Which you might call: The Problem With Ideas Part II
Here’s a live example of me having an idea. And watch for why I think ideas take over…
Stop. Rewind. Imagine I’m back in Project Management class on the first night. But this time I’ve seen TV advertising’s DVR challenge at News.com.
Because I’m dirt poor, I haven’t been able to indulge in gadgets. I haven’t sampled the many cable and satellite television options. Why would I want to watch more TV, anyway? It’s hard to have a conversation with people sometimes, because I can’t figure out what shows they’re talking about. But what a tremendous waste of my time it would be to remain knowledgeable. Are there scholarly journals I could read to keep abreast? (Yeah - If you consider Entertainment Weekly) It’s bad enough I have to watch Simpsons Reruns.
I have been paying a little attention to the commercials on broadcast TV. For many years, I’ve been fascinated by the more artistic examples. Most of the clever ideas get on my nerves because of frequency. I’m really annoyed by one commercial split into two parts and run separated by another commercial. Half of the commercials seem to be about cars. Which I find weird, since I think of cars as a necessary evil - something for special occasions. I don’t have one, I don’t want one, but I will probably have to get one. And the next one I get is going to have to be cheap.
So, another thing I don’t have is a DVR. I have taped the occasional show. Alias and Firefly were on nights with frequent distractions, like late night bookstore inventory shifts. I got in the habit of taping every episode so I could watch them in sequence, and not be left with copies of only the episodes I missed. From the patterns of my computer usage, I already know that I prefer to have whole collections of related material to analyze/enjoy. It’s funny to look back five years at the commercials that were on when I couldn’t be at home. My instinct has always been to skip the commercials and that’s a big pain in playback. But I realized that I don’t hate commercials per se, I just don’t like the interruption.
Maybe cable could have metered channels. Think about it. You pay while you watch shows, and the system pays you back when you watch ads. That way, you could choose the balance. It would even be possible to make money by dedicating a lot of time to watching only ads. Sounds a bit like selling electricity back to the power company by installing solar panels. This aspect just occurred to me while I was thinking about being able to watch the commercials if you wanted to. Some of them are interesting, and worth seeing once, or even more times when they’re really good. And, you can already see that a lot of people wouldn’t mind sending tracking data back through the system. Heck, that news.com article talks about having fun with a kind of scavenger hunt.
Is this a useful idea? Was there an idea here at all? Can someone explaint to me what it was? Would it have worked in the context of something called “Information Technology Project Management”? Have I just been rambling through a web of ideas? Fragile as in the web a spider weaves?
Maybe there are several ideas that I’m mashing together. Is that such a bad thing?
The question becomes: I imagine a cable or satellite TV system with metered viewing. The high-tech viewer tracking problem is largely tackled by your Nielsons, or at least a lot of energy is going into it. The viewers don’t just keep a journal anymore. You probably need TVs with motion detectors and IR sensors to register warm bodies. Maybe viewers have to ‘click in’ to keep the segments loading. That would get truly annoying with a long program, but with shorts or ad viewing it would make perfect sense. There is an ancillary way in which the program distribution also carries tracking data, or becomes a conduit for better targeted marketing. Surely, a lot of people are engaged in designing this type of system right now at Microsoft or wherever. Otherwise, why all the Media Center PCs? And floods of strange advertising patents? I think for some of these reasons there are some real barriers to entry.
What I’m learning about myself is that - at least in this realm - I am painfully literal. Daydreams of this variety are fun, but anything I can’t accomplish myself seems like a lost cause. My world is clamped down right now. I still find it amusingly creepy to see people with cellphone headsets, little music players, and other strap-on gadgetry I can’t identify. I clamp down on my ideas for a good reason. I’ll never prove anything to anybody with pipe dreams about rolling out web applications to a school system (Really - that’s the project my group is working on). I can’t seem to wrap my mind around a fabulously large project, even if we are just making up the details. It would seem a whole lot more useful to concentrate on things I could actually do. That making up the details part takes it too far from reality, in my view, to do any good.
Posted in infogami-blog, school, film-and-TV, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 24 May 2006 20:10:00 GMT
When I get an idea, I just want to start working on it. I don’t know where the ideas come from.
