Bibliomancer.Com

The Livescribe Pulse is pretty much one of the most brilliant devices of recent history. The ability to have your writing captured to a computer without the pain of weird clipboard attachments is a really exciting technology for people who like writing longhand (like, say, me).

Unfortunately, the first generation pen is a monster. Not to say it doesn't work, but the thing is huge. It's like writing with a big, fat marker, and all the technology in the world can't make it appealing for me to write with. I've been quietly hoping for their success so that they can eventually produce a second generation pen that's a little more manageable.

Thankfully, all signs point to things going well. Target carries them, which is great. Plus, one of the first paper products they released were moleskine knockoffs, which shows a great understanding of their target audience.

I was at Target the other day and discovered that they've clinched it. They seemed to have entered into a partnership with paperblanks, the makers of the distinctive notebooks with the magnetic closures. They don't even have them up on the website yet, but they were stacked neatly under the pens. It's a small thing to be excited about, but it's the sort of convergence I'm really happy to see.

I am still wrestling with my opinion of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. It is both a very good and a very annoying book.

To explain that contradiction, I’m going to talk a little bit about Clausewitz and Jomini. They’re a pair of 19^th century military writers, and some of the most influential military thinkers of all time. I do them a great disservice in simplifying their work here, but they are iconic of a division in military thinking which is mirrored in most other sorts of thinking. Clausewitz argued that the way to win a war was through overwhelming force, applied unrelentingly at your enemy’s weakest point. In contrast. Jomini argued for winning a war by fighting smarter – strike at your enemies’ supply lines, fight only when you can win, pick your battles and in doing so you can overcome a vastly superior force.

This actually got played out very interestingly in the US civil war, which was fought in a pretty Jominian fashion form the outset, which went badly for the north because Robert E. Lee and his generals were much, much better at it than the union generals. Grant’s victory came in large part because of a shift to Clausewitzian tactics, and a willingness to grind out the fight with the south to its brutal conclusion.

This conflict, between force and calculation, has been with us for most of history. George Eliot called it the dirk versus the cudgel, and I’ll use those terms now if only because I’m tired of trying to spell Clausewitz. It shows up in fascinating places in military history (look up Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a navy sometime), as recently as with the modern American fascination with air power. Like the perpetual cycle of offense vs. defense, the dirk and the cudgel rise and fall in relationship to one another, but this pattern is a bit more interesting because of its predictability.

Put simply – intellectuals and engineers love the dirk. They love its elegance and its emphasis on knowledge, understanding and intellect. They are constantly certain that the cudgel is just going to up and go the way of the dinosaur any time now because the dirk is just so much more elegant. And they are always surprised when someone shows up and takes a cudgel to the side of their head (or, more properly, the heads of the guys they’ve sent to fight for them).

On a lot of levels, Age of the Unthinkable is a predictable tract on the death of the cudgel, written in a manner better suited to an ambitious grad student than a veteran of the world stage. It is so enamored with flexibility and resilience that it either dismisses or merely pays lip service to strength and determination, and that is what keeps it from being great. By the end there is a nod to the idea that we need both to thrive, but it is so absent from the rest of the book as to cut it off at the knees.

Worse, it falls right into the worst sort of traps. Have you seen Rising Sun? Recently? It was a kind of fun action flick when it came out, but nowadays it’s running theme of JAPANESE SUPERMEN WILL RULE US ALL is almost comical to behold. Ramo seems to feel the same way about the Chinese, and he does things like quote Sun Tzu in ways that might have been novel and interesting 20 years ago, but are just tired now.

And that’s sort of the rub. 20 years ago, this would have been a brilliant book. Earth-shakingly brilliant. But now, it’s full of insights that are going to be trite to anyone who has read any decent non fiction (or good science fiction) in the past decade or so.

BUT

The thing that keeps me from dismissing this book entirely is that they are good and legitimate insights, even if some of the analysis (and writing) around them is flawed, and it’s possible that there are people they would be new for. So if you’re a reader who is actually baffled by the rate of change in the world, and if you don’t understand why planning and response might make for a more robust defense than barriers or why an organizations ability to learn is important, then this book is a great primer for such things. It’s probably a great read for high school freshmen, for example.

