This song is resonating with me. It's in my heart and has found my voice. I admit to being a Christina Perry fan. I've been known to use the Repeat-1 option with some of her songs, and though I'm aware that she has critics and that some of her music is formulaic and downright grating, I still am enthralled by this.

Sea of Lovers
Christina Perri

A certain type of wind has swept me up
A chill has found each bone
I am overcome
There is an icy breath that escapes my lips
And I am lost again

A certain type of darkness has stolen me
Under a quiet mask of uncertainty
I wait for light like water from the sky
And I am lost again

In the sea of lovers without ships
And lovers without sight
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers losing time
And lovers losing hope
Will you let me follow you
Wherever you go?
Bring me home

A certain type of silence has filled my voice
I scream beneath the water and make no noise
All my prayers go quiet and never heard
And I am lost again

In the sea of lovers without ships
And lovers without sight
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers losing time
And lovers losing hope
Will you let me follow you
Wherever you go?
Bring me home

A certain type of wind has swept me up
A chill has found each bone
I am overcome
There is an icy breath that escapes my lips
And I am lost again

In the sea of lovers without ships
And lovers without sight
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers losing time
And lovers losing hope
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers without ships
And lovers without sight
You're the only way out of this
Sea of lovers losing time
And lovers losing hope
Will you let me follow you
Wherever you go?
Bring me home

Songwriters: James Eliot / Christina Perri

Sea of Lovers lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

image over practice

Apple's new bags when you buy something in an Apple Store are biodegradable. The old bags were thick plastic and threaded with a rope drawstring. The old bags conjured an image. The old bag image said, "I just bought something substantial that requires a sturdy bag that will keep the contents safe until they arrive safely at their new home." The thing about the old bags is that they were reusable. I have several of them around my house. My kids like to use them. Because they are plastic they can keep things reasonably safe from water. I've used those bags for various things--some to carry sack lunches, some as a hamper when traveling, some to carry books, some to wrap electronics inside my backpack when rain was likely. Apple's new bags are stiff, upright, paper sacks with a similar rope to the old bag, and they are biodegradable. The Apple people make sure to tell you that they are biodegradable. They're intended to be easily digestible by Mother Earth. The new bags conjure an image. The new bag says, "I just gave money to a company that cares about the environment." But, if you're not careful you'll miss the subtle message that comes from the shift in image. When you consider the old bag, the new bag says, "I just gave money to a company that cares about the environment more than their products."

I like the old bags. I'm not saying the new bags are a mistake. The new bags are only a mistake if snobby Apple customers don't prefer the new image. It's only a mistake if they like the image of "celebrating awesome products one bag at a time" to the image of "saving the planet one bag at a time".

I referred to Apple customers as snobby, but maybe that's unfair. Maybe the business strategy works best if they are shallow. I say this because I wonder how bio-economics would rate a very reusable bag against a single use biodegradable bag. In other words I wonder how many reuses it would take for a multipurpose bag to have a lower carbon footprint than a single-use biodegradable bag. It's the same thing as wondering whether the biodegradable soap, utensils, matches, and bags that I toss while camping are better for the environment than my backpack that I also take camping but reuse for 10 or 20 years. It's not obvious that the new bag loves Mother Earth more than the old bag. But, it is definitely obvious from an image perspective. And their message is not subtle.

And that's what's got me thinking about image over practice. I guess we all want to look good. In business it can translate to the bottom line. In personal life it can translate into friendships, conversations, and other intangible personal capital. But, looking good is different from being good.

I don't have any special praise or condemnation for anyone looking good or looking bad or being good or being bad today. If I had to rank my priorities it would be, from high to low: being good, looking good, looking bad, being bad. And now I'm going to go set that new Apple Store bag in the back yard to see how long it is before it totally biodegrades. Maybe I'll come back and update this post when it does.

we are bionic

Steve Austin. The 6 Million Dollar Man. Lindsay Wagner. The Bionic Woman. I couldn't get enough of either of them when I was a boy. I imagine that the bionic woman coming out later, when I was entering puberty, would explain why I had the hots for Lindsay Wagner, especially when she ran in slow motion in that Pocohontas outfit.  And I imagine that my referring to him as Steve Austin rather than Lee Majors is because I so wanted to identify with him. Steve. Perfect name for a bionic boy.

I was slogging through some college football schedules today, just trying to get a better handle on this wonderful season that has finally blown in. Slogging. I went to several popular news outlets like espn and foxsports. Both are loaded LOADED with information. The info is well-presented, colorful, and hyperlinked. But, it was a slog for me. Why?

