other hand, we are all angry at times. It's a necessary personality component. But there are those people whose lives seem to be ruled by their anger and others for whom anger is a temporary state rather than the foundation of their being. I don't think there are any angry babies, so this must be something one acquires with age.

Music Review: Richard Goode in Newtown, CT

2007-10-10T16:07:00.000-04:00

Seen and Heard (MusicWeb International)

Richard Goode, Piano Newtown Friends of Music Edmond Town Hall, Newtown, Connecticut September 16, 2007

J S Bach
 Prelude and Fugue in G minor, BWV 885 (Book II) Four Sinfonias 
E major, BWV 792 
E minor, BWV 793 
G minor, BWV 797 
E-flat major, BWV 791 Prelude and Fugue in B major, BWV 892 (Book II)

Haydn, Sonata in D major, Hoboken XVI:24

 Beethoven, Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2 
‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’

 Debussy, Three Preludes 
La cathédrale engloutie (Book I) 
Ondine (Book II) 
General Lavine - Eccentric (Book II) 

Chopin Impromptu in F-sharp major, Op. 36 
Three Mazurkas 
G major, Op. 50 No. 1 
C major, Op. 24, No. 2 
C-sharp minor, Op. 50, No. 3 
Nocturne in B major, Opus 62, No. 1
 Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Opus 44

So many pianists try to be flamboyant in their playing or exaggerated in their interpretations often to the point of affectation. Thus it is a particular pleasure to listen Richard Goode’s playing, which is all about the music—capturing the mood, transmitting a feeling without extraneous fanfare—it seems so reserved, but in a good way. I suspect it’s harder to be interestingly thoughtful and subtle than to come out with all barrels blazing. And what a treat to hear Richard Goode in the rather intimate setting of Newtown Connecticut’s Town Hall.

I never tire of hearing Goode’s intelligent rendering of Beethoven sonatas, this time, the so-called Moonlight. There’s nothing melodramatic or sappy about Goode’s articulation, and instead of the usual Chopin-like romanticism one hears in the first movement so often, Goode emphasized the dark melody in the base and the brooding quality of C-sharp minor was more redolent of a moldering grave than anything light or frilly. It was remarkably and rivetingly effective.

Goode began his recital with a selection of Bach put together like a baroque suite. The clarity of his articulation and the beautiful subtlety in his phrasing seemed so natural and unforced that it was easy to forget one's reviewing duties and simply enjoy the music. How utterly pleasant.

Similarly, Goode’s Haydn was immaculate, and moving from baroque to classical brought a fierceness and urgency to the playing that ripped along at a great rate of many notes per second—delightful.

The Beethoven followed, and you could feel the expressive range growing with the chronology. Lots of sforsandos, great dynamic range. And then after intermission, a leap across all of romanticism directly to three Debussy preludes. I wondered how Goode’s clean lines and elegant phrasing would match up with the slowly emerging images Debussy painted in the preludes. I needn’t have worried. Clarity and precision, Goode’s hallmarks, combined with his intellectual understanding of the works, created what felt like newly cleaned artwork glowing in freshly polished frames.

Then back to romanticism for a bookend collection of Chopin movements to balance the synthesized Bach suite at the opening. It was a long concert and, surprisingly, the Chopin felt murky by comparison to the rest of the performances. I’ve heard Goode play Chopin with the ferocity of a middle Beethoven sonata, and it works beautifully, but this was more of a relaxed finish to the afternoon.

Goode is a transporting performer, an intellectual with plenty of technique to communicate his thoughts about the music. Nothing is ill-considered or dashed off without careful consideration. It’s as though he has considered just how every note in the piece should be played. He is intense without being showy, correct without being stuffy, original without outlandishness. Goode allows us to hear new things and it’s a treat. He sets a standard of excellence that few can match.

CA

Fired, Again!

2007-10-04T21:13:00.000-04:00

I was fired from my job as an account manager one week ago today. It was remarkably like being fired three-and-a-half years ago from my job as an acquisitions editor. This time, though, I felt like an old pro at being fired, which probably isn't something I should be proud of. There are some striking similarities in the two situations.

In both cases, I had grown to hate my job to the point of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. It depressed me to work for people who seemed to take such pleasure in criticizing my work. I continued to do my job, not even perfunctorily, but well, but it was no use. I became withdrawn, uncommunicative, and argumentative even as I was trying my best (admittedly not great) to do as I was told. Once again, I find that I do not have the constitution of a good little girl.

