Rob Schonberger at large

On Design. Familiar Operation, Familiar Failure.

2012-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

A few months ago I bought an Amazon Kindle to try to answer for myself whether or not it’s better than reading books on paper?

I love reading a book on paper: I know how it works. And I can do it anywhere, if I have my book. I just open it up, and it ‘works’ : the book is just there. There’s no magic buttons to press, no batteries to charge. The only thing to worry about, I guess, is tearing the book apart, or getting it drenched.

The Kindle? Flipping to the next page is a bit funny (You press a button on the side), and you kind of have to charge it every few months. You press a button to turn it on, but otherwise, it looks like a printed page more or less. Less, but that’s not such a big deal. It’s ‘good enough’.

Except, well, it fails in ways that a book doesn’t.

A few weeks ago I found myself standing outside in -15^C temperatures. I wanted to read while waiting outside in this weather, and all of a sudden, after a few pages… my Kindle rebooted. It turns out that reading in sub zero temperatures doesn’t work yet. Who would have thought? I was kind of annoyed, but hey, now I know.

So, I started wondering. What happens in failure. People design for making sure that something works as expected, but I found this failure really perplexing. I’d love to have “planned failure” a more important design aspect. A book keeps working in cold weather, why doesn’t my kindle?

To me this was as if my Prius didn’t work in the rain. Or my espresso machine wouldn’t work on Tuesdays.

Dealing without.

2012-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Almost all the work I do requires a pretty steady internet connection. WIthout it, I can’t check email, write emails, write code, write designs, talk to colleagues. Nothing. Of course, when you need something as much as this, it’s fun to see how people deal with not having it.

A couple of years back, in Sydney, there were a few afternoons where there was no connection from my office whatsoever. The story was completely standard. First, everyone panicked; there were still deadlines, of course. Frustration. Anger. Only after an hour or so did people relax, and say: screw it, let’s go to the pub.

What’s the key to happiness in this? To avoid the angry hours. I think this is what buddhism is all about. Accepting loss. Now, when I don’t have internet on a train, for a minute or an hour, rather than fret about it, I relax, accept it as part of the job, and read.

In the last hour I read 100 pages of a great new book by Haruki Murakami. Written a blog post. smiled. Some around me struggled, smacked their keyboards, or, who knows, maybe gave up and went to the pub.

Building Bridges, or Apples and Oranges.

2012-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

I think that bridges are interesting. A lot of the time we think they’re really pretty, but there’s more to the story. The Brooklyn Bridge is famous for being the uniting feature of New York, and its amazing construction. The man in charge, Washington Roebling, famously suffered decompression sickness during construction, and, unable to move, watched and supervised the construction of the bridge from his apartment window.

I want to compare the construction of two bridges I find incredible for different reasons.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was controversial for its costs while being built. So many odd things about the construction linger. Firstly, it was the longest bridge of its kind when constructed. Then, the huge stone towers on either end of the bridge are just cosmetic—The real supports are on a large ‘king pin’ at either end. Then, the way it was built: every rivet was handmade and heated, at various points on the bridge. The steel was brought from the UK, with a steelyard at the north end of the bridge. That is an incredible distance to bring steel over, and even more incredible, is that Australia is a huge iron and steel exporter now. The noise from the steelworks angered Sydneysiders, and the site is now an olympic swimming pool and a fun park.

The other bridge is the Kaibab Suspension Bridge. It’s a little footbridge, 130 metres long, 1.5 metres wide, over the Colorado River, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was finished in 1928, 4 years before the Sydney Harbour Bridge, so it was built at the same time. The Grand Canyon is a damn remote place, and every single bit of this bridge was taken, by foot, or mule from the top of the canyon. That is 21 kilometers away, and 1.8 kilometers further up. Incredibly, for instance, the cables for the bridge, some 550ft long, were carried on the shoulders of men from the top of the canyon to the bottom. It took six weeks to take one cable, on the shoulders of about a hundred men, from top to bottom. All of this was built by hand, because there is no food, water, electricity, gas or any sort of infrastructure.

I find the human endeavor in the Grand Canyon bridge so impressive. More than any large bridge around.

Moneyball—Why only for sport?

2012-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

I watched Moneyball a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great movie that, apart from letting Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill strut their acting stuff, talks about using statistics to really find the value of baseball players rather than having human beings talk about them behind a closed room.

