Practicalmadness by David Demaree

Oh, The Dem Unity!

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:30:55 -0600

There was no Two Minutes Snark yesterday because nothing important happened yesterday. (Note: there is a “to me” implicit whenever I say that, i.e., “nothing important happened to me yesterday.”)

You may have heard something about the comedy duo of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton teaming up for a “unity” event today in — wait for it! — Unity, New Hampshire! HA HA!
There’s a guy running for President who knows who Jay-Z is. So what is on Obama’s iPod?
Zimbabwe update: Mugabe’s youth militias are stocked with young men who are as scared of the regime as the people they’re beating to death.
And let’s all take a moment and reflect on a world where the following graf makes sense: “One of Mr. Tsvangirai’s most senior aides, Tendai Biti, was freed Thursday on bail of a trillion Zimbabwean dollars, or about $90. He was arrested two weeks ago on treason charges, which carry a potential death penalty.”
There are some interestingly similar shots in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and Raising Arizona. And interesting to note: No Country was released last year but is set in the late 1980s. Raising Arizona was made in the late 1980s.
Pixar’s Wall-E in a nutshell: lazy, self-absorbed human race saved from the evil clutches of Wal-Mart when a lonely robot walks up to it, waves, and says “[Hello, my name is ]WAAALLL-EEEEEEE[!]” a few times. Whether you think Wall-E is better than Ratatouille is likely correlated with how much you love Kubrick and robots. (I love Kubrick and robots, but I also love Paris, food and Ratatouille. I am on the fence.) Also: Wall-E made me cry. Verdict: Four out of four spare robot eyeballs.
Today was Bill Gates’s last (regular) day at Microsoft. He’s staying on as chairman, but will no longer be involved in the day-to-day business of the company. Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO years ago and was replaced by this man.
Web designers are, first and foremost, professional communicators and crafters of interactions. Andy Rutledge on the skill set required by any employable web designer. There’s a degree of ‘job description creep’ here; the job Rutledge calls “web designer” I would call “art director” or “web design lead,” and I think he sets the bar for ‘employability’ a bit high unless you’re talking solely about senior folks and not junior- or entry-level designers. But I absolutely agree that good web design has absolutely nothing to do with yr mad Photoshop skillz.
Related from Rutledge (and far more useful to people on the lower rungs): Pre-Bid Discussions and Calculating Hours: The Client Factors, both about how to deal with reconciling your youthful Pollyannaism with the harsh reality that People Is Suck Sometimes. Note that Rutledge is also the dude who, when Veerle Pieters posted about how deadlines kill inspiration, spent a few hundred words telling you to suck it up and quit whining.
In case you weren’t aware, Adult Swim has been posting each weekend’s new episode of The Venture Bros. — TV’s third best comedy series — as a free web stream on Friday mornings. This week, Dr. Venture opens a day camp for boy adventurers.

Two Minutes Snark

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:56:33 -0600

Tonight’s edition of Two Minutes Snark is brought to you by Half Acre Lager, the best local microbrew I could find at the 7-Eleven on the corner.

The best case of It Just Works you’re likely to find anywhere outside of Apple: I just bought a Polar heart rate monitor to use during cardio. On a typical cardio day I use three different machines from three different manufacturers, all of which have built-in HR monitors, all of which suck. (They all require you to hold onto something, which may or may not have been cleaned or calibrated right.) Today, though, I walk up to each one of them wearing my new wireless monitor and all three machines immediately pick up its signal. Probably helps that Polar is to sports HR monitors as Apple iPods are to portable music players these days, but still — nice.
Verdict: despite 40+ minutes of unsimulated sex by the leads, Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 film 9 Songs — about a so-brief-as-to-defy-meaning love affair between a dull Englishman and a crazy American girl who’d be a cipher if she were interesting — is really fucking boring. I feel like it could have at least had some soul if the acting had been better, but of course, to attract better actors Winterbottom would have had to forego the ultra-explicit sex. Which was almost the whole point of the enterprise.

Having been shamed by my über-cool stylist into giving Winterbottom another chance, next up will be 24 Hour Party People.
Speaking of England: At the urging of the UK’s Foreign Minister (not to mention pretty much every member of Parliament), Queen Elizabeth has annulled Robert Mugabe’s honorary knighthood. The Queen has customarily given knighthoods to visiting heads of state; Mugabe’s was granted during a state visit in 1994.
While we’re across the pond: the CEO of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair has promised that their new business-class service would feature “beds and blowjobs.” And yes, that’s exactly what he said.
Hugh Laurie told the London Times one of the biggest perks of celebrity was the “Burger King gold card”, which entitles a select group of 11 very famous people (including Jennifer Hudson!!!) to free BK hamburgers for life. Laurie’s endorsement tends to prove what we’ve always feared: that English food really must be terrible if it makes Burger King sound appealing.
Photo of the day: Eddie Murphy’s head traveling down the interstate.

Two Minutes Snark

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:20:16 -0600

So, let’s try something new — this is an overview of things that were on my radar screen today. I am going to try to do one of these every weekday, though we’ll see how well I hew to that.

