Projects like menstrual cycles
A friend recently made the observation that no matter how many projects we have running concurrently in our development center they all seem to slide into lock-step and arrive at phases and milestones simultaneously. The analogy she used was that this seemed similar to the way that menstrual cycles of women in close quarters tend to synchronize over time. I find a lot of truth in this and don’t exactly know how to explain it. The extremes don’t seem to apply — if you are in the design phase of one project and launching another you’re obviously too far apart — but projects with only a few months offset do seem to synchronize, somehow. This is most noticeable when you realize that an entire entire category of skilled resource is busy simultaneously. (How come all the information architects are swamped all of the sudden?)
Why does this happen? Could be coincidence, but what if it a kind of macroscopic inability of an organization to truly multi-task? That is, what if there is some underlying tendency which drives teams working in close proximity to maximize productivity by shifting timelines slightly so that they are all in the same phase of a project at once? One benefit would be a kind of lateral development support. (Need help solving this particular design problem? Look at the team next door.) Other than that, though, it seems to me to be a trend fraught with downside: vertical resource shortages, projects completing at the same time (putting large numbers of people on the bench, potentially), and organization-wide single points of failure (if something should happen to prevent some step of the project methodology from being able to proceed.)
Maybe it has to do with pheromones. Thoughts?
Friends who sell things online
Laura Gilligan meticulously creates customized wine charms and other baubles by hand at Cloud Village. Check out the wedding gift detail.
Melissa Pins turns her keen eye for fashion to custom-made dyeable footwear for women at Blue Tux Shoes. Oooh la la!
Matt Wenc creates paintings that warp spacetime ever-so-subtly at mattwenc.com.
The following message was not underwritten by any of the aforementioned merchants. (But I bet they’d like me more if you bought something.)
Remanence
Matt Kirschenbaum has uploaded a really smart essay challenging the common notion of electronic text as impermanent or less stable than the printed word. He argues that the physical trace evidence of supposedly erased data force us to question the prevailing mental models of electronic text and also suggest a range of skills that will be needed of future bibliographers. Can’t wait for his book.
Combine this mode of investigation with the “literary forensics” popularized by people like Donald Foster and the potential for a completely new field of inquiry in new media opens up. The opportunity for a meaningful digital paleography arises precisely because electronic documents are considered so volatile and impermanent; rarely is the effort expended to truly expunge unwanted data. Somewhat boggling (and exciting) to consider what lies undiscovered at the level of the magnetic dipoles.
Act of volition, act of contrition
“Mommy, I accidentally hit Andrew on purpose.” Sobbing, sobbing.
The conflicted emotions of a rambunctious 3½-year-old.
Targetted again
Horrible news from Cairo. A bomb was detonated near the Egyptian Museum today and, in a separate incident, tourists were attacked on a bus elsewhere in the city. This just a few weeks after a popular bazaar was bombed. I fear that the stunning tourism turnaround that Egypt achieved after the 1997 terrorist massacres is officially over.
Infuriating. Especially given the handle that Egyptian authorities seemed to have on security over the last few years.
Tinkertoy iceberg
I finally got a chance to stop by the Art Institute last night to see an installation by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. The exhibit is a two-story nylon lattice fabricated from a radar/sonar scan of an actual iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. Basically he’s taken a structure that is solid for a moment in time (it calves, melts, sinks, reforms), mapped it, broken it down to its wireframe, and created it using rapid prototyping techniques. The result is a complex natural polygon that floats inside a stairwell at the ARTIC.
Much of my work involves scanning artifacts that have not changed in eons in order to most realistically reproduce and preserve them. Which is why Manglano-Ovalle’s process — scanning an ever-changing structure to break it down to its basic geometry and build it back up — is a bit of an intellectual delight.
My friend Craig noticed this little detail. Manglano-Ovalle includes a 512MB memory key in the lattice. A docent noted that all the data from the iceberg scan is contained on that key.
As a bonus we popped down to see the stunning Photo-Respirations exhibit. Tokihiro Sato uses long exposure times, a flashlight (by night), and a sun-reflecting mirror (by day) to create eerie scenes puntucated with will-o’-the-wispy blurs of light. Definitely worth a look.
Thanks for the tip, Matt.
Hizzoner
So I says to Da Mayor, I says, “Give ’em hell in Congress, sir.” He says “I’ll try.” He turns to exit as the plane door opens and we walk down the jet bridge to go our separate ways into D.C.
I wonder how he did?
Four things my cabbie said to me last night
- “Your address is the same number as this cab. I’ve been lookin’ at it [the number] all day. Mind if I pull over and buy a Lotto ticket?”
- “Corrupt? Like someone slipped pornography in?” Referring to the the error message about a corrupt file in an aborted boot sequence of Windows 2000 on the tourist info LCD panel.
- “You see those people standing there staring at the wall under the highway? They are worshipping some image of the Virgin Mary in a water stain. Man, shit, she’s been poppin’ up a lot lately, hasn’t she? If you ask me, she ain’t a virgin no more. Maybe that’s why she keeps comin’ ’round. Why else would she keep appearing to all us sinners? We like to have sex. That’s it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some guy humpin’ that wall, sayin’ ‘she ain’t a virgin no more!'”
- “Can you believe these gas prices? I tell you what, how come you only ever see one gas tanker filling up the pumps but you can select three different octanes? I think it is all the same gas. They just charge you three different prices.”
Cingularly interesting
Today when calling to cancel a phone account I arrived at a fork in the voice menu path where I had to declare my reason for calling. Once it was confirmed that I wanted to cancel the line would transfer and then after a short wait I would be informed that the system was experiencing difficulties and that I should call back later. Yet, if I called in and declared some other reason — billing question, for instance — I got right through to an agent. I tried this three times and each time when I wanted to cancel (and I used slightly different terms each time) the system was experiencing difficulty. That just seems too baldly nefarious to be believable, but there it is. And no you can’t cancel an account online. That’s be way too easy.
Oh, and when did voice menu systems go from passionless monotone to Katie Couric chirpy? I’ll take robo-operator any day.
Crayon box morning
Last night I was thinking how much the front page needed some color. I had to look no further than a few spring gardens on the walk to the L this morning.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