In addition to being fired twice, I have been laid off and once I got offered a severance to leave when my boss went unnecessarily ballistic and cursed at me. But I've also had managers who I liked and who liked me. Interestingly, a couple of them have gotten fired along the way, as well

Is there a lesson to be gained from my experiences? Probably not, but I do think that a certain worldly caution is inevitable after such earth-stopping events. Or perhaps the lesson is simply that I'm slow to learn my lessons. No wonder I spent so much time in the "Thinking Chair" in second grade.

Tomato Confit

2007-10-04T21:09:00.000-04:00

I’ve been making batches of Tomato Confit. Timo found the recipe in the Zuni Café cookbook, exclaimed with satisfied glee, and passed it along. I’ve picked a lot of plum tomatoes at Waldingfield, washed, sliced, salted, added garlic and basil, covered all with too much olive oil, and roasted half-a-dozen batches at 300° for two hours or so. Almost every night we have a fresh batch to eat with bread and salad, and I’ve been piling up the left overs in a covered glass dish, which was almost full.

There’s enough oil in each batch that it’s easy to leave most of it in the baking dish and just layer in the next batch of tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. The oil becomes remarkably flavorful, almost rich with the concentrated flavors baked into it. The tomatoes themselves are baked long enough to remove almost all the water from them, and the effect is essentially sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil.

Which brings up the question of what percentage of tomatoes sold as sun-dried are sun-dried? I suspect it’s very low. But oven-dried tomato isn’t a particularly appealing name. It brings up images of limp stewed tomatoes. So confit, which I’ve only known as various forms of meat packed in their own fat, seems like an apt name for the result of the long, slow roasting.

Today, I reheated the accumulated confit in the oven and canned it all in pint-size jars. It looks quite beautiful and the jars sealed nicely. I think that we have at last found a way to store tomatoes for use through the winter. I want to make much more, and I have another batch in the oven right now.

Book Review: "The Tipping Point," by Malcolm Gladwell

2007-10-04T20:59:00.000-04:00

I read about 100 pages of The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, a best-seller from 2000 and an inspiration for Make it Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, a current best-selling business book published last year. The connection is only significant because all my colleagues have read Make it Stick, and the book has become something of a bible at work (or more like a false god, perhaps). I’m not happy about this, but first, The Tipping Point.

The point of tipping points, a term not coined by Gladwell, is that there is an observed phenomenon that crosses disciplines such as epedemiology, population growth, advertising/marketing/fashion, and, by association, business. So while it’s important to figure out how the 1918 flu epidemic tipped from garden-variety influenza to the fierce killer of the 20th century, we’re also supposed to believe that the great Hush Puppy phenomenon of the late 90’s, when fashionably counterculture lower east-sider males of the late ‘90s caused a nearly-forgotten shoe brand to become a must-have, was equally important in the annals of tippiness.

Is it just me or do other people find the codification of anecdote as scientific fact bothersome? I suspect that the popularity of this practice puts my sort in the minority. Gladwell is guilty of this sin of elision, as are the Heath brothers, as is every so-called business book I’ve ever attempted to read through. Some, like Good to Great, required reading at my previous job, attempt to hide the anecdotal reality of their evidence in a sea of statistical observation, failing to recognize the first lesson of statistics (at least for me), that a correlation is not a proof. More often, it is simply the diet-book effect—it worked for me and my friends, so it’s obviously a good diet—the proof is in the pudding.

Perhaps it all boils down to The Power of Suggestion. And with this aphoristic beginning, I could write my own solution-to-all-ills business/diet/self-help book, but though a powerful temptation, I shall endeavor to resist. I will not write about connectors or disseminators or agents of stickiness. I will eschew type-A personalities and carbohydrate loading and all things karmic. I feel no urge to simplify what is necessarily a richly complicated world.

At the same time, I feel compelled to say more about tippiness and stickiness. The Heath brothers mention the tippy book as one of the inspirations for their sticky book. In fact, they pretty much re-branded the whole tippy idea as the sticky bible. Their book is an unabashed guide to making your business sticky, as if a few key thoughts could take any good idea and make it great. Essentially, they’ve homogenized the range of anecdote from Gladwell’s book, pasteurized the idea of the straw that broke the camel’s back, added an unhealthy dose of does and don’ts, and created a guide to ruining any spark of imagination or creative thought.

On the other hand, this is really want most people seem to want—a sort of pabulum for the narrow mind. I bridle and become peevish when forced to digest such revolting stuff. At least Gladwell is a good writer, and I probably could have finished the book if I hadn’t started with the Heath’s. Their book is a model of excess and repetition, and it’s not even very long.