But an idea will take over. I will want to work on that idea to the detriment of everything else. If I’m really going to start working on an idea, I won’t be at work on time, or clean my apartment, or remember to pay bills. So in the interest of getting along, I’ve learned to suppress ideas. I can usually fend them off, pushing them to a corner of my mind. If we suppose that I’ve got to live in this world, then ideas are poisonous.
So when somebody asks me for ideas, it’s no wonder I’m suspicious of the very notion that I might have one. If I start revealing that I have ideas, then I could open up all kind of trouble. Sound a little Post-Traumatic, wouldn’t you say? I’ve managed to close the valve. I can’t really open it on command. I can only do it in a supportive environment where I can have all the time I need, and most of the resources.
Posted in infogami-blog, ontology, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 24 May 2006 13:53:00 GMT
What does knowledge consist of? If knowledge is supposed to have some utility, than most of what I know is useless in my current situation. What is the point of anything? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, so I can’t know what I’m supposed to be learning. I already know so much… I expect I can just start working, and it won’t be any different than anybody else.
Look at what I just wrote in BIS325:
Effective navigation is essential in a quality web site. Identify effective navigation techniques and post links to examples on the web.
Pike Place Fish Market
This might have something to do with my own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, but I think good navigation should be very easy. It is a trivial task, once you know what exactly it is that you offer. The fish market sells fish, so does the web site also sell fish?
Two kinds of people arrive at a web site in my estimation: The first kind know your business already, and are expecting to see something in particular. So their thought process is “Where’s the fish?” Sometimes those people know the name, and sometimes they arrive from a search engine. The second kind are exploring, don’t know what they are looking for, and see what is available.
Every design has to consider both types of user. The designer might make a conscious decision to snub the explorers, but a portion of those users wind up as customers, so there is still some value to each of those visits.
Which brings us to the navigation: Good navigation accommodates both types of users. The categories have to be worded just so. Users miss what they are looking for because the right link suggests something that they aren’t looking for. It is a process of elimination. Users are not necessarily in a hurry, but something about the computer makes everybody impatient.
Posted in infogami-blog, school, web-craft, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 23 May 2006 22:44:00 GMT
One deep issue about Web Design: I think the ideas structure themselves. When my bookstore originally decided to have a website, it exposed a fundamental problem with the business itself. Namely, there was no structure. There were some suggestive features. We had a bunch of different stores. We had cleanly separated Book and Music departments. We did institutional and mail order sales. I think maybe we were intimidated by the enormity of the Internet. There was also a definite culture: What we already did was working, so why muck that up. The futurists or forward-thinkers among us were convinced beyond reason that having a web site would be a good idea, but we couldn’t explain why. We did plenty of newspaper advertising, and I kept returning to the idea that a website would share a lot of the same resources. Much of the work would do double duty. But those people at that time were mystified by the connection.
It was probably 1997 or 1998. I can see from the FTP server that the really old gif files all have “Mar 30, 1999” as their creation date. If memory serves me well, that would have been a server move. But, that may have been the right date. The very first generation of the site was on a houseboat. From there, it moved to an office on K Street. I saw those offices once, and I should be able to figure out when that was, but no such luck. When that building was renovated, they moved across the street. I was taking on some maintenance chores, and finally, in 2003, I went to get a tutorial. By then it was in an office in Southwest DC, by the waterfront (still the guy with the houseboat, but the server was on dry land).
Since then, the hosting business was sold to a guy in Gaithersburg. I have made a lot of major revisions to the site in that time. I read about XHTML and Stylesheets, so I felt obligated to try them. (Okay, fine… the stylesheets are a bit messy). There was one little chunk of Javascript that I linked out to its own file. I worked very hard on graphics. I did it all with a text editor, and my own copy of Photoshop CS. The main title database is on another site, but we kept a supplemental list for specific product like an author events calendar, bestsellers, signed books, buyer’s choice, used books and other features. That used MySQL, and I had Access to connect to it. I spent most of my time extracting and reformating title information from our main computer. It felt right to develop queries, forms, scripts and Visual Basic code as helpers. There were also Perl scripts on the server to generate the HTML page lists from the database and build the mailing list emails.