Why are facebook and twitter and mmorpg's and porn and candy crush and farmville and whatever the latest corny games are such a time sink? And why was their predecessor, ebay, such a time sink?  In my opinion it's because we are all bionic. Our brains and eyes are so much faster and more powerful at processing information than programmers have understood.  And computers are weak at doing things like humans. As a result the computing interfaces we've ever seen have been awkward and time-consuming to us.

This might be hard to accept because of how infatuated we are with computers and computing devices like smart phones, tablets, laptops, and other shinies. They're so fast. They do so much. They bring so much information to our fingertips (until the latest cellular broadband gets flooded and has to be scrapped and replaced again--1G, 2G, EV-DO, EDGE, 3G, 4G, LTE--good grief, the history of cellular networks is like the history of the razor blade. I think we're on 5G with razor blades now). But, our infatuation is misplaced. Yes, computers have raw processing power, all those mips. But they don't process information the same as our brains. Our brains are bionic. They're OP.

Going back to the college football schedules, what I wanted to find was a very quick way to scan the whole season, jump to any team's schedule, see their rank, get team and opponent analysis, see the point spreads for today's games, see very quickly what times and what channels on MY tv the games are to be televised, and anything else I could think of. To be sure, all of this information exists. It absolutely exists. Out there. On the internet. I just have to hunt for it. And that's the time sink I'm talking about. And it's why there are experts at this field. The experts are the ones spending their whole life hunting and gathering this information. Hunter/gatherer. Primitive.

Our brains are capable of processing so much information in such a short time. And they are very sensitive to very small things. Things computers are light years from understanding. The best movie actors act with their faces, and they don't overact or we call that comedy. A small narrowing of the eyes can convey an emotional bouquet that would take millions of words to describe.  Our brains process that without the words, without if/thens or flowcharts, or other computing constructs. Or, think about when you're driving in your car on a road that's new to you, looking for a destination that's new to you. There's a lot of fatigue. That same road, after you've driven it a few times, is relaxing, and the time goes by faster.  There are millions and millions of pieces of information being processed by your brain the first time you drive that. Not just the speed limit and warning signs and traffic conditions. The leaves on the trees. The colors. The smells in the car and coming in off the road. The vibrations and bumps felt. The sounds of the car, the road, the radio. The blood in your veins. Heartbeat. Blood pressure. Digestion. Detox. Sweat. Tears. Breath. Conversations before the drive. Concern over kids, retirement, aging parents, lost love, all those other things that are occupying brainpower on the back burner, sliding forward at interesting intervals.

So what do I want from the college football sites, and from all web sites and all computer programs? I want a firehose. I want what Neo got in the matrix with the training programs. That thing is the least fiction of any science fiction I have ever seen. But, it will never happen. Why? Money. All of the Money have taken over information technology and their vested interest is in creating time sinks. facebook wants you spending hours and hours and hours on their site. Games use clever techniques to trap your mind. Other web sites do it clumsily and maybe inadvertently, thinking that they are organizing information well, but still trap us uselessly for hours. And porn, well, yeah. These digital all stars are the new predators. Predators that prey on bionic minds.  They are the new boob tube. The new idiot box.

We are bionic. In cages of digital kryptonite.

what he used to look like

I was reading a post that included a picture of the blogger at the bottom. I thought, I wonder how aged that picture is. And then I thought, every picture is what someone used to look like.

Social. I hate the term. Old people think they're so cool when they say it. But, the likes of facebook and pinterest and instagram and even facetime offer a promise of pictures of who people are, not who they were, as they shorten the timeline of picture development and distribution. It's a false promise.

Every picture is what someone used to look like.  Just like these words are what I used to think.

Every picture is what someone used to look like. Even celebrities, even yours, even mine, even God's.

Beyond mobility and modern apps

The problem with “mobility” and actually all applications is this. We need to move away from monolithic applications that are rules-based and very rigidly architected and towards applications that are more fluid, agile, and even evolutionary.