I wish that Gladwell had talked about the study of tipping points more and spent less time trying to define the sort of people who can cause tipping points. Perhaps this came up later in the book, but I didn’t have the patience to find out. However, I thought that this definition from Wikipedia was as interesting as anything I read in the book.

“In sociology, a tipping point or angle of repose is the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common. The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with the fact in physics that when a small amount of weight is added to a balanced object, it can cause it to suddenly and completely topple.

“Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families would remain in the neighborhood so long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point." The idea was expanded and built upon by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling in 1972. A similar idea underlies Mark Granovetter's threshold model of collective behavior.”

I’ve moved on to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Einstein. What a relief! It’s nice to be able to use words like brilliant and genius and have them applied appropriately. There’s no need for exaggeration and no attempt to say that you, too, can be an Einstein. It’s pretty much statement of fact, elegantly presented, written in a lucid, readable style, full of worthwhile detail, and entirely fascinating.

You can't be careful enough

2007-09-07T21:05:00.000-04:00

Today was a day of two scams, one for me and one for Timo. Timo's was the more egregious, but mine was likely the more bothersome.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join a relatively new social network called Quechup by someone I trust and who is also pretty deeply involved with social networks. So I did the free sign up, looked around the site a bit, connected to my gmail directory, didn't find much of interest, and dropped things there. Today, I started receiving bunches (does email come in bunches?) of automated replies from people who were on vacation. This confused me as I didn't think I had sent any of them email.

Then long-lost acquaintances started writing. It was nice to hear from some of them, but others were mysterious. Then it became clear that these were all responses to invitations sent from Quechup to join my network. Had I hit some send button inadvertently last week that caused a slurry of messages to gush out to everyone in my address book? I started sending apologies. Then a friend wrote to say that Quechup was well-known for "aggressive spamming of mail directories." Not only was everyone I knew being spammed: family, friends, acquaintances, professional contacts, doctor's offices, schools, mailing lists…, but I had been spammed 1000-times over!

Superficially, it appears that this is a non-destructive spam, but how many people will be annoyed to receive email that has appeared to come from me and never wish to hear from me again? And now I'm getting invitations from all sorts of Quechup members who I suspect are being spammed just as I was. I better get online and start deleting my entire profile.

Then there is Timo's eBay spam-of-the-day. He sold his iPod for a price that seemed too-good-to-be true. Then he noticed that the account with the highest bid hadn't been used since 2004. He received a PayPal notification with his name on it, but it wasn't from a PayPal address. The shipping instructions were for a store location in Nigeria, even though the account was American. Finally, he received a message from eBay saying that the winning account had been hijacked and the sale nullified.

eBay has relisted the item, but you'd think they could have made the sale to the runner-up bid. And the sad part is, there's really nothing he could have done to change this outcome. eBay is a dangerous place, and sadly, the entire Web is full of pitfalls. We're still browsing in the 21st century equivalent of the wild west. Browser beware!

Book Review: "Kitchen Confidential," by Anthony Bordain

2007-09-07T20:45:00.000-04:00

This is really yesterday's post, but I don't see a way to back date it from when I'm writing it, which is today.

I finished listening to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bordain's autobiography in the restaurant business. It is profane in the extreme, descriptions are grossly exaggerated to the point of unbelievability, and it doesn't hang together with any sort of theme (does it need to?), but I liked it nonetheless. Partially, I just liked how true-to-character the whole book was, and having Bordain read it in his somewhat lower-class-sounding New Jersey accent, made it seem all the more genuine, despite the exaggerations.

The fact is, Bordain isn't as lower-class as he sounds. He's rather well-educated and well-read and this is evident from his vocabulary, powers of description, and knowledge of his craft. I liken him to the cooking equivalent of Bruce Springsteen—seemingly working class New Jersey on the surface, but completely savvy and talented in reality. Bourdain is proud of his accomplishments, but writes with vivid savageness about his past excesses as a drug addict and general live-for-the-moment type of guy. And while he doesn't seem to regret anything he has done, he speaks kindly of others who came up the ranks with their passion for food as primary motivator and not the love of rank and money as he did.

But if Bourdain had been refined, his book wouldn't be so entertaining. In the end, he really does love food and cooking and he's totally devoted to his faithful staff, which is clearly a big deal in the New York restaurant scene. Most surprisingly, after many descriptions of debauchery in and out of the kitchen, we learn that he's been married to the same woman throughout the book! So I even ended up liking Bordain. I wouldn't mind reading his other books, including a couple of kitchen novels.

New iPods! Are we still excited?

