I am an avid google reader user, as are many people I know.  When I first started using it, I was adding a new feed every few days, but I started realizing that once I added a feed, I felt obligated to read everything.  With a couple dozen feeds, some with multiple posts a day such as Treehugger, it's a losing battle.  I generally have somewhere between 200-1000 unread posts at any given time.  In fact, I use my unread posts count as sort of a barometer of how busy I've been lately.  Weekends are nice because few sites update, and I usually have time to whittle things down a bit, but I rarely get down to zero.  When I do, I wind up in a mental state that I can only describe as hyperinformed, since I've usually crammed hundreds of bits of info from some amalgamation of tech news, pop culture, and sports over the a short period

I've discovered that this secret hope, that I can stay on top of every feed, has made me reluctant to add new feeds, and that's my google reader dilemma.  I ask myself, is the information I'm getting enough to justify the additional feeling of inadequacy I get when I look at a high unread post count?  It's silly, because I should use the magic "mark all as read" button to make it all go away, but that somehow feels like cheating.  Instead, I think Google should add a "don't show me any posts older than X days" feature, since then I could at least cap feeds that tend to have news that "ages out of usefulness" like Techmeme.  When I can read it everyday, it's great, but three day old tech news is usually pretty stale.  

Do others out there suffer from this same problem?   Are you reluctant to add new feeds because you want to stay on top of everything?  How many feeds can one person reasonably be expected to stay on top of anyway?

I came across this brief South Park clip parodying the generally acknowledged ridiculousness of people's dedication to Guitar Hero, given that a similar level of dedication to practicing with a real guitar would lead to having an actual skill rather than a made-up skill that only applies to the game. In short, Stan's dad finds the kids playing Guitar Hero, shows them that he can actually play the songs on a real guitar, and they make fun of him and go back to playing the game. Later, Stan's dad sneaks down to try it out, and is terrible. This matches my experience in that real musicians tend to be terrible at first because the timing of the game is just enough off that you have to adjust your internal tempo to make it work, so if anything, it's slightly regressive to real playing. I'm sure it's worse for guitar players who have to fight the urge to go to the correct fret, versus me as a pianist who is only fighting the timing.

While lots of people have questioned the acquisition of this made-up skill, few have asked the question: why is it that people so readily prefer the fake world of Guitar Hero to the real world of Playing Guitar? In short, my answer is that Guitar Hero is a surprisingly good computer tutor, albeit for a made up skill, that does many of the things a good human tutor does, and it's a lot more fun too.  Good teachers tend to create students that come back for more, and this is what Guitar Hero is doing.

Researchers have been probing the question of why one-on-one tutoring is such an effective learning strategy. The problem is that the difference between a highly-trained tutor and a unskilled tutor is surprisingly small. Upon investigation, it appears that tutors tend to do a few things that seem to make a huge difference:

1. They help present and frame problems to provide a clear path for tackling subject matter. Often students have trouble knowing how to even approach a problem and knowing how to get off on the right foot makes all the difference.
2. They act as a source of general knowledge so that students can feel free to get clarification on issues in a way that they might be too embarrassed or hurried to do in a classroom setting, and which they might not have access to if they were studying alone.
3. This is the big one: they provide affective reinforcement in the form of praise and accolades for successful achievement, and this reinforcement is very close to the time of execution so that it has a very strong effect (unlike a test that you often take and then wait days for results).

It's a pretty simple set of things that almost any tutor seems to implicitly do, considering the difference it makes. Guitar Hero does a lot of this as well:

1. The problem of learning to play guitar is framed as the playing of and scoring on invidual songs, slowly increasing in difficulty.
2. Not really much here on general knowledge, but the subject matter of playing a made-up guitar is so contrived so as to make this somewhat irrelevant.
3. It's huge in this area: with crowd reaction, both in-game and often with people around you in the real world you get instant feedback, not to mention the overall "rock star" experience with star power, on-screen avatars doing all kinds of tricks, and so on.

In addition to this, it offers a few things that real-world guitar instruction can't hope to imitate: the concert experience, and the simplification of the instrument to a few frets while still allowing players to play actual music instead of twinkle twinkle little star.