GWOD update: 240.6 lbs this morning (-59.4 from start on 8/8/07), about to enter ominous “Phase 2” involving a diet and a third weekly resistance session.

Also: just went out to Danny’s for beers and OMG yes I did dancing, alone on a Tuesday night. Realizing such things can be fun if I can just quit worrying about a couple of things. Yes, all straight white men look like idiots when they dance (so may as well enjoy it), and no, it is not important that I Meet Someone, Take Someone Home, or etc. tonight (so may as well enjoy the view).

Also: if the girl in the strapless dress with the hair and the eyes and the moves is a Practicalmadness reader: um, hey, baby, whassup?
Guitar Hero came out for the DS this week; I picked it up today. Instead of a guitar controller, the game comes with a “guitar grip” you attach to the bottom of your DS, and a pick-shaped stylus you use to strum the touch screen. It sounds insane, but it works — GH: On Tour isn’t really a “play on the bus” sort of game, but it might be a “play in a waiting room” sort. I say: three out of four pick-shaped styli. Game Rankings gives the game a 75% fresh rating. Speaking of music games on Nintendo consoles: as previously noted, Rock Band is out for the Wii on Thursday.
“The reality of the regime’s brutishness nearly hit me over the head as I was being expelled from the country.” Peter Maass on the U.S.-backed Obiang regime in Equatorial Guinea in Slate.
Speaking of African dictatorships: the current exchange rate of U.S. dollars for Zimbabwean dollars is 35,000,000,000:1. That’s nearly doubled since Friday.
Mayor Daley, having given up on Chicago being America’s London by getting Harrod’s to open a store here, now has his heart set on us starting up a Paris-inspired bike rental program. Unfortunately, the lawyers don’t share his romantic bike-sharing vision and are holding up the project.
This blogger’s favorite Muppet — Cookie Monster — visited The Colbert Report on Thursday.
Newsweek covers the book I’m reading right now, Sam Gosling’s Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: “‘It’s dangerous to look for the things that stick out,’ Gosling says. ‘You want to look for themes. The meaning of one thing modifies the meaning of another.’” (Buy the book at Amazon)

Pregnancy Boom

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:57:45 -0600

If you get links forwarded to you by co-workers or friends or keep up with the news, you may have heard a story about some high school girls in Gloucester, MA who decided as a group to start having babies and raise them together, one going so far as to find a 24-year-old homeless dude to knock her up. You may also know that there’s now some doubt about certain details of that story. The school’s principal had said there was a “pregnancy pact” (and he’s also the source for the homeless dude thing), but inquiries by school and city authorities have found no evidence of such a pact. So the tenor of the coverage has shifted, from “OMG there are girls getting pregnant!” to “OMG a white guy lied about girls getting pregnant!”

So, questions of veracity aside, why were these girls allegedly knocking themselves up? Apparently, it’s because globalization has sucked all love and meaning out of their quietly failing fishing town, and this is a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind of thing.

That’s fine, I guess, but one can’t help but wonder whether this graph speaks to the real reason why these young women couldn’t wait a few years to fill the gaping, baby-shaped void in their lives:

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.

It’s interesting that this should show up on my radar the same day as this funny funny blog post describing a really terrible job offer with no salary, demanding hours and a generally unpleasant working environment. (Let me ruin the joke for you: the author is describing his daughter’s elementary school.) The post was linked from the Twitter streams of three different software developers, either in the context of ‘that’s totally why I’m homeschooling my kid’ or ‘that’s totally why I dropped out of college.’

To attempt a full explanation for why American public schools are so profoundly fucked up is, alas, beyond the scope of this writing. So instead, please allow me to raise the following questions:

What kind of insane world have we created for our children where high schools have day care centers?
Did it not occur to anyone that that was a symptom of some deep, terrifying social malaise, if not such a nuclear explosion of meta-ness as to threaten the very fabric of the space-time continuum?
What kind of death-defying mental acrobatics are required to look at that situation and think, ‘wow, we have finally solved the problem of unwed single mothers with unstable home lives dropping out of school’?

Free day care is what those of us in the armchair economics game call a “strong incentive,” especially when paired with free room and board from one’s parents. Toss in some media-blaming — do we really need round-the-clock coverage of Brad & Angelina’s babies? Of Jessica Alba’s baby bump? — and it seems obvious why these girls got pregnant: because society made it look glamorous, and the school made it seem cheap.