On a purely practical level, the first chapter can be skipped, as can most of the second. If you’re annoyed by gimmicky writing, expect to get annoyed early and often – he overuses narrative tricks like the reveal pretty much every chapter.  For all my cycnicsm about this, if you aren't a regular reader of non-fiction or science fiction, this may be an interesting read.  If you are then this will likely provide a few interesting anecdotes, but little in the way of revelation.

I'm still trying out my Kindle, and loving it so far, but I still have many more technical hoops to jump through to see how I like it, but I have to admit that one thing has jumped out at me. The size is practically perfect, as illustrated below (Sorry for the quality - it's from my camera):

Kindle vs. Moleskine

On the right is one of my Moleskines. As this picture shows, in it's case the kindle is only slightly wider and slightly shorted.  Given that the Moleskine is something I'm already very comfortable toting around, that makes the Kindle very easy to work into approach to carrying things. Specifically, i won't need to find some new way to carry this new gadget - I'll just keep it with my notebooks.  For more of a comparison, let me add my HP netbook and my ipod to the shot:

Clockwise from top left: HP Mini-Note 1000, Ipod Touch, Moleskine, Kindle in its case

For someone who is trying to get everything down to one bag, kindle plus netbook already looks like a promising combination.

I’m not used to windows yet, so I’m still trying out a lot of software options, including windows live for blogging. It’s got a very Microsoft interface, for good an for ill, so if this post looks weird, please feel free to blame MS.

It’s now been a few weeks with an HP Mini 1000, and I remain pretty happy with it. Practically speaking, there’s only one thing it does that I couldn’t do with a smartphone, but that one thing is pretty important – writing.  I bought the HP because it has the best keyboard of any of the netbooks – the Asus EEE 900 is almost as good, but trying them side by side definitely came down in favor of the HP.

The netbook is definitely liberating – I’ve already ditched my usual bag for a much smaller one, and it’s really, really nice to move towards a lighter load. A large bag tends to attract more stuff and get heavy pretty quick.  Restricting to a smaller bag heads that off at the pass.  Similarly, it’s a lot easier to grab in one hand and take up to the kitchen or bust out when I have an idea.  If my laptop weren’t so large (17”) the contrast would perhaps not be so pronounced, but as is the difference is night and day.

It’s not without quirks. With a 3 cell battery, I’m looking at 3-4 hours of battery life, which is kind of short. HP is theoretically releasing a 6 cell battery next year, and I’ll likely grab one, but it’s a shame to need it.  In fairness though, I knew what I was getting into picking this up before January.  Less predictable was the power adaptor, which is not well fitted to the charging port. A stiff breeze will disconnect it, and that makes it very frustrating to work while plugged in.

These are minor concerns at best though, akin to my gripes with windows XP.  For all that they may bug me a little, the device works just fine, and my ability to write anytime, anyplace without lugging around a huge block of computer has taken a turn for the better. For anyone else who really wants something small and portable but still friendly for writing, I would definitely encourage looking at a netbook. That said, if you’re not looking to do any writing more involved than the occasional brief email or IM then I must admit you’d probably be better off with an Ipod Touch,, Nokia n800/810 or a comparable device (unless, that is, if there’s some windows specific functionality you demand).  Similarly, you can get a more powerful laptop for the price of a netbook, so make sure you really want to pay for something smaller and lighter before you shell out. 

For me, this is just the sweet spot I needed, and when I close it up, I get a little rush of nerdy pleasure since it feels like I always imagined a cyberdeck to.  Crazy, I know, but if you’re not going to be excited about the device, then get something cheaper.

I like to think of myself as a pretty savvy guy, with a decent education, a good job and a good understanding of technology. This is well and good, but I think all of those things have contributed to the oddness of something I haven't done in a while.

This morning, I clipped coupons.

It shouldn't be that odd - it's something I did growing up, and continued to do after college when my income was on the painful side. I think I stopped when I moved to California. There were new grocery stores (that sold liquor) and I was making better money than I ever had before, so it seemed kind of unnecessary. I fell out of the habit.

Now, in recent years I've gotten my financial habits under much better control. Paid off credit card debt, stayed within my means, saved, invested, all that jazz. I am perhaps not as frugal as I could be, but all in all I run a pretty tight ship. So, given that it was interesting to me when, in the midst of all the bad financial news, a little switch flipped and said "get the coupons today".

As panics go, I feel like that's pretty restrained, but what scares me a little is that the behavior is bad in the big scope. I'm not entirely sure thrift is consistent with the needs of the economy in its current form. What I'm not sure of is whether that's a strike against thrift or a strike against the economy.