I was spending so much time building title databases, and reformatting graphics, that eventually in their infinite wisdom, my bosses decided that we were refusing to use many of these services at no extra charge from the shopping cart site. They specialize in bookstores, so they maintain an otherwise very expensive title database. Think of it as Amazon Junior. This arrangement caused the Books and the Records to be split from the very beginning, and I think they will never be reconciled. I doubt CDs will exist for much longer. We had to give up a lot of control so that I could spend less time fussing over it. But there was an ulterior motive! They worried I was leaving, and they needed a form driven approach to modifying the site. I should probably we working on that right now.
Posted in infogami-blog, olssons, web-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 23 May 2006 17:00:00 GMT
I’m still having trouble figuring out a project to do for the web design class. It’s very late, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t shop for things on the internet because I don’t have any money. All the sites in my bookmark file are research, news, and information related. I ordered my Graphire pen tablet on line, but that was after seeing it in a store first. If they get rid of stores, I’ll be unable to shop. These creative choices are always disturbingly difficult for me. I start to draw a blank. No option seems to fit at first glance, and they all eventually become too simple or too complicated. I feel better prepared to translate an existing idea. I thought I was creative, but where’s the proof? I never do anything creative anymore. I’m creative about my inner world. I can change how I see things. I can disturb ideas, but I can’t settle them. I can’t fix and idea to reality, because the ideas can move better without it. I’m happier about nonsense.
Sometimes it seems that all I really needed was for someone to tell me what all those job descriptions entail. What does a Network Administrator do? Or an Electrical Engineer? Or a Web Programmer? I can do a lot of those things, sort of. The distance between me and those jobs is quite small. But I don’t want to get pinned to an idea. There’s no term for what I want to be. I couldn’t ever have told anybody I want to grow up to be X. I had fleeting interests as a child, and I still do now. I could be good at one thing or another, but I couldn’t take it seriously that I might be one of any title. What actually happens in these jobs is so different from place to place - but I suspect that, I don’t really know. I find myself simply wanting to go around observing what other people do. This is very recent. I think I need to study the people I should be like. Before all this I didn’t want to be like them, so I didn’t care what they were like.
Posted in infogami-blog, ontology, web-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 23 May 2006 05:18:00 GMT
But, there were no wires… It was all done wirelessly!
My wonderful girlfriend went to BEA yesterday when I was at work. I’ll try to say that without any sarcasm. I had to make the very difficult choice of not going. That’s life. But I wish people wouldn’t rub it in. She probably didn’t mean to. She had to go to a funeral, and it was the only day she could go. She’s not in classes right now, so she is theoretically as free as a bird.
Christina called me at about 3:30 yesterday from the Convention Center on her cell phone. I am not impressed with cell phones. I never have a good conversation with anybody using a cell phone. I see a day coming (if it isn’t already past) when I will need one, and I dread it. They are an inferior communication device - especially if you are trying to economize. Good service is certainly something you have to pay for. And everybody I know with a cell phone is stingy. I was already talking to my parents when she called. They almost always call me at work on Sundays because I won’t answer the phone at home. Most of the time telemarketers are calling. Surveys and creditors are next. Then, wrong numbers. And occasionally, somebody I know calls. My parents have adapted - they only call me at work, where it’s my job to answer the phone. Unfortunately, that’s a help-desk line, and I get the impression from anecdotal evedence that for the hour we talk, other callers get a busy signal. I think this was why Christina wound up on another phone extension. As luck would have it, there was somebody in on a Sunday to hear that call. Things would have gone a lot more smoothly if there were not.
Christina was weighed down with free crap from the convention. She wanted me to leave work early and meet her for dinner. She was travelling on the Metro, so that limited our choices. We both knew that some books had arrived for her at the Dupont Circle Olsson’s, and I thought she would want to pick those up, but she said NO. She already had a lot of weight to carry… (and so would have to do it another time.) In the meantime, there was a lot of ambient noise on her end, I was having some difficulty understanding her, and you have to keep chattering to be sure the cell phone person knows there is still a person on the line. She was reasoning out loud, sounding out different options and I had to make mental calculations about what I absolutely had to complete before I left work, and how long it would take. She suggested Teaism for dinner. Then she couldn’t decide which one. She pushed me to decide. I like the one in Dupont better, except that it is smaller and so is always crowded. She said to hurry up and decide because she was “running low on minutes”.