So here's my modest proposal: someone needs to modify a guitar so that you have to actually play the real notes on the guitar in order for it to count. I did a search on "guitar hero real instrument" to see if this has been done. I've found the inverse and converse of this concept, with people retrofitting real guitars to play guitar hero. as well as using guitar hero controllers to make real music, but no one is stepping up to try to give people the ability to use all the support offered by guitar hero, but wind up with an actual skill. If anyone knows of an effort in this regard, I'd love to hear about it.

I have been fighting with jquery for the last few hours, and almost forgot to post. I'm still on the fence about whether jquery is a good thing, or a very evil thing. For now, suffice to say that it's nearly impossible to step through with the javascript debugger, and that in and of itself is really a hassle, despite the ultraslick syntax I will post more about my experience and complaints tomorrow when I've had some time to cool down.

With the WGA strike in full swing, I have spend a lot of time looking over the arguments and trying to understand the issues.  At first, the whole thing came off like a major league baseball strike: both sides have more money than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so who really cares?  After further review, not only is one side (the writers) clearly "the little guy" here, but I have a very self-serving reason for wanting them to win: I love content.  I like new ideas, new plots, new characters, it's the one and only reason I watch TV.  I need narrative; everything else is just window dressing.  I asked myself, when is the last time I saw a great TV show or movie with tremendous acting, but so-so writing?  Probably never, that combination is awful.  I've seen a lot of great shows with amazing writing and a so-so cast because it's the writing is what carries it through, despite the fact that that the actors get the big bucks.

I know from personal experience that good writing is just plain hard, and I admire those who can do it for a living.  Giving writers more incentive to create great works, or try out new ideas because they have a little money in the bank to risk will only produce better quality content for the future.  Especially since the avenue that is the main point of contention, receiving residual payments for content delivered in formats other than television and DVD sales, in particular, the internet, is about to open up dozens of new possibilities.  We seen these ideas scratched at with web puzzles, webisodes, and character blogs, but if we want writers to really take full advantage of these media, we surely want them to get paid to do it.  In particular, I liked the idea pitched by one writer, to just simply pack up their tents and head over to Google, and see if they wouldn't want to pay them decent money to put stuff up on YouTube.  I agree that this is management's worst nightmare.

I'd like to ask for something in return from the writers though: make it a matter of professional pride to continue to deliver new content instead of going the route of the RIAA and MPAA who have chosen to spend their time finding new ways to profit from existing content.  If you receive the desired 5 cents for a $2 episode of The Office, your incentive becomes greater to assist the network in finding a way to get 5 more cents from me instead of writing another episode.  I don't believe writers will do this, as they profit from their ability to create something new, but it's a concern that has lingered in the back of my mind since I first heard about reasons for the strike. 

Ultimately, I believe that the writers will prevail in the end because they hold all the cards, so it's just a waiting game.  In the meantime, I'll guiltily churn though all my backlogged TiVo content.  Or maybe I'll just keep watching the some old episode of Flavor of Love over and over again in an act of solidarity.

An interesting article posted on Yahoo discusses the classic dilemma of the employer, best summarized in the title of the Harvard Business Review paper referenced in the article: "Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?". The article highlights recent efforts by many companies, despite a serious need for new hires, to focus on weeding out potential employees that would end up clashing with the corporate culture through, dare I say, authentic assessment practices. My position on the best way to hire candidates is clear, but this is one of the first instances I've seen of companies attempting to insert more of their actual business practices into the hiring process, instead of more nonsense. A few highlights from the article:

The 1,900-person company is divided into 18- to 20-person teams. One
team is so close, the whole group shows up to help when one member
moves house, Napier said. Job interviews at the San Antonio-based company last all day, as interviewers try to rub away fake pleasantness.

"They're here for nine or ten hours," Napier said. "We're very
cordial about it. We're not aggressive, but we haven't met a human
being yet who has the stamina to BS us all day."

If you can pull it off, I love the idea of the full day interview, and I couldn't agree more that you need to give someone a chance to let their guard down so you can see what they will be like on a day to day basis.

In the mating dance of job interviews, employers traditionally put
their best feet forward, too, trumpeting their wonderful benefits
packages while leaving out the bit about working late, eating cold
pizza.