David's WWDC 2008 Predictions

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:49:32 -0600

Is there a new iPhone? — IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
Will it have 3G? — SIGNS POINT TO YES.
Will it come in colors, such as PRODUCT(RED)? — REPLY HAZY, ASK AGAIN LATER.
Will it go on sale today? — OUTLOOK GOOD.
Will it be $200 after subsidy/rebate from AT&T ($400 at Apple retail stores)? — MY SOURCES SAY YES.
Will the “OS X iPhone” 2.0 software update be available for download today? — MOST LIKELY.
Does that mean the App Store and the first round of third-party apps will be out today too? — SIGNS POINT TO YES.
Will .Mac be rebranded “Mobile Me?” — YOU MAY RELY ON IT.
Will the new “Mobile Me” service feature over-the-air “push” e-mail and calendar syncing, essentially like an Exchange server for consumers? — AS I SEE IT, YES.
Will anything else change about the former .Mac, like its spotty reliability or ridiculously high price? — DON’T COUNT ON IT.
Will Steve Jobs announce the next major release of Mac OS X? — MOST LIKELY.
Will that be the rumored “10.6 Snow Leopard” release, which drops PowerPC support and foregoes new features for a bunch of welcome performance boosts and framework improvements? — OUTLOOK GOOD.
Will “OS X Snow Leopard” be a free upgrade? — VERY DOUBTFUL. (Sarbanes-Oxley, dudes.)
Will new Apple Cinema Displays be announced, possibly slimmer ones with built-in iSight cameras? — OH, IF WISHING MADE IT SO.
Will Jobs announce Mac OS X licensing, or some other official way of loading Mac OS X onto non-Apple hardware? — NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS.
Will he announce a Mac tablet, or an xMac? — BITCH, PLEASE.

Sustainable

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:51:55 -0600

Okay, I just noticed a referer from mail.nau.com — hi folks! — so I’m going to pre-empt the inevitable e-mails from either Nau employees or devotees by expanding on what I wrote below, and posting a couple of supplementary links.

So I’m sitting in my office, trying to make up my gulliver about what to do with my afternoon, when I see an item on Gapers Block about Nau — a Portland-based clothing label whose schtick was that all their garments are sourced from “sustainable” materials like organic cotton and recycled polyester — shutting down all operations at the end of the day today and as such liquidating the inventory at their Halsted St. store at 50% off before padlocking the doors.

How sudden was Nau’s collapse? Well, according to this article from The Oregonian Nau — who announced their immediate shutdown late on Friday — were telling journalists as recently as early Friday that they were under pressure but still open for business. Which tells me that whatever letter, phone call or smoke signal that convinced them the game was over came during the business day Friday, and that their financial picture was so dire that they couldn’t even afford to keep the company running an extra day or two to finish liquidating their inventory.

I’d had my eyes on a pair of their so-called “Loose But Not Slutty” mens jeans ($150) for a while, but at those prices I wanted to wait until I’d lost a few (dozen) more pounds and could count on not dropping any more sizes before splurging on fancy things. At 50% off, many of the items I would never have considered picking up — like $75 polos or $100 cargo pants — suddenly entered a more accessible realm I like to call the “Banana Republic zone.” All told I spent $350 on Nau clothes, after spending an hour studying and deciding while my fellow vultures filed into the dressing rooms with literally armloads of organic tank tops and recycled windbreakers.

Anyway, the time spent studying their clothes and the hours spent wearing them since have made me think a bit about why this company went out of business. Their website says they’re closing shop because of what they refer to as an “extremely risk-averse” environment in the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown, in which investors are hesitant to spend any money on anything.

This raises a couple of questions for me. Nau are trying to paint themselves as a hapless victim of the capital markets, but to the best of my knowledge there are two businesses that have been recession-proof since time immemorial: the Mafia, and high-end retail. The rules of the retail game may change slightly during a downturn (i.e., the middle class may move some of their spending from Whole Foods to Costco), but as anyone who’s seen a movie about the glamorous 1930s ought to know, times are never so tough to make rich people stop spending money on pretty clothes.

So Nau’s problem wasn’t that they couldn’t raise capital, though that’s what finally killed them, in the same way that pneumonia might be the final cause of death for an AIDS patient. Their problem was that even though people who can afford $75 polo shirts will be just as able to afford them next quarter as they were last year, Nau couldn’t find enough of those people to make a profit.

Funny thing, but after spending time in their stores and buying some of their closeout-priced products, this makes total sense, for a few reasons:

Forgive the marketing-ese phrase, but what exactly was Nau’s brand story? They made fashion-forward sportswear made from sustainable materials like recycled polyester and organic cotton. But that’s just a detail of manufacture, and their designs were all over the map. Some looked like standard yuppie-wear (see above reference to polos and jeans), some (like their cargo pants) looked more at home on the Starship Enterprise than an American sidewalk. Nau’s schtick was sustainability, but you can’t look at the clothes and get that. Fashion retailers aren’t selling a context for their wares, they’re selling a context for their customers, and it seems Nau epically failed to understand that, or at least to express their concept in a way that could expand their customer base beyond the true believers.
Why did Nau have retail stores in five cities? Come to think, why did they have retail stores at all? The vast majority of their customer base — that’s to say, nearly everyone east of Portland — would have had to order online anyway. They described their retail outlets as “webfronts,” where they would sell clothes but encourage customers to place the actual orders online. Nice idea, but that doesn’t change the fact that they had to support the cost and hassle of building out, staffing and running five retail locations. So it wouldn’t have saved