The financial crisis is no trivial matter, no one would argue otherwise, but I can't help but note how much it offends some people I know and think about it a little. Some of it is normal indignation, some of it is personal interest in the impact this has, but what's curious is that I think no small part of it is hurt pride.

I know a lot of engineers and technology-oriented people. These are smart people, smart enough that it often makes for a bit of a chip on their shoulder. They have strong opinions on politics, but usually with a certain bit of disdain, as if mere politicians are not really smart enough to understand things.

The financial crisis takes a hammer to this because of it's sheer complexity. These very smart people are obliged to face the fact that people in non-engineering fields might be smart too. Actually smart, not just touchy-feely emotionally smart. That the sources of these problems are something they cannot understand cuts to a pretty primal nerve.

I think it's a good thing. Geeks are pretty complacent, even if they're highly verbal and argumentative. Having these smart people get interested in and possibly even respectful of the intelligence required for other fields could be a great boon on so many levels.

I just finished Atul Gawande's Better on a friend's recommendation, and I owe that friend a drink (or perhaps one of those terrifying japanese sodas she likes).

Better's subtitle is "A surgeon's notes on performance", and that speaks directly to the hook. Gawande is a surgeon, and that fact shapes his perspectives and arguments as he makes the case that improvement comes from three main vectors: diligence, doing right and ingenuity. These are the three sections of his book, and each section is composed of a number of accounts which reflect the premise.

The section on diligence opens strong with the mundane seeming issue of hand washing. While it's an interesting study on sanitation and infection, it is even more interesting as a portrait of how to go about solving a relentlessly mundane problem in a large scale environment. That focus on the mundane and practical drives the other two sections, one on a massive immunization campaign in India and the other on U.S. Army battlefield medicine, and the ways in which it has improved. While the nominal thread of these three is diligence, I would say the keyword is really logistics.

The next section, doing right, wanders the map a little bit, from malpractice, to doctor's salaries, to how medicine is priced, to the death penalty (and the role of doctors in it) . This is, to my mind, the weakest section, but this probably speaks to my bias as a reader. I am less interested in the doctor's perspective than I am in what it can tell me, so issues that are so strongly internal to the profession were not what I was looking for.

The last section, ingenuity, had been the one that had caught my interest, as I had been told about some of the findings about the treatment of cystic fibrosis, and I was curious to read more. This is where he absolutely knocks it out of the park, and these are the stories I'll be thinking about for weeks.

First, he talks about the history of childbirth and medicine, and how deadly the process has been. This is interesting enough, but it takes a turn for the fascinating when he talks about the development of the Apgar score, a simple numeric rating of the health of a baby, taken one minute and five minutes after birth. In a magnificent example of getting what you measure for, the creation of a metric helped drive success by giving something to judge it against - how many children below a certain score can you save?

Next he talks about the treatment of cystic fibrosis and the bell curve. The kicker is this - when data became transparent, it became clear that there was a bell curve of outcomes in different treatment centers, with some vastly outperforming others. What's more, when that data became available to all practitioners, they could look at the best practices of those best units and improve their own performance, thus improving the overall average.

Left at that, this would be a simple triumph of the virtues of transparency, but what gets very interesting is what happens next. Yes, the overall average improves, but the greatest improvement comes from the top group, not the bottom. Their improvement is so profound that the gap between the best and average becomes almost insurmountable. It seems those groups who were already on the lookout for any way they could improve applied that same drive to taking advantage of the new information.

The final bit, on doctor's in India kind of ties it all together, and while it's an illustration of a lot of the points in the book, one particular bit struck me, that these doctors in these sometimes terrible conditions still felt they had something to contribute to the wider medical world. That belief did not seem unfounded, but it also seemed that it was positively self-fufilling.

The book's afterward, magnificently titled "How to be a Positive Deviant," is composed of five simple points to follow, and it is probably the best such advice I've seen for the brilliant-yet-not-so-functional since Scott Berkun's section on office politics in The Art of Project Management (Now titled, Making Things Happen).

This is a book I would suggest to anyone who needs to do things which are bigger than themselves. While the premise may be medical, the bulk of the book is clearly applicable to almost any endeavor which requires diligence, judgement and ingenuity.