Why is it my problem if you are too cheap to pay for cell phone minutes? That is your problem. I don’t even want to know about it. I see no advantage to rushing a decision in this context. Call or don’t call. Ask me to think about it for a while and call again later. There are so many strategies. I have a lot on my mind, and I’m not even hungry. I trust that I’ll be hungry later, but with all the stress between work and school, it’s not a sure thing. That’s cool that my girlfriend wants to spend time with me, but I’m actually going to be in a crappy mood. I’m a little jealous that she got to go and I didn’t, I’m a little ill, and I don’t realize it yet at the time.
So at 4:45, I arrive at Teaism in Dupont. Christina is nowhere to be found - I read a book for a while, but I was starting to nod off, so I had to get up and walk around. I walked to the Metro and back. She said it would take her a while to get there, and I thought I was early because I bolted from work, leaving a major task for later. So I was feeling ill and sleepy, standing on the corner watching for her. I was too close to home not to consider making a pit stop. At 5:30 I ran home. When I’m tired and under a lot of stress, I like to keep close to home base. All my priorities are stripped to the basic level. If I can’t get some work done, I like to sleep it off to be refreshed later on as things get more crucial. At home I checked my voicemail, and looked around for her cell phone number. No messages, and I couldn’t find her number. Where could it be? It was lost in the shuffle with the painters, I’ll bet. I looked at my bed, and it was so hard not to lie down in it. But it didn’t seem too late to run back and find her. I knew how upset she would be if I didn’t show. So I waited again at Teasim. At 7:00, I was completely fed up. All I could think about was all that wasted time. My last idea was to stop at Olsson’s and ask them. They said she was there “earlier this afternoon.” It’s quite possible that she gave up much earlier. But she never did call, so I figure she is mad at me. She ought to know that this is how these situations usually play out. She will claim ignorance about where she told me to meet her. I was tired, but I know what I heard. I heard a lot of different things, and the last thing seemed to be the decision. She filled in the detail about meeting at Olsson’s, but I remember that she didn’t want to go there, and I remember the reason she stated. She was also being presumptuous, thinking I could just leave work any time on a Sunday, when I’m working out my 40 hours, and my tasks are planned down to the minute.
Posted in infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 22 May 2006 17:38:00 GMT
I get upset about work that doesn’t produce results. Some of that work needs to be done in preparation, but the completion of sub-goals is part of what helps me fend off distractions, like… other work that will produce some immediate results. It takes a big leap of faith to assert to myself that the best use of my efforts is banging my head on some thankless task, when I am putting off other things I needed/wanted to do; Things that are narrow windows of opportunity. It’s not so easy to prioritize a task that will take hours, days, weeks(!) and not bear any fruit. Time sure looks wasted when I do that.
This probably belongs in a discussion about long-term projects.
Posted in infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 22 May 2006 16:46:00 GMT
I’m hoping it does me some good to constantly complain. The particular hope is that I am forced to think about all sides of an issue. Although, I imagine it might cause the reverse; cause me to channel my thoughts on well-worn pathways.
It is with this idea in mind that I bring up some thoughts about Business Management in General, and this Project Management class I’m in, but most specifically… the Group Project. I promise not to merely complain! I have in mind a way to use my complaints as a rubric to apply to other problems:
When we sat down in our groups that first night of class, we were lacking some of the puzzle pieces. If I hear the phrase “That’s the way it is in Real Life” one more time, I’m going to scream. Here are a few ways in which that is correct, but I’ve added some rebuttals:
- You’re not going to know the people in your team. Not true all the time. You probably have some working knowledge of the people in your team. It may not be necessary, but that kind of familiarity is going to go a long way towards bridging other gaps.
- You’re not going to get to choose the project. Who says? And anyway, sometimes having a project imposed on you is pleasant. I see myself as a problem-solver. I like a challange. We wound up having a brainstorming session where we had difficulty communicating ideas with each other because, once again, we lack a shared background, and more than that, we’re not part of an organization engaged in business. A bunch of students are in the business of studying. A bunch of employees have already been engaged in that business activity. Add a few new hires to the mix, and it’s only different by degrees. BTW, do people really sit around in groups coming up with ideas for projects? Because, I think ideas come from immediate needs. In the Real World, I have to imagine that a superior either has an idea to peddle, or a widely acknowledged problem exists, and it’s just sitting out there like a target for the next clever person who cares enough to try / thinks they can get the glory. Yet another way that the people who will constitute your real group have a shared context.