Not Lindblad. It sends job applicants a DVD showing not one, but two
shots of a crew member cleaning toilets. A dishwasher talks about
washing 5,000 dishes in one day. "Be prepared to work your butt off,"
another says.

"It's meant to scare you off," company founder Sven Lindblad said.

It does. After watching the DVD and hearing an unvarnished
description of life onboard a Lindblad ship, the majority of applicants
drop out, Thompson said.

It's hard to give prospective hires a clear sense of what the job is like day to day, and putting out a DVD is a great way to say "we work really hard and aren't afraid to tell you that" I'm sure the people that stick around are really committed.

KaBoom [a non-profit that builds playgrounds] sends prospective project managers to one of its four-day
playground building trips, with the actual build on the last day
involving 200 to 300 volunteers, many of whom have questions for KaBoom
staff.

"If they're not easily approached, or they're easily stressed —
this is the way we find out and they find out if it's not going to
work," he said.

Hammond wouldn't say what percentage of applicants drop out,
but he did say project managers' tenure has increased since they
started sending them on the trips four years ago, from one year's
tenure to between two-and-a-half and three years.

Changing the average employment term from one year to between 2.5 and 3 years saves what, $100K a year in spin-up and adminstrative costs? Not to mention the effect is has on morale. Employers so often fail to consider the real costs of turnover, and the true sources, and a mismatch between employer and employee expectations is so often the cause. That's why authenticity is so valuable: not only does it allow you to more truly evaluate a perspective hire's capabilities, but it gives them a chance to find out what it is they are signing up for.

So it's probably the collapse of the lending industry, and not my angry post a few months back that has brought them crashing down, but it still feels oddly good to see Citigroup in trouble. From their ridiculous customer service, to their constant upselling pressure, to their trigger-happy bill collection policies, I for one will not be sad to see them have to scale back operations, and I think in many ways, they are reaping what they've sown.

Recently, Steve Ballmer made some comments regarding social networking that were widely ridiculed (and probably more appropriately, labeled as self-serving since Microsoft has been looking to acquire a stake in Facebook and would be happy to drive down the price):

"I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there?s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people," Mr. Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

On his blog, Marc Andreessen wrote a response making use of a common conceit: applying comments about a modern phenomenon to historical phenomena in kind of a reductio ad absurdum argument. A brief excerpt:

"I think these things [televisions] are going to have some legs, and yet there?s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [hip hop music] are going to have some legs, and yet there?s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

"I think these things [mobile phones] are going to have some legs, and yet there?s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people."

Now, I assume his point is that so-called disruptive technologies are often dismissed at the time as a fad and, quite frankly, it can be very hard to tell a fad from something truly transformative. This brings up a larger question though: is social networking more like television, hip-hop, and mobile phones, or is it more like video arcades, pocket bikes, and the "Rachel" haircut? What features of a trend might we use to determine this?

I started considering this question recently because I have a guilty secret: I don't really get mainstream social networking site even though I make heavy use of technology in general. I certainly understand why teenagers and college students use them, and I take part in lots of implicit social networks via listservs and other online communities, and I've even made use of some sites like last.fm, but I don't see why I would care to get seriously involved in Facebook or MySpace (Andreessen's company, Ning, makes more sense to me for reasons that will become clear in a moment).

My issue is fundamentally about what one might call personal power. I remember reading one of the Carlos Castaneda books when I was younger, and Don Juan at one point counsels the narrator to cut off his ties with friends and colleagues back home in an effort to erase his personal history and thereby increase his personal power, which is diluted by his past and relationships (I'm strongly paraphrasing; I read this book probably 15 years ago, but this part stuck with me for some reason).? However you feel about the mystical mumbo-jumbo in these books, it's hard to not see the kernel of truth in this idea: you can increase your perceived status simply by limiting others' access to you.

This brings me back to the dilemma of social networking sites, and a rule that I've just made up that I'll call the inverse social power rule.? Simply put, the likelihood of finding a contact on one of these sites is inversely proportional to the quality of the contact. The problem is that people who have power have no need of additional access paths to themselves, while those who are trying to rise in the ranks are much more willing to be "promiscuous" in allowing social access in the hopes of making a connection with someone of higher status. Blogging uses the same logic: I divulge information about what I'm doing and thinking in the hopes that I might attract smarter, more interesting people to say or think nice things about me, and maybe give me some money to do some work for them (hint, hint).