2007-09-05T17:03:00.000-04:00

Up in the sky! It's an iPod! It's an iPhone! It's iPod Touch. Huh? Even Apple has their moments of branding clumsiness, but perhaps it's just hard to get excited about a new form-factor iPod that's really just an iPhone with no phone. But like the name, this is either a great moment of marketing savvy, or a fill-in-the-gap product that means more for what it isn't than for what it is. What do I mean by this bit of confusion?

My first impression of the phoneless iPhone had to do with my eldest son, Timothy, whose music library expands to fill any available disk space. Great, I thought, a "cool" new interface for his next iPod. But then one notices that the iPod Touch is only available with 8gb or 16gb, one tenth the capacity of the updated iPod Classic. There are modestly updated Nanos and Shuffles, as well, which is nice, but not really the big news here.

So who is the iPod Touch for? Answer: all the people writing to Apple to say they'd really like an iPhone, but don't like or can't use the AT&T Wireless network that iPhones are wedded to. If I'm right, then this is not a key, long-term market, merely a stepping stone in a mysterious strategy for ubiquitous electronic media branded by Apple.

I choose not to join into this guessing game, but Apple TV, which is not exactly a revolutionary hot potato, and the iPod Touch, want to lead somewhere. The question in my mind is if, like two parallel rails vanishing in the distance, they will come together at some point? I'm in no particular hurry to find out, but I like to think that Apple knows what it's doing and that these pointers, place markers, interim solutions, whatever you want to call them, will all make sense in retrospect.

At the same time, Apple gets to collect huge amounts of genuine market research on everything it sells, and make money at the same time. It doesn't matter that the iPod Touch looks disappointing to me or that it feels like just another new flavor of cereal in the marketplace, it's almost as if Apple can't lose these days. So I'm see today's "big news" as further indication that Apple is staying ahead of all who would copy their success and at the same time plotting moves well ahead of any possible response from its would-be opponents.

Software Review: Why Scrybe?

2007-09-04T21:03:00.000-04:00

Despite my generally skeptical nature, I like Scrybe, or at least I like what I've been able to glean from the iscrybe website and video overview. Like any new product with as-yet-to-be-determined potential (it's intended to help keep life in the Internet age somewhat more cleanly organized) Scrybe feels over-hyped.

Scrybe is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today's lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.

It would not be hard to rewrite this sentence to mean something, but you'd need to know what it was meant to mean before you could do it. But somehow I have let me hype-defenses down and wish that I could be a part of the beta ("temporarily closed"). I watched the video overview and liked what I saw, at least partially because I was ready to like what I saw. I am the market for this product. They know what I struggle with every day and their solution appears to work the way I work—at least this is my impression.

This isn't really a full-featured organizer, at least not yet. It includes a calender, todo lists, and "thoughtstreams," but no integration with address book or email functions. Thoughtstreams don't interest me, though it might be that if I knew what they were, I might find them useful. But even though my hype-defenses are down, I've still got buzz-word defenses in tact.

What really appeals to me is the simple ability to integrate todo lists with calendar events in a way that maintains context. In other words, lists have an awareness of the calendar state. So as you look through by month, week, or day, the lists reflect your view. At the same time, the user interface has an elegance I haven't seen before, though I can't really be certain of this perceived quality until I can actually try Scrybe out.

Scrybe also has another big plus in its favor. Adobe has made a major investment in the company. Scrybe is written in Flash and one can only assume that they'll be able to add much more functionality by adopting Adobe's rich Internet Application tools, Flex and AIR, and they'll likely have a lot of help doing this. One futher hopes that the next somewhat more public release will be even more elegant, functional, and innovative, and that there will be a version running in Mac OS X Tiger.

I blog because I am

2007-09-03T14:53:00.000-04:00

It is necessary for me to blog. I have resisted the urge long enough. I have no pressing subject on which to blog, but blog I must. In fact, I write this for myself in the hopes that the act of writing will reveal the reason for writing.

Today's blog is about family and falls on Labor Day, a good time to begin. Katharine and I are home with Hoover (Corgi) and no children. The three boys are away at school, and though this is not the first time we have been home without children in nearly 22 years, it will be our longest stretch without their daily distractions so far. This "opportunity" to look inward, to reflect on one's own lack of productivity, is as much my reason for starting this blog as any.

Perhaps it is the need for discipline, a vague hope that writing regularly about anything will lead to more purposeful writing. And then assuming that I enjoy writing, that writing brings some sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction (in a good way), I hope that some writing will lead to more and better reasons to write. Somehow, this will all be magically revealed to me as I wander from reflection to reflection.

Here's to hope!