- People have different strengths and weeknesses. Granted. You’re not going to know up front who is best suited for which tasks. But now I’m seeing a problem with group work altogether. I was looking at it like a sports team, and don’t I plenty of sports analogies in business school? But there are more customer-supplier relationships than anything else, aren’t there? We as a culture seem to love these scenarios where two groups of five guys battle it out on a basketball court, and it looks like they are “teams”. It’s not really about those guys - they’re only the visible part of the organization, so everybody tends to focus on them. Some of them are just there in case another guy gets tired, or injured.
- My list is falling apart. That’s a good enough reason to stop. Looking back, I haven’t changed my mind. No one Real World factor ruins it. It’s about how the deck has to be stacked for the sake of a class. If real world aspects are to be mastered, maybe this isn’t the forum for doing it.
In addition to all this, something I consider my own peculiar problem: Artificial situations bug me. Artificial situations do not fall on a spectrum from Abstract to Concrete, or from General to Particular. Artificial situations pretend to be more concrete or particular than they really are. You lose the power of being abstract or general without really gaining much. I think the class I’m in sends the wrong message: Through this process of making things up, you will prepare yourself. But you’re skipping the power tools of generality, and you’re not getting any real experiences that allow you to build up the tools from the particulars. The worst part of it is, those tools are laying out for the taking. Other people have developed the healthy attitude “Don’t waste your time with things that aren’t on the test.” And I’m under too much stress to really try out the tools in the short run.
Why would you want to be specific with false detail? Now I realize that I’ve suddenly tarred all fiction writing. But think again: Not all fiction is needlessly artificial. Good fiction is true in the details, even if that particular story never happened. The artifice in fiction is surely the source of endless debate. I don’t even care for narrative all that much. Give me an idea-space to explore any day. I’ve heard a lot of the arguments, so you can probably save it: I think I know what good fiction consists of, and I think there are a lot of crappy writers out there, in addition to the good writers who make good novels out of ideas I don’t care about. There is a lot of crappy non-fiction too. I like a good novel, when I can find one, I prefer good nonfiction that isn’t so worried about telling a story, but best of all is a textbook. That’s right, I said textbook. I guess deep down I’m a scientist.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 May 2006 17:10:00 GMT
We’re not 100% at the end of it, but it looks as if I am not going to BEA. I guess I never convinced myself that it wasn’t frivolous. In a sober choice, BEA will always lose. Perhaps if I had a lot of time and money, a book convention would make sense. I’m also not clear on the ramifications. We had badges. We probably got a certain number free with our American Book Association dues. So nobody spent money on me that I carelessly let fall down a drain. But the truth is, I don’t really know.
I don’t appreciate it when somebody pays me that sort of kindness. It’s like one lane of traffic blithely waving you across to the other traffic lanes that aren’t stopping. No doubt, someone is going to be hurt and upset that I didn’t rush to my splattering because - damn it! - they were being nice, and I didn’t take the offer.
I guess I never do see this coming: “Having the convention in our back yard makes it more accessible.”
Well, actually no, it doesn’t. It’s much less accessible. I make these remarks all the time, and I could go around gloating about how “I told you so.” But, in the long run nobody respects that kind of prescience. They all think I’m being pessimistic. Even just pronouncing self-fulfilling prophecies. But really it’s one more example of the same old Catch-22: Nobody here would have splurged to send me away to a convention - I even get the feeling I’m not supposed to go. The rest of my life isn’t going to step aside so that I can have a break and go to my precious convention.
It really shows when I talk about these things: I’m not interested in high-stress situations. My choice would be to lie around thinking. But, I’m smart enough to know that isn’t going to work.
Posted in infogami-blog, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 May 2006 14:43:00 GMT
I’ve been up since 4:45am. For all the reading and writing I did yesterday, I’m still falling farther behind in schoolwork. I was planning on going down to the Book Convention for a couple hours, but I never got around to it. The big risk with such a heavy load is that the weight of things I need to do can depress me. I can’t afford that kind of indulgence. It sometimes happens that I will sacrifice part of my work load - just admit that I won’t manage to do it, but work that much harder on everything else. It does wonders for my work ethic, but my total record is blemished. I find it strange that anyone else should care: Isn’t it my goal to work harder?
We scheduled another group meeting in MGMT404 for this afternoon. It’s in Bethesda.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 20 May 2006 11:18:00 GMT