So if I am a high-school or college student, and therefore I am generally on the weak side of the power equation in most relationships, social networking makes sense.? If I'm a CEO or a celebrity, I want to limit my access as much as possible and avoid social networking like the plague, since that's just giving the milk away for free.? If I'm somewhere in the middle, I want to be more like the CEO, not more like the college student, so I want to make extremely judicious use of these types of sites lest I give the appearance of a weaker social status.

You'll note that Marc Andreessen does have a page on MySpace, but he hasn't logged in in nearly 2 years, and has 0 friends, revealing basically nothing about himself. Now that's a MySpace page for a CEO.? As far as I can tell, there is no real Steve Ballmer listed there, although there are at least 2 parody profiles.? It's pretty much the same story on Facebook, although Marc does list his companies.? I somehow doubt he would respond to a poke though.

And therein lies my problem with social networking sites, and why I tend to agree a bit more with Ballmer than with Andreessen on this one, although I think Marc has a very different perspective because Ning is for building sites that allow for topical rather than status-oriented social connections, which breaks my power rule completely. I honestly believe that at this point in my life and career, I am better served by avoiding them than by joining them, and I wonder how many upwardly mobile 20-somethings are going to be frantically deleting their profiles from these sites when they realize that they have moved to the strong side of the power equation.

In conclusion, I have no doubt that entreprenurs can profit from social networking sites since they do have benefit to the ones that need them.? However, I ultimately believe that they will not have transformative power because unlike a technology such as a cellphone, which has become essential as a tool for increasing one's social status and only becomes more vital to the owner over time, social networking sites will continue to lose members just as they are becoming truly valuable, draining their ability to make a significant cultural impact.

Technically speaking, blogs are supposed to be places where you talk about things you've seen or read and comment on them, at least in one connotation of the word, which I rarely do here. However, I came across this article, discussing the origins and popularity of the "brain teaser" interview/recruiting format and seemed like a good way to return to my blogging roots.

I have previously railed against brainteasers as I feel that it has little or nothing to do with what software engineers actually do. In this article though, in addition to the classic brain teasers, it also discusses the use of estimation problems such as "How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?". The article failed to mention the historical context for these questions as Fermi Problems, but it offers a similar justification, via a Google employee:

Such questions are more relevant to a high-tech job interview than you might think. "Employers want to see if you can make an estimate in the ballpark, within an order of magnitude," says Mark Jen, a former Google employee who is now a program manager at Tagged.

and it goes on to posit:

Coders are constantly making educated guesses rather than calculating exact answers, so a good interview should probe how well a candidate handles such estimates. That's why Amazon.com interviewers, for example, have been known to ask job candidates to guess how many gas stations there are in the United States or to ballpark that bill for washing all of Seattle's windows.

I agree that we often need to make educated guesses instead of direct calculations, so it certainly is a more authenticate assessment than a brainteaser (in my opinion). The bigger question is: is this a useful skill to test in an interview setting? I believe that if the original intent of the Fermi Problem is actually observed, then the answer is yes. To me, that means two things:

1. Ignoring the actual generated estimate, or inputs used to the estimate in favor of looking at what the inputs were - In the classic Fermi Problem "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" the fact that someone wildly under or overestimates the population of the city is less important than the fact that they chose that as an input.
2. Paying attention to where they feel they need more information, and probing about how they might obtain it.

In addition, I would suggest choosing more domain-specific estimation problems. Instead of the cost to wash the windows of Seattle, ask them to estimate the number of bytes that are actually transmitted across the network to load a 100K HTML file in the browser, or the amount of power needed to keep a 1000 piece server farm at 90 degrees for an hour. In addition to understanding their estimation process, you will be able to see their mental model for the realization of these operations in the real world, which is the part I personally feel is the most critical.

I had a Citibank credit card. Technically, I still have it but I will be closing the account shortly. My recent experience has been a not-so-rare glimpse at how strange the business practices of a mega-corporation can be sometimes. This is not a story about fraudulent charges or bad customer service, just a sequence of events that made me doubt their ability to competently run their own business.