I stopped by Staples today to pick up some paper for my new printer (a Brother HL-5250DN, which I am very happy with) and took a little bit of time looking at the planners. Now, I had actually been looking to find a case that would suit the iPDA, and had no luck on that front, but I did make a curious discovery - the 2009 Action Day Planner.

I should also note that that label is set up in a band across the middle of the planner, which is black and closes with an elastic strap, so that the whole visual effect is not unlike a moleskine. Compounded by the trademark dodging "Get Things Done" it looked all the world like someone had decided to knock off the current hotness of personal productivity and sell it through Staples.

It turns out that impression was pretty much right.

Now, I should note that this planner files the serial numbers off a number of very good ideas, and as such it's actually a pretty well designed planner. The layout is functional, (one week spread over two pages, with room for separate types of lists) and the introduction is more detailed than the average day runner, so in and of itself, it's a decent little book.

However, if you have any familiarity with Getting Things Done or Franklin Covey, the introduction promises to be at least a little bit humorous, especially when you get to the action flow chart, which begins with your "In Tray" and looks strangely familiar.

So, I went to their website, and there's not a lot there. I apparently missed these guys in 2008, and it seems that they do have windows software, with an Outlook plugin for $23 (the price is not listed on the site). Since the David Allen product costs about three times that, I feel more secure in my impression that this is really a generic product filling a niche.

I admit to mixed feeling about that. One on hand, when the generics start showing up, you know that a product has reached a certain critical mass. On the other, it can really end up muddying the water for new and interesting products. For comparison, I really like moleskines, but I feel like their success has lead to too much emulation and not enough new and interesting products.

For now this is just something I found on the bottom shelf of a Staples, and it may be nothing more than a flash in the pan, but it's something I'll keep a curious eye on.

For my birthday, I received an Ipod Touch, which I have been using as a PDA (and iPDA, if you would). The release of the 2.0 firmware, and the new software capabilities this added to the machine was enough to drive me to make the leap.

So I'm two weeks in and it is so far the best PDA I have ever had, knocking out the previous contender, a Nokia n800. While the n8oo was more powerful (since it was effectively a small linux box) the iPDA simply works more smoothly, has better software (with some specific exceptions) and is a vastly better media player too.

That said, there are a few lessons learned, and good and bad things that have come out of this that might be useful to people looking to go the same route.

Impressions

• I dropped an extra $20 on the fancy pants screen protector at the Apple store and I can only say this: Totally. Worth. It. An unfortunate collision with my keys has now marred the surface, but the damage is limited to the screen protector, and that is much easier for me to replace.
  
• More than anything the utility of iPDA is going to depend on how comfortable you are with the keyboard. Personally, I like it, and the fact that it works with my oversized thumbs is a big point in its favor, but it's not like any other keyboard I've ever played with. That means it may or may not be to your taste, and I really strongly suggest playing with one for a while - either a friends or one at an apple store - to see if it's something you think you could get used to. If you can't, I would honestly say don't bother getting one unless you want it for the media side. Without the ability to enter data comfortably, you will quickly find that it is not a useful pda.
  
• If you are comfortable entering data, you may find this has one benefit that other PDAs do not - you may want to carry it around. The utility of an iPod is something you can come to take for granted, and in situations where I might forget my PDA, I still want to bring my audiobooks. As someone who has left many a PDA to gather dust in a drawer, this is huge.
  
• Be sure you really don't want an iPhone. Even setting aside the phone component and always-on connectivity, the iPhone has a few features that the touch does not, notably the camera, GPS, a good external speaker, and a built in microphone. For me, Camera and GPS might be nice, but always-on connectivity would mean I never turn the thing off, so I'm just fine without them. I do begrudge the speaker and the microphone though. I would love to be able to use it as a voice recorder or to trust that I won't sleep through the puny alarm.
  
• In one of the more baffling bits of software, there are about a dozen third party to do list applications, some of which sync with web service, but none of which sync with the to do lists in ical. I have no idea if this is a problem with apple's sdk or with the list developers, but it's a gap I find highly annoying.
  
• I don't use it for work mail because our exchange install is sufficiently crotchety that I don't want to risk it. But I do use it with gmail, and it works pretty much seamlessly.

Applications I use

• Appigo's ToDo - Given the number of free task lists, it may seem odd to have paid for one, but ToDo's interface matches my personal style of input. I would encourage others to try out as many of the lists as they can and find the one that suits them best.
  