If you consider the classic example of an order management system, the rigid structure is plain. There are orders. Each order has properties associated with it like date, time, sales agent.  Order details have information about the individual items ordered, their status regarding availability, price, cost, quantity, and the like. Order headers usually summarize this information into totals. The desktop app usually allows a subset of orders to be chosen according to security access, and then allows the user to select an individual order to see its header information and totals, and then allows the user to drill down into the header to see the details for the individual items on the order.  And then, the user can sometimes do things with the individual items or even the whole order like cancel it, approve it for release from inventory, send it to shipping, or back-order certain items.  The so-called modern app, which is device-centric, can implement this functionality easily. SAP Fiori , for example, targets this particular app squarely.  Both modern apps and desktop apps can do this the same way, and it will work.

But, one of the problems that either platform has is the ability to pare down the work and get the user quickly to the right order or set of orders.  The way both solutions implement this is with filters.  The user needs to know in advance what filter to use to get the ones she wants to work with. The developer or IT department can help by pre-configuring some common filters like “open orders with a ship date within 5 days”, “orders with at least one item on back-order older that is 1 week past the original ship date” and the like.  The problem has always been that if there are not very many orders, the app works easily and delightfully. But then again, if there are not many orders then a pen and paper can run the business.  However, if there are many orders, the user might spend most of their time just trying to filter for the right orders or scroll through a large list looking for the right orders, so that they can finally enjoy the experience of “swipe-right-tap-once-and-you’re-done” that is so “delightful”.   We need to move away from all this.  What we need is for the apps to be allowed to learn and evolve so that they automatically surface to us what we care about and what we need to decide.

I’m not sure if this goes firmly under the category of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or not.  If you think about the way humans learn from an early age, it might help.  A child learns that some things are bad and others good.  Bad things could be inherently bad or artificially bad.  I touched the stove and burned my hand. That was bad (inherently).  I hit my sister and got sent to timeout. That was bad (artificially). I swam in the cool pool on a hot day. That was good (inherently). I ate all my meat and so I got pudding. That was good (artificially).  One of the differences between computers and humans is in the way we decide. Computers can iterate through enormous sets of data and analyze each one in a very tedious, monotonous way to come up with a definitive selection. Humans cheat. We use intuition, hunch, prior experience, elimination of nonsense, and the like, to arrive at answers quicker.  We process a lot of information but not in the same way computers do. I believe the answer to getting the most out of modern apps is to teach them the concept of good and bad, and empower them to use their iteration skills to arrive at the same place as humans so that we work together, so that the device is an extension of the human.

For example, if the computer (browser, phone, tablet, whatever) is allowed to know that back-orders are bad.  Back-orders that are older than a week past the original ship date are worse. Back-orders for our most important customers are worse.  Back orders where there is a comment on the order about someone canceling our contract and giving all their business to our competitor is bad, even if it’s not a week past due.  And it’s also bad if that comment is on the customer master record or another order from the same customer, or on another customer in the system who is really the same as this customer even though they have a different customer number.

In monolithic systems the software doesn’t evolve. The developers evolve.  What I mean is that the software gets released.  If it’s modern software it gets continually released by making agile updates every week or so.  As the app is field tested new conditions are learned, more complexity is modeled, and richer functionality is included.  Things like bad back-order situations.  But, bad back order situations being discovered and hard-coded into the apps by humans is inefficient. It’s not what humans are inherently good at doing, which is why it takes so long in the field to achieve this level of app maturity.  What we need is to teach the computer things that are bad (have negative consequences or are unpleasant), and unleash them to find those and surface them to us so that together we can avert them.  What we need is to teach the computer things that are good (reward us or please us), and unleash them to find those and surface them to us so that we can “swipe-right-one-tap” them together.  This won’t be simple, but this is what needs to happen.

First, the computer is going to have to know some basics about what business is.  These are customers. We want to make them happy.  When we have a customer we put them into the database and assign them a number.  But a customer could have lots of numbers because sometimes we have a sell-to customer, and ship-to customers, and sometimes customers are just addresses or people that have special meanings depending on what app is using them.  They all work together to help us serve our customer well, which is GOOD.

Next, the computer needs to be free to traverse all the data in the system and surface things to us like, “Hey Jane, are these customers related? They’re not linked on the customer master screen, but they have very similar names. They are? Ok, them I’m going to add that to my black book of customer relationships for future reference.”  There are many implications of this type of interaction. For example, another app could come and look at that discovered information in the black book and suggest merging and restating all the history, and then retiring the customer that was erroneously added when someone couldn’t find the correct customer (because the human couldn’t spell the original customer’s name).  Or, once these discoveries are made, the app might come along be allowed to realize that there are several large orders, related to a customer, that are all back-ordered, or that are all set to arrive at the same time, and suggest, “Hey John, you might want to call this customer and let them know what they’re about to deal with.”

