Read this if you feel like most meetings are a waste of your time:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/jobs/18pre.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
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My wife reminds me that I have an old story about fixing things which serves as a cautionary tale for those who would, like me, go past the sticker that says “No user-serviceable parts inside.”
In early September 1990 we were waiting for the birth of our first child, and he was a week overdue. We saw every movie we could, we hung out in sidewalk cafes, and we bought a Pentax point-and-shoot camera. It was the first film camera we had owned that did everything for you; having a baby seemed like a perfectly good excuse to get a new toy. It was the camera we used to take all of his baby pictures, and we took a lot of baby pictures since he was our first baby.
In late October of 1994 we had that camera with us at a pre-school Halloween party and it was dropped while it was on and the camera lens was fully extended; it fell from table-top height to a linoleum-covered concrete floor. It probably goes without saying that the fall broke the camera, but it was not smashed to bits, it sort of seemed to want to work, and I took it upon myself one afternoon to open it up and see if I could fix it.
The lens was stuck in the extended zoom position, and no attempt to dislodge it seemed to do any good, so my goal was to get to the motorized mechanism that did the work of moving the lens in and out, and I imagined that there was some piece of it that had been jarred out place by the impact and could be re-adjusted and functional again. It made no sense to get it repaired, since it would have cost as much as getting a new camera. I got out my set of tiny screw drivers and opened the camera up. Just beyond the outer plastic outer case there was a noticeable sticker with black and yellow lettering warning “Caution: High Voltage. No User Serviceable Parts Inside.”
I thought, “Well, of course it should say that. It has a self-contained flash circuit which requires the use of high voltage.” Besides, I’m an engineer and I know what I’m doing. The batteries had been removed at this point, and I assumed that the flash charging circuitry would not retain enough charge to shock me, and after all, what were the odds of touching the circuit board just at the right contact points?
I got a shock from that puppy that made me yelp and drop it on the floor. My wife yelled at me and tried to take the whole pile of parts away from me to put it in the trash. I explained that the shock had been delivered by the flash unit, which obviously stored a bigger residual charge when not in use than I had expected. I picked up the pieces, found the offending jam in the lens motor and went about the task of reassembling the camera’s guts while avoiding touching the circuit board completely.
Then I got shocked again.
This time, I dropped it only a couple of inches. Expletives erupted from me. This time, my wife laughed and left the room.
In the end, I did not shock myself again. I was able to put everything back together, and the camera worked just fine.
And within a few years we switched to digital.
Around the 18th of December in Seattle it started to snow and it kept snowing on and off for days. Seattle is a city that doesn’t normally get much snow, so the city has only enough plows to say they have plows and they’re doing the best that they can, but not nearly enough plows to make any kind of difference. Most of us had to walk or take the bus or just had to stay home and wait it out. UPS and the USPS slapped chains on their trucks, but FedEx did not rise to the occasion. We didn’t know early in this siege that we would not be getting any FedEx deliveries (and by the 27th no deliveries had yet to be made). But 9 days at home did give me the chance to catch up on lots of Mr. Fix-it projects.
First, I fixed the Dualit toaster (half of the elements of which have not worked for more than a year) by carefully tucking the end of the broken winding under the next loop of the heating element. Leave it to the English to build an appliance that can actually be disassembled and repaired rather than just thrown away. A replacement element is on order to make the repair permanent.
Somewhere along the way I fixed several strings of Christmas lights; each was a simply traced problem (burnt-out bulb, loose fuse).
I then debugged the treadmill which mysteriously stopped turning on. Working my way from the base with the motor, fuse, etc. up to the top section which houses the microcontroller, display, and switches, I determined that a ribbon connector that had been improperly placed during a repair early in the life of the treadmill caused the problem. Over time, it had been bent past its tolerance, breaking one of the traces. I used a bulldog paper clip to temporarily hold the broken traces together until I can get a more permanent solution in place.
Finally, I tackled the Sony DVD recorder that had an intermittent problem of the left audio channel randomly cutting out. It is only about three months old and is still under warranty but good luck finding all the receipts, sending it back to some service center who knows where, and waiting an indeterminate amount of time to get the problem fixed. Or worse, having it work when someone on the other end tried to duplicate the problem. Instead, I took the cover off, and went to work with a voltmeter to find what I was hoping would be a simple mechanical problem since the audio problem would come and go as the connector was jiggled around. As it turned out, I traced the problem to a cold solder joint on the bottom side of the main circuit board which I easily re-soldered to be nice and shiny the way a good solder connection should be. Typically, the external connectors are hand-soldered after the rest of the circuit board is manufactured by automated component-placement and wave-soldering processes. I just got unlucky, and my unit got through the test process since the problem is an intermittent one. It was easy enough for me to fix the problem, but I can only guess at the horrors that a more typical consumer would face (“sir, your cable may be bad; sir, did you check the balance on your amplifier; sir, did you try using another input on your amplifier”) in trying to get something like this fixed. Just wish me luck when I try to explain how the improper placement of a ribbon cable on a treadmill caused a failure seven or eight years later!