• Instapaper - This is a web service that grabs interesting web pages for you with a click, and sets them aside for you to read later. I tried it on the web and quickly discarded ti in favor of other options. However, the (free) app that supports it has made me into a regular user. When I find an interesting article, I just click the bookmarklet and it gets saved. Then when I take the iPDA online I just free it up and it pulls down local copies of these articles for me to read at my leisure.
  
• NetNewsWire - I use netnewswire for my regular RSS reading, so getting the iphone version was a no-brainer. Managing multiple locations (I read only a fraction of my feeds on my iPDA that I do on my computer) took some getting used to, but it's a feature I love. People who use google reader might look into using "Byline" for similar purposes, but it will run you ten bucks.
  
• Times and Mobile News - As far as I can tell, a company called Verve Wireless has been coming up with a standard platform for taking newspaper distribution wireless. The New York Times and the AP seem to use the platform, and as a result are both pleasantly easy to read when I'm online. I'd love a few more features, but they're nicely utilitarian at the moment.
  
• Remote - Ok, this isn't hugely productive, but turning my iPDA into a remote for itunes is incredibly handy. It would probably be even cooler if I had an apple tv widget.
  
• Twitterific - This is the app that makes me glad I don't have an iphone. This is so perfectly the medium for twitter that if I had full time connectivity, I would probably go down a very dark hole of tweets.

Where it falls short

• Seriously. How hard is it to sync to ical's To Do list?
  
• If you go the iPDA route, you will be a second class citizen. The iPhone gets all the love, and some app developers don't even think about how their apps are going to work if you don't have connectivity. Other apps will be of limited utility to you because they depend on functionality you don't have, like a microphone or GPS. This does not mean you won't have great stuff, but seeing what you don't have can hurt a little.
  
• The cases are all terrible if you are not a teenager. I would not feel this way if I viewed this primarily as a media player, but I'm using it as my pda, and is it so much to want a grown up case? I'm still looking for something that can double as a wallet so I can reduce the number of things I have to carry, but I am frustrated at every turn.
  
• Syncing files back and forth is still pretty weak. I currently use filemagnet to push documents across to the iPDA, and it's functional, but I can't say more about it than that. The developer has promised the usability is going to improve soon, and I look forward to that, but right now the offline document viewing options require jumping through hoops.
  
• You apparently can't talk about this without mentioning that there's no copy and paste. So there.
  
• There are a lot of apps and ideas that are more promise than delivery at this point, so it's important to remember that this is a fairly immature market.

Conclusion

So, warts and all, the iPDA is holding up very well indeed. It does everything I need without connectivity, but then offers additional features when there's wireless to be had. For me that's about the right balance - I don't like depending on connectivity, but I don't like it as an afterthought either. It's also clear that this is an experience that is just going to get better and better with time, as the applications mature.

It's worth noting that with the many options available to me via the app store, I have not felt any need to jailbreak my iPDA. Partly this is because if I was really concerned with getting into the guts of the device, I'd stick with the n800, but partly because I;m not sure what jailbreaking offers me that I need. I suppose it would be nice to have an SSH client, I really don't see that as being worth all the hassles.

I do admit that this definitely leaves me looking curiously at the iphone when my Verizon contract runs out. Are all these advantages (and the prospect of one less device in my pockets) enough to switch to a carrier whose local service is spotty at best? Probably not, but we'll see.

So, Architects Online magazine has an article about how five teams of architects might reinvent Starbucks. It's an interesting read (and also an illustration of why flash slideshows make terrible, er, illustrations) but the thing that's intriguing is that there's a clear divide between the designs that go in two different directions. Two of them (neither of which I can really clearly envision) are all about slipping coffee dispensing into the landscape, while the other three all have a common theme of creating more common seating, like a bar or a community kitchen.

That split is kind of fascinating since it cuts right to the heart of what Starbucks is. Are they a coffee shop, or are they the much ballyhooed "Third Space", that place that people can go that is not their home or work? It's not surprising that the designs that lean towards the latter look more like bars, since that's the classic third space. Still, when I go to Starbucks I admit I don't see a lot of broad socialization. Small groups at tables, but mostly it's individuals with their laptops (and most of those are going to Panera Bread these days). I'm not sure there's a desire for true socialization as much as there is a desire for a place to go to be alone. With other people.

Discovered via Brand Autopsy