This was great – and the movie goes on to show how successful this approach has been. People have also talked about doing a statistical player approach in other sports: e.g., in Ice Hockey has Moneypuck.

So the question is: when will this happen in other team based activities? I see no reason why a statistics based approach can’t be used to create teams of surgeons where nurses, surgeons, radiologists, anesthetists all have similar success metrics that can be found.

Hell, even in my industry: there are quantifiable metrics for an engineer. Lines of code produced. Bugs fixed. Bugs discovered. Feedback from peers. Feedback from management. A lot of companies i’ve seen use a fairly ad hoc approach to hiring, promotions and team creation: getting a bunch of people together in a room, and having a decision based partly on facts and partly on gut feel.

I wonder when a more evidence based decision process will come into the non-sporting arena. Or rather, when even more of it does. MBAs and management consultants can get back to me right now and tell me what trend i’ve been missing over the last 20-30 years, while I catch up and think about this for the next couple of hours.

The new Facebook IPO

2012-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Every tech person and their dog is talking about the Facebook IPO. Some in the financial world wonder about who owns what percentage of the company, what the valuation is, and so forth. Some people think of this possibly huge transfer of money another way, as someone on twitter writes:

That loud sound you just heard out of Palo Alto was in fact 28 luxury car dealers simultaneously climaxing.

What do I think? Well, I wonder what the true value in Facebook is. There’s the constant comparison with Google, since they’re both big tech companies. What’s my take? Facebook doesn’t have, right now, the same type, and quality, of data about me that Google does. Or at least, they don’t use it.

What do I mean? If I look at my Facebook profile, and what information is in there, I have a bunch of photos about weddings and parties i’ve been to, details about my friends who are skiing in a far off place, beachside paradises they’re at, and that kind of thing. Some of my friends share a link to their work that’s public, or make a pithy comment about some current affairs.

On the instant gut feel, none of this really tells you much about me. The advertising experience right now? I get ads touting great dentistry at a good price for my employer. There’s a great element of mail merge in there. Often, I see ads with a little image that has nothing to do with what they’re selling. It feels under-targeted. I feel as if, given my friends status, I should get wedding venue recommendations, baby gifts and ski poles.

Really, I should be seeing ads for espresso machines, bicycles and hiking boots. I feel as if there’s an opportunity for Facebook to get this kind of data, but I don’t know that they have it right now. That feels like it will hurt their ad revenue for a while to come.

Hiking in Utah, the real formative memories.

2011-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of years ago, my friend Jim and I went hiking in Utah and Arizona. This was undoubtable some of the finest hiking i’ve done in my life: we made an impromptu decision to walk to the bottom of the grand canyon, and back, and many other hikes through more water, mud, dirt, and whatnot that you could imagine.

A few days ago I had a flashback to a moment, sitting around in the middle of an eastern Utah desert. A guy next to us, living out of a little ute, pulls out his tent-for-one, sets it up, and just plays guitar, to no one and for no one, under the sparkling stars.

There’s a hell of a lot of freedom in that kind of thing. I wonder what someone is thinking when they embark on a lone road trip, like he clearly was. I imagine he’ll write a memoir one day about that time in his life.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo - A broadway review.

2011-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday night, I got super lucky and got a surprise — walking down times square to go to see this play. After screaming at tourists “New Yorkers coming through!” I managed to get into the theatre to see Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Theres a couple of small problems in the play, but they’re mostly to do with marketing. This is a controversial play, here: it’s about the Iraq war, or pretends to be, and has a greedy gold digging soldier as one of the main characters. the Saturday night production I saw wasn’t full, and it’s only been out for a couple of weeks.

So whats this thing about? It’s about a dead tiger who haunts american soldiers in Baghdad, after meeting Iraqis dealing with bad memories, other ghosts, and the gold-seeking adventures they’re on.

Firstly, the problem with this production is that one of the main characters is, the tiger; But it’s not the main character. In this production, the tiger is Robin Williams: and he steals all the marketing limelight. It’s a shame, since the other characters are excellent, and it feels that the tiger comes in for comic relief at intervals, telling us about the understanding that he’s attained in death. Ever wanted to hear a tiger having a moral dilemma about becoming a vegetarian? Robin Williams does it well. Ever wanted to hear Robin Williams say ‘motherfucker’ on stage and give you the finger? sure thing.