Cameras, cameras, cameras.
Why are there so few real choices in the ocean of digital cameras?
Every once in a while, I get fed up with the bulk and in-your-face quality of my digital SLR camera (Canon 30D) and frustrated with the toy-like nature of my compact camera (Nikon P5000) and look for a viable alternative. By viable, I mean something that costs less than $1000, so as I go through the description of what I’m looking for, banish the thought of the only product that currently even comes close (the Leica M8 -which is upwards of $5500 + lens).
Here’s what I would like to see on the market:
A camera with a rugged, compact, all-metal body. Something along the lines of the smaller-sized 35mm film SLRs that were plentiful during their golden years. The fit and finish should be of high quality. The product will have fewer bells and whistles (i.e., “features”) but everything done will be done with attention to detail. Quality over quantity, may conventional market wisdom be damned.
A large sensor. Not full-frame, but APS or even 4/3 would be nice. 8 megapixels would be fine, 10 is plenty. I would gladly take even 6 or 7 if I could take high-ISO shots in natural low-light settings (without flash) without excessive noise.
Real through-the-viewfinder manual focus. That’s right – I don’t need or want any auto-focus capabilities. Give me a high-quality lens with smooth focus and aperture rings. For this type of camera, I wouldn’t mind ditching zoom lenses altogether. There are plenty of cheap ultrazooms and DSLRs with zoom lenses if that’s really needed.
High-quality viewfinder. Bright, good eye-relief, with a clear indication of what’s in focus. I don’t care if the design is a rangefinder or TTL. But it needs to be good enough to bring back the joy of really seeing through the camera and having it work as an extension of the photographer’s visual system.
Manual controls for everything, most importantly, shutter speed and ISO. Knobs should be knurled and operate easily while looking through the viewfinder.
A secondary monochrome LCD display to display settings (shots left, quality, ISO, shooting mode, etc.).
Some other odds and ends:
Metal tripod mount, proper hooks for a strap, AA battery support, instant on, decent (5 fps) motor drive.
Things that can be left out:
A built-in flash. Include a hotshoe for people who really need it, but leave out something that is otherwise mostly an annoying toy that ruins as many pictures as it enhances.
A big LCD display. Even I find myself compulsively reviewing shots right after I take them, or showing other people. But does it ever change anything? You don’t really know how the shot came out until you download them and can take a good look on a large display, or better, print out the picture. Keep it pure, keep it simple, and focus on the elements that impact creative control, spontaneity, and picture quality. Elimination of this feature will save bulk, cost, and battery life.
Movie mode or voice recorder. Again, not jobs for this particular tool.
Interchangeable lenses. A decent built-in, 28-35mm equivalent fast fixed lens would be perfectly acceptable.
The new Sigma DP1 comes close on many counts (large sensor, metal body decent non-zoom lens), but misses on a real manual focus and real viewfinder. That’s a deal-breaker since composing shots with an LCD is as natural as communicating through an interpreter. Just take much of the fun out of it, at least for me.
The introduction of the Nvidia APX 2500 at 3GSM is a watershed moment in mobile computing. It marks the emergence of a new class of mobile processors that enable phones to finally complete the transition from audio-centric devices to ones that will also deliver first-rate visual computing experiences. Forget the iPhone’s 480×320 display – it merely hints at what’s really to come in the right hardware scenarios. Imagine a standard phone resolution of 800×480 displaying advanced 3D graphics and UI and full frame-rate video while still just sipping on the battery. Imagine phones driving high-resolution displays. All of this won’t happen overnight, but silicon such as Nvidia’s will be instrumental in such an evolution since such capability is only possible at the efficiencies necessary with dedicated silicon.
I see this as a transition not unlike what the PC went through in the 90’s. The standard hardware for PC’s was initially a dumb frame-buffer – the CPU did all the work rendering the graphics. Then 2D hardware acceleration became standard for things like fonts and movement of windows or rendering video. Finally, the 3D graphics revolution made advanced 3D hardware acceleration standard on every PC today.
It’s not simply what the APX can perform that’s the key – it’s that it can do so within a power consumption budget suitable for a phone.
The constraint of having to run on a very limited battery budget is a beautiful thing. PC technology is still deeply rooted in being able to simply draw more power from the wall if necessary to increase computational power. So PCs have remained for the most part big, hot, loud, power-sucking beasts. And why most laptops aren’t far from a wall socket. But since phones must go at least all day, computation power efficiency rules the day. And why silicon such as the APX exists.
Welcome to the revolution of graphics on mobile devices.
Poor Motorola. Reports say that they’re considering selling off their handset unit. I’m no financial analyst, but the optimist in me says that a company that was once world-class can be world-class again with some hard work, vision and leadership.
So when did things go wrong? Basically, when Moto failed to evolve after their big hit. The RAZR was a breakthrough design, and there it sat. And sat. The SLVR was a re-packaging job for people who preferred a candy-bar form factor to a hinged design. The SLVR is the phone that I still own. For the record, I’m still not sold on getting any type of smart phone. I came very close to getting a Nokia N82 as an upgrade (without a data plan) but ultimately decided that $500+ was too much for a device that tends to occasionally tumble around on the concrete.
So Motorola…where was the high-res camera when you needed it? Or an upgraded display? How about a graphics user interface that looks like it’s from this century? Why cumbersome dongles instead of a 3.5mm headphone jack for music playback? How about a non-smart phone with a querty keyboard for heavy texters? And it seemed to take forever to get different color versions to get done. Oh, and good luck getting an unlocked Motorola besides places like TigerDirect. If the carriers are constraining the design, why not establish a retail channel for unlocked phones? People like choice.
It’s all salvageable. The RAZR2 V8/V9 points the way. I still have my Startac in a drawer somewhere – I can’t part with a truly timeless design. I for one am rooting for them and hope they keep the spark of innovation alive.
The Asus EeePC got a very positive review in my house. It is small, light, well-built, and started up fast. Yes, the display is a bit cramped, as is the keyboard. And yes, it runs yet another weird variant of Linux. But it has a real browser, connects effortlessly to the internet, and comes with a pretty broad suite of applications. It is available in a variety of colors. Battery life is OK – no worse than a typical laptop. The girls at the high school where my wife teaches think it’s really cute – a good thing if you’re Asus.
What doesn’t the Eee have? For starters, it doesn’t have a high price. The entry-level model is a mere $299. It also doesn’t have a hard drive, high-speed CPU, boatloads of memory, or the latest graphics processor. It doesn’t show you a sequence of coming attractions of corporate logos when you turn it on. But what it does, it does well – certainly, well enough to make you think – “Hey, for this price, why not?!” It wasn’t designed as a replacement for a desktop or traditional laptop machine. It was designed to fill some of the gaps where a big bulky expensive laptop was inappropriate or unfeasible – for example, a kid’s computer, or an on-the-go companion device.
The Eee adheres to some of the core tenets of the ultra-mobile PC – a low-cost, highly mobile, full-fidelity companion computer. In fact, the Eee PC hits one of the key UMPC targets dead on; there’s one place where all of the other UMPC products missed – price. People expect mobile devices to be affordable! Asus’s R2H UMPC launched at a price point two to three times higher than the Eee, but the basic technology backbone was similar, with a 7” display, low-end Intel CPU/chipset, standard PC I/O and hardware compatibility. Sure, the R2H also has a hard drive, GPS, Bluetooth, a fingerprint reader and runs real Windows but the additional features don’t justify significantly higher cost. A $1000 companion device will have few takers regardless of functionality.
Good product design is ultimately as much about what to leave out as what to include. And with the Eee PC, Asus got a number of things right that they got wrong with their R2H. It’s small enough to toss in a backpack or bag, light enough to carry all day, inexpensive enough to afford as a secondary computer.
As I sit here writing my first entry, the operating system of my computer has decided that it needs to update itself. It’s been going at it for a while…certainly a lot longer than I had hoped, and as usual has made using my PC almost impossible: the process brings everything to a crawl. I really hate having my time wasted.
Which brings me to my current topic – performance and responsiveness.
I think personal computers were supposed to perform repetitious tasks quickly and to make our lives more wonderful because they were going to save time. There have been many generations of improvements in the PC since I bought my first IBM in 1983, but I feel like I am still waiting. Waiting for the machine to boot up, waiting for the machine to start, waiting for something to update, waiting for technology to be more amazing. When I turn on my PC, it’s a short eternity until the desktop shows up. And once the desktop shows up, it’s just a tease. A dozen other programs and processes then need to load and it’s another yawn of impatience until I can actually do anything.
And after the machine is actually ready, still nothing happens quickly. Simple tasks such as opening a document, or opening a new browser window, or viewing some photographs are a chore. I’m staring at the hourglass, or the screen is simply frozen indefinitely. I click on something, and nothing happens. The hard drive churns away. I am known to ask the obvious question aloud: what is it doing?
Ok, on some level I know what it’s doing: I can look at the list of low-level processes and get a pretty good idea of who is doing what.
But what’s missing is a good reason for all the waiting. With the equivalent of a supercomputer on my desk or laptop, I shouldn’t have to wait to accomplish the simplest chores. I can understand needing some time to compute tomorrow’s weather forecast. But checking my email?
Of course, some delays are inevitable–particularly operations that rely on the network or other slower peripheral devices. The fact is that performance and responsiveness are afterthoughts in the design of technology products where the almighty feature list rules the day. That’s unfortunate because performance and responsiveness are the cornerstones of user experience: how fast something works defines how well it seems to work. The effectiveness of even the most advanced user interface of features is lost if responsiveness is compromised.
Remember how windowing in the operating system was supposed to improve usability by being able to perform tasks in other windows while the one that was busy finished doing its thing? Right?
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve lost the bet “I can look up the number/address in the phone book faster than you can on your laptop”. It would be refreshing to see performance and responsiveness trumping long feature lists. Do less, but do it better. And faster.
We have a long way to go! And I’m still updating…
