This is the best blog post ever. Now you know.
You now also know how keywords work. And don’t work.
— Mark Barrett
Amazon Catches Fire
While the world’s landfills can always use more toxic waste, Amazon’s introduction of the Fire phone strikes me as particularly problematic for people in airplanes, airports, hospitals, restaurants, foxholes, firing squads, artillery batteries and crowded theaters.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone gets tossed off a plane for saying the wrong word at the wrong time. I would also like to believe that Amazon simply didn’t game out the possible implications beforehand, but given the amount of free publicity such an incident would generate I think it’s more likely that they did. Fire indeed.
— Mark Barrett
Pono Kickstarter Update
The Pono Kickstarter closed today, netting the third largest amount ever at $6 million.
While it’s still the only Kickstarter project I’ve funded, or even paid attention to, and it certainly had obvious advantages over rank and file projects, I think it’s a good example of how to approach Kickstarter funding at any scale. Or at least it seems to be from what I’ve read about such things over the past month or so.
It was obviously easy for the Pono team to add new rewards and new artists that had name recognition, but they did so in a well-paced manner that seemed appropriate to the project. There wasn’t a lot of fanfare or publicity involved, and I think that was in keeping with the overall tone. Welcoming, positive, maybe even a bit corny at times, but never slick or overbearing.
Updates were also regular, at 27 over the 30-day run of the project. Most of the updates were informative rather than sales driven, and several of them took pains to answer questions that bubbled up in the comments — another smart move given how eager trolls are to destroy anything they can get their hands on. On no occasion did I take the time to read an update and find it pointless or pedantic.
A certain amount of marketing-savvy and pre-production must go into high profile Kickstarter projects, but even at a much smaller scale I think the same process applies. Have a few new rewards in mind at launch, and if backers come up with others that are doable be prepared to shift gears and respond. Stay engaged with comments and answer trolls and backers as necessary, but always in a tone that makes you seem like the kind of person someone would want to give money to.
— Mark Barrett
Google Mail #825 Error | 2 Workarounds
A few days ago I started getting an error at the top of my Google Mail page. The error displays after I look at any message in my inbox, then attempt to return to the inbox. The error reads as follows:
Oops… the system encountered a problem (#825)
The error also displays a countdown notice that it will retry the operation in five seconds, and a button to retry the requested operation immediately. Neither waiting for the clock to count down and retry or retrying on command resolves the problem.
Workaround #1
I do not allow third-party cookies on my machine. Until recently disabling third-party cookies proved compatible with Google Mail. Now that seems not to be the case.
Changing my cookie settings to allow third-party cookies resolves the problem. Because I do not want to allow third-party cookies, and because I don’t think you should either, I do not recommend this workaround.
Workaround #2
When the error displays, clicking the refresh button will load the requested window, and seems to resolve the problem for the current session. Leaving GMail and returning reproduces the problem, but it can again be resolved with a single refresh of the window.
I don’t what change Google made to prompt this behavior. I found a thread on Google’s support site earlier today but both then and at the time of this posting no explanation was given for the error, or for any third-party cookies that Google may be allowing on Google Mail.
Update: I am no longer getting the error message as of 11/18. Hopefully the issue has been resolved, if not explained.
— Mark Barrett
On Willow Street
I am a pigeon. A big-city pigeon.
I am walking. Another pigeon is walking behind me. We are looking for food.
When I stop walking you may notice I stand with one foot up, as if I am injured. When I walk, you may notice that I am dragging a small branch with me.
The branch is stuck to my foot. I don’t know why it’s stuck to my foot, but it is. I am dragging it around with me when I walk, and holding it up off the ground when I rest.
I walk in a straight line, just back from the curb. The pigeon behind me wanders. If you stop to look at me and my branch I will walk around you and continue in a straight line.
If you move in front of me again I will stop and wait to see if you leave. If you don’t leave I will wait longer. If the other pigeon sees something to eat lying on the sidewalk in your shadow I will run to the food and eat.
If you come too close I will fly a few feet away. I won’t fly any farther than I would otherwise, but you will see the little branch is not keeping me grounded.
If you stay back just a bit more, I will stop and hold my foot up. If you move around you will be able to see my foot, but you will not be able to see what is keeping the branch attached. It may be a wire. It may be that one of my toes is stuck through a split in the branch. I don’t know.
If you stay where you are, I will stay where I am. If you wait, I will wait, too.
And I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you.
— Mark Barrett
The Missing iPad Review
I get the utility of hype. If you can work people into a frenzy about a given brand in a crowded marketplace, you sell more of that product. Fair enough.
But after you’ve got that spanking new Ferrari parked in the garage you’ve still got to take your three kids to school, including their sports equipment. After you’ve had that delicious pedicure or manicure, you still need to plant your garden or rake your leaves. And of course there’s all that gizmo-driven exercise equipment in your basement, which you used exactly twice.
Point being: it’s one thing to buy yourself something cool and another thing to use it in your day-to-day existence. Products that require a lot of care and maintenance generally get neither, meaning we tend to avoid those products or destroy them in short order.
Now that all of those how-the-iPad-will-change-the-fabric-of-the-universe-twice posts have faded into the coffers of Steve Jobs, I find myself confronted with a deafening silence on more banal points like utility and usability. If you’ve had an iPad for a while, and you’re using it regularly — or, alternatively, not using it regularly — I think you could corner the market on iPad news by answering any or all of the following:
- What’s it like to lug an iPad around?