Compare this paradigm to something like “Boom Beach”, an app available for iOS.  There are good things and bad things that can happen to your civilization. Good: “Commander, your troops are ready.”  Bad: “Home base raided.”  Good: “Home base defended.”  Bad: “Village lost.”  In this case the computer knows what things are considered good or bad, and surfaces them.  It’s fairly simple to do because there are a limited set of conditions that are good or bad due to the limitations of the game.

For business, there could be many more, and much more complex conditions that are good and bad, but when the conditions are found they can be surfaced in much the same way.  Check these orders.  Call these customers.  Review these mishaps and take action.   Again, this problem can be solved in two ways.  Solve it monolithically by field testing the app and updating the top-down code to be more and more complicated to handle the newly discovered conditions.  Solve it modernly by allowing the computer to evolve.  It goes without saying that trusting the computer with concepts of good and bad, and asking it to surface actionable conditions only will have problems: some conditions will be missed and some conditions will be non-issues that clutter the app and waste time.  But, this is the next frontier, and once we get this to work fairly well there will be an acceleration of app innovations possible.  Until then all we're doing is working bloodshot developers around the clock to create the illusion of apps that are delightful, and under-utilizing computing power.

Imagining No Desserts

April 12, 2012
10:45 PM

The kids were listening to an episode of Adventures in Odyssey as they went to sleep tonight. In the bumper, the emcee said, “God gives grace and mercy to his children, even when they don’t deserve it.”  I don’t know if that’s a helpful thing to talk about—the part about being deserving. I don’t think God thinks about who deserves what at all.  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually. I imagine this scene going on in heaven. There’s St. Peter. He’s like God’s administrative assistant. And St. Peter keeps parading these prayer requests into the throne room of the Almighty. And he says, “Here’s someone praying for healing, but they don’t deserve it.”  And then he says, “This guy is asking for forgiveness for having a prostitute, but he doesn’t deserve it.”  And, “This lady wants forgiveness for being a prostitute, but she doesn’t deserve it.” And then another time he says, “This couple is asking for you to make a way for their kids to attend a private Christian school, but they don’t deserve it. And this woman is praying that her child doesn’t starve to death in the famine, but she doesn’t deserve it. And this boy is praying for his mom to come to church with him, but he doesn’t deserve it.”  And somewhere in all that, God interrupts St. Peter and says, “Ok Peter, let me ask you something. Does anybody deserve to have their prayer answered?” And Peter says no. But then he has a second thought and says, “Well, yes, there is one person who does.”  And God asks him who that is. “It’s Jesus,” says Peter. “Ok,” says God. “So, I understand that Jesus deserves everything he wants, but he and I are one, and we don’t run our prayers through you. So is there anyone in your list that is gonna deserve anything from me?”  Peter says no.  Then God says, “Right. So, I just want you to drop the whole topic of desserts. Nobody deserves anything anyways, and besides that I’m not even thinking about that as a category until you bring it up. So just stop bringing it up.”  So Peter goes back to what he’s doing. “Ok Father here’s a guy who’s beating his chest saying ‘have mercy on me a sinner’, but he doesn’t…I mean…how do you want to handle this?”  And God says, “Give it to him.  I love that guy.”  And Peter starts to say “BUT HE DOESN’T DESERVE IT!” but then he catches himself and bites his tongue.  But it’s still bugging Peter. He says, “But isn’t this an important category? Isn’t the whole justice thing important? Isn’t it important to evaluate who deserves what?” And so God says, “I have already evaluated everyone. When you keep evaluating people, you keep hoping for someone who actually does deserve to have their prayer answered—it’s like you are still hoping for another Jesus.” And then Peter gulps real hard, and he asks God for help in his unbelief.  And then he asks God, “So you never want me to use the word deserve when I talk about a prayer request ever again?”  And God says, “No, I never want you to use that word ever again for anything.  Just stop saying it, please.” (In my imagination, God is polite like that, saying please and all.)  So maybe Peter could pass this on to the Adventures in Odyssey people, so they would stop saying it, too.  It’s not that “God gives grace and mercy to his children, whether they deserve it or not.” It’s just that “God gives grace and mercy to His children.  That’s how He is.”

When sun dies into mountain

Spent from all the heat

And wisting winds wax cool, then

Cold, the bones to cheat

O faces fat then thin look

Back but never see

The wormwood eyes, the soul shook

Silent, all for thee