1) The story starts a few months ago when we received an ominous letter telling us that our card had been compromised and that we needed to contact their customer service people immediately. With us both in full possession of the cards, our overall rare use of the card (it's mostly backup for the rare occasions when our primary card won't scan or decides to go on fraud-alert freak out, or for when I'm traveling to help keep track of expenses), and my fairly elaborate attempts to keep our personal information protected (crosscut shredder, receive electronic billing statements only, etc) I wondered how that was possible and wondered if it was some kind of Citibank ad campaign.

It turns out that they were the ones who were compromised; Citibank had lost our information, and then sent us a letter making it look like they had ingeniously detected some fraud and proactively addressed it. They insisted on sending us a new card and an affidavit in case we needed to report fraudulent activity. They were not amused by my wife's sardonic questioning regarding their ability to protect this new account number any better than the previous one.

2) When I received the new card,we had to call to activate it as is customary. Normally, you dial a number and get an automated message asking you to enter the number and then it is activated almost immediately. We recently received a new card for our primary credit card account because it had expired and this is exactly what was necessary to activate the card. Citibank on the other hand has "pioneered", at least I experienced it with anyone else, the use of a live person to activate your card when you call. This provides them with the opportunity to cram some sort of up-sell gimmick down your throat when all you were expecting was an automated message.

This time around it was the new "credit protection" plan that everyone wants to sell you, where for a fee based on your balance, you can skip a payment (or 2 or 3?) if you lose your job or you have a serious medical incident or one of the other horrible qualifying conditions. I tried to explain to him that regardless of the fact that I don't take part in fear-based nonsense, if I instead took the money I would have been paying for the credit protection and stuck it in a savings account, I would easily be able to cover a minimum payment for a few months. Insurance only makes sense if the gap between the cost to insure and the cost to replace/repair is high (home insurance), or qualifying conditions are likely (car insurance). In this case, it wasn't even close. I wasted 10 minutes of my life trying to get off the phone without being rude, and then finally resorted to being rude since I had only called to activate my f&@$ing card.

3) After activating the new card I went to log on to the card site to check that everything was in order. Of course, I was naive to assume that because this card was the logical successor to the previous one, that card would show up. Instead, it showed our old account as closed and nothing else. I was forced to create a whole new username and account for this new card. That was annoying, but not terrible. It will be turn out to be important later on though.

4) This is more of an annoyance than a real part of the story: Citibank revamped their credit card website, and now whenever you go there you get a pop-over add thing that blocks out your access to their actual website until you click a few things. It's like they created a DIV that they position over the site, but instead of just making it the size of the ads, it blocks out the entire site with white. And this is just to show me ads for a product I already own. Keep in mind that I had to click through that thing a zillion times during the course of the ordeal I am about to describe.

5) A few weeks ago, I made a payment on the web site scheduled to take effect a few days later. A day after the day it was to be debited, I got an email from Citibank thanking me for my payment. I went and looked at our bank account and there was no charge. That seemed odd and I chalked it up to a timing glitch with online processing. When I checked the next day, still no charge. Then it hit me, I had another bank account that I had been using previously but which now had like $100 in it but I was too lazy busy to close. Going to look at that other account, I noticed that sure enough, a charge had been attempted and of course rejected for insufficient funds.

I was really mad for 2 reasons: first, I had no idea that bank account was even on that new card's account. It had been on my old Citibank card, and without telling me, Citibank had brought over that old information to the new account I opened. So it never occurred to me to double check that I had the right bank account selected because I didn't even realize that there was more than one. Why they could link my bank account after the fact, but forced me to create a whole new card account is beyond me. Second, why can't they ask if you have the funds available without actually debiting it? It seems silly for me to pay a bounced check fee when there is no person receiving the check, and no goods changing hands, etc. Why should electronic funds work exactly the same as physical funds? Especially with a huge conglomerate like Citibank would could save themselves and their customers huge hassles with a better system.

6) Now it got fun. My credit card statement showed that it had been paid, despite the fact that there was evidence that it had been rejected by my bank, so I couldn't just make another payment and be done with it because you can't pay more than your remaining balance. I called customer service who explained that they must not have been notified yet (which seems unlikely since it showed up in my online banking statement) but that the problem was that Citibank might keep trying to debit the amount depending on "what response they received back from my bank". So I was supposed to call my bank and find out how they would have marked the rejection, either as insufficient funds, or just denied. If it was insufficient funds, they might just keep retrying, with me incurring a new charge every time! She insisted that this was all done electronically and her hands were tied.

I called my bank and actually got someone who understood what I needed to know. He advised me that given that it wasn't an active bank account and had only a small amount of money, I should just close it and make it impossible for them to retry and incur additional charges, which I did (thanks guy at bank, you are the only person in this entire thing that had any interest in helping me!)

7) Fast-forward to today. Ten days after I originally got the bounced check notification, Citibank finally notified me about it. The best part is that their email says, in a nutshell "since your bank account was closed, we have disabled your on-line payment functionality until you call customer service". Remember that I have a perfectly valid bank account that I have used several times before to pay this card, and it was only because they decided to bring over an older bank account unexpectedly that this happened, and that I had already spoken to their customer service to explain the problem and was given essentially no alternatives. So now I can't pay the bill on line any more and have to call them. I guess I would have needed to call to close the account anyway.

The thing that bothers me most is that Citibank will feign interest in my leaving them when I call to close it, but they ultimately don't care about people like me except in some sort of aggregate statistical way. I feel at every turn their message is "we don't really care about making you angry or costing you time and money if it means we might make a few extra bucks because of sheer volume", which I'm going to call the "spam theory of business". After a decade of card membership with an ever increasing level of disinterest on their part, it's time for me to stop rewarding them.

Besides big projects eating up all my time, I did have one fun side pastime: a brand new T-Mobile Dash smartphone. The device, which is the same as the XTC Excalibur, runs Windows Mobile 5 (or 2005 as it's also called), has a full qwerty keyboard, and WiFi so it's pretty serious little thing. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it, and with associated tools. Here is a quick summary:

Pros:

• This is well covered in other places, but it just looks cool. It's got a soft textured rubber exterior on the back and it's easy to grip, and a brushed metal look on the front.
• Lots of useful built in applications, stuff for viewing word docs, windows media player (more on that in a second), an IM client, and mobile outlook.
• I bought it as a replacement music player after the untimely demise of my iPod, so I went out and bought a big (2GB) microSD card which, quite frankly, I could easily inhale if I weren't careful. It's about the size of a quarter of a postage stamp. Anyway, it comes with earphones that plug into the "micro USB" port on the bottom, and I have been totally shocked (in a good way) at the quality of the audio. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but compared to my old iPod, the bass is much better, and it just has a nice clear, rich sound. That really surprised me. I have been using the built-in music player, but I'm going to try out some of the other players and compare. Overall, I would highly recommend it as an ipod replacement thus far.
• It's a little slow switching between applications, but the applications themselves run without a hitch.

Cons:

• There don't seem to be that many applications available for the Windows Smartphone platform. For anyone who has tried to produce an application for the mobile world, you know that each platform has it's own set of capabilities and quirks, and so it's time-consuming and often not worth the trouble to develop for multiple platforms. Windows Mobile itself is actually divided into two branches: the smartphone branch and the PocketPC branch. The main philosophical difference is that the smartphone branch does not use a touchscreen, but there are other subtle differences. Therefore, you can't just grab from the huge slate of existing PocketPC applications, there has to be a smartphone version.
• Windows Mobile, like its big brother on the PC, is kind of uptight. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out where it wants me to put things and how to get things installed. Part of this is probably because I refuse to use the standard Windows tools and want to make everything work on Linux (more on this tomorrow), so Windows users may have less trouble with this. There is talk that some people have gotten Linux to run on these phones, but I'm not quite that brave yet.
• I got my email set up on it, which is very cool, but I have it check every 15 minutes or so for new mail and it insists on using the EDGE connection rather than the WiFi, and I have absolutely no idea how to change that. Overall the whole connectivity thing works, but mostly I just end up having the data service up all the time, and I only turn on the Wifi when I am browsing the web.

Tomorrow: Linux Tools for Windows Mobile