It weighs 1.5 pounds. You can talk all you want about how that’s super-light for a laptop, but it’s still 1.5 pounds. The average person is not built to carry a weight like that, let alone manipulate it in one or both hands. (If you think I’m kidding, grab yourself a much-easier-to-carry 1.5 pound barbell and lug it around for a day.)
Weekend Reads
It’s an interesting time. Spring is busting out. Oil is washing ashore.
I’ve been in a low gear for quite a while now, partly for reasons of my own and partly due to circumstance. I feel like an upshift is coming, and that I’m personally ready to pick up speed, but the corners are still blind.
Do I need to keep my foot on the brake, against the straining engine, or can I drop the pedal and go? An interesting question, which I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to answer in advance.
It’s an interesting time.
- The Big Picture: April 30, 2010
I would give the first image a Pulitzer on the spot. The last image — if the hurricane-shaped sprawl is indeed oil — is rife with irony.
If you’re wondering how hard it’s going to be to clean up this oil spill, imagine that a crude-oil bomb has exploded in your closet and your job is to clean your clothes. The immediate response you just had — that you would simply throw away your clothes and start over — is not available to flora and fauna. They have to wear it.
- Shakespeare: The Question of Authorship
A book review about a smart book that takes apart all those entertaining claims that Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare.
Every mystery is not a secret. Every silence is not a lie. The play’s the thing.
Weekend Reads
Welcome to the independent writer’s life. Put up your short story collection at the beginning of the week, get pounded by malicious code injections the rest of the week.
To help keep your own chin high and lip stiff, I offer herewith a helping of distractions and items of interest that could very well make or break your ability to ever again confront the horrifying solitude of the keyboard. Drink up.
- FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram
Found this via a tweet by Levi Montgomery. Easily one of the Top 5 most useful bits of information ever posted on Twitter.
You laugh. I’m serious. Who can keep these things straight?
- How To Correctly Pronounce Authors’ Names
Another absurdly useful post. Bookmark it, or print it out for study in the library. (Make flashcards if you’re serious about name-dropping and party chatter.)
On the platform subject, does it help or hurt an author to have an indecipherable name? Does it make people less likely to reference you, or does it make them more likely to talk about you, if only relative to the difficulty of pronunciation?
Weekend Reads
Over the past two months I’ve had three people work on my furnace. In order to use both outlets on the nearby drop box, one of these people unplugged the sump pump, then neglected to plug it back in.
Have I mentioned that it’s been raining a lot lately?
In order to take our minds off the joy of clean-up, I offer these links of interest. How much interest I can’t say, but definitely more than you would have in cleaning up a flooded basement.
- How to Leverage Twitter When You Have Little Time
I have a general distaste for the idea of maximizing anything. Books or people who encourage me to get the most out of everything from my in-between moments to my entire life are invariably asking me to heighten my already heightened sense of awareness to the point of overload. I understand that time-saving procedures and efficient processes can produce benefits, but only if they are themselves simple to understand, implement and practice. As such, this link passes the minimalism test.
Twitter can take a while to understand precisely because you can’t really understand it until you’re using it. So take what you want here and ignore the rest. It will help.
- “World Press Photo” Contest Winners Gallery 2010
Found this link via my good friend, Jurie. I was particularly drawn to the images of street fighting from Kiev, Ukraine — a city I visited in 2008 while working on an interactive title.
I didn’t get to see that side of town.
- Art Is Everywhere
Note: this is an image-intensive site, and as such may take a while to fully load.
Back when the internet first burst onto the scene, this is what it was like. You’d find a site where someone had dropped anchor in order to look around, and it was invariably interesting to experience that person’s point of view. Today the average garden-variety site is sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, in keeping with a culture that cares more about being looked at and talked about than doing or saying anything of interest.
Give me a point of view any day:
I started this blog to show that Art is Everywhere.
That’s site-owner Ashley Spencer’s mission statement. And she’s right: it is.
- Roger Ebert: The Essential Man
Speaking of sophisticated, breathless, trendy and slick, it’s clear that Esquire magazine lost its way at some point. Now a caricature of its former self, Esquire currently rides the cutting edge of metrosexuality, cutting ever closer to the bone. If you know what I mean.
Real men don’t objectify women, and particularly not under the pathetic pretext of
oglingrevering them. If you can’t tell me why a woman is interesting as an individual without also showing me a two-page, soft-focus flesh-drape across a $9,000 divan, then your pictures are not actually worth thousands of reverential words.Which brings us to the eternal problem of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, the baby is a profile of Film Critic Roger Ebert, which answered a lot of questions for me. I knew he was sick, and that he’d lost the ability to speak, but I didn’t really know what hand he’d been dealt. I don’t think I ever really thought of the man as tough, even when it looked like he was going to come out of his chair and punch Gene Siskel in the mouth, but the man is tough.
Like men used to be.
Stay dry.
— Mark Barrett
Be Bold
I was reminded today of this:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
~ Goethe
It was probably two or three years ago when I came across this bit of pith, and it really hit home. Key to me is the fact that it scales: whatever you consider being bold, that’s your bar. You don’t have to compete with people who have deep pockets, or who were born into a family hard-wired with connections. You just have to try.
I also think it’s true. Or at least it’s been true for me when I’ve been bold in the past. I’ve had my ass kicked, I’ve swung and missed more than once, but in general I’ve come out ahead for being bold. I know that magic.
In a (mostly) amazing coincidence, I visited Goethe’s resting place in Weimar, Germany last year while traveling on business. He didn’t have anything to add.
Update: Maybe because the quote doesn’t actually come from Goethe. As near as I can tell after trying to nail this down, it seems to have originated with this guy.
— Mark Barrett