So he’s pretty good – but he’s not the center of the play, even though he’s the title character. The main action centers around the living (and dead) Iraqis and Americans in Iraq, who are all dealing with horrible memories from the place. One soldier has to deal with being haunted by the tiger he killed, an Iraqi remembers talking and meeting Uday Hussain, Saddam Husseins purely evil son, whilst a third becomes haunted by his own memories while chasing loot, in the form of a solid gold toilet seat to sell back at home.

It’s a sensationally well written play – the characters interact really well, and there are a lot of interactions between the ghosts and the living, which is interesting: it’s a good way for characters to reveal their feelings without the difficulty of monologues, and brings an added plot element that really works and grows on you as the play moves on.

The play is controversial because it’s set in Iraq — but it’s really not. The Iraq war is used as a really good hook for the audience – a familiar tangent from the reality of the news, and one that can hook into peoples imaginations. Iraq also gives a good platform to have forces of pure evil, as Uday Hussain, in the play, while allowing for completely flawed and endearing american soldiers to come into the picture. Theres not much that ties this to Iraq, though: it’s fiction, that reads well, and has a good current interest. It could easily be adapted to any warzone in the past, or hell, the future. What makes this special is the good writing thats endearing, intelligent and flows together.

Should you see it? sure. Don’t get fooled, and watch all the actors in the play: although most of the audience will be there for Robin Williams, the whole cast is fantastic, the dialogue is great. There might even be some people that leave, in disgust, by Robin Williams swearing, or by the portrayel of American Soldiers as imperfect. Ignore all that, keep listening to the dialogue, and you’ll walk out wondering what else you can see by the same writer (Rajiv Josef) or same director (Moisés Kaufman), or any of the other actors. You’ll probably be able to score a cheap ticket, too.

Time Stands Still — A broadway review.

2011-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Last night, I had the privilege of seeing Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies new play, that had an incredible cast: Laura Linney, Brian D’arcy James, Christina Ricci and Eric Bogosian. On top of all that, it was affordable: so I was comfy in my chair before the curtain rose.

I found out after the performance that Laura Linney had just come back from the death of her father, so who knows how this affected her performance. I couldn’t tell. Either way, the play is about a war photographer, Sarah, wounded and dmaged, making her way home from injury with her long term boyfriend. The play chronicles a year in their lives, following the fissures in their relationship and showing the many layers they have.

As a mirror, Bogosian and Ricci play their friends, who are having the seeming ‘sugar daddy’ relationship. The comparison, and questions about which relationship is healthier are both funny and poignant, and the differences in the problems are great.

Really, Time Stands Still is just a really clever relationship drama. Theres the backdrop of a war wound, which is a good story basis, but the strength in the play is well written charaters, with a flawed relationship thats enthralling. The current wars in the middle east are used as a prop to allow a wedge to come into the relationship. It’s the focus, but don’t be fooled by it if you see the play. Actually, theres a hat tip in the play, where the characters see a play about suffering in Iraq, and comment about how shallow it can seem, and can just make the audience feel good about themselves to have gone to watch. Margulies clearly knew this was going to come up in a review of his show.

Linney and James play their parts wonderfully, without hamming things up, and clearly showing the emotions that you’d expect a couple living together for years to have. The interaction between Bogosian and Ricci is, as comparison, much less interactive, but it’s supposed to be. Ricci plays her character well, though, showing a little humanity that an redeem her silly little girl aspect.

Is it worth seeing? Sure. Is it going to stand the test of time? Probably not, unless the next production in 10 years will change the settings and place names. The story is a timeless one though: what keeps people together? What happens to love? I doubt there will be a better production of this show anytime soon, so if you want to see a period drama about 2010, go and see one of the last few runs of this show, which is on until the end of January.

A Rose for Milton?

2010-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

From all the generations of past roses,
Disintegrated in the depths of time,
I want one to be spared oblivion—
One unexceptional rose from all the things
that once existed. Destiny allows me
The privilege of choosing, this first time,
That silent flower, the very final rose
That Milton held before his face, but could
Not see. O rose, vermillion or yellow
Or white, from some obliterated garden,
Your past existence magically lasts
And glows forever in this poetry,
Gold or blood-covered, ivory or shardowed,
As once in Milton’s hands, invisible rose.

—Jose Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid.

Discovering the directory again.

2010-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

The computer it's been on has been on the whole time - great! (Thats what i'm paying for) . I'm going to give it a reboot, and make sure I keep using this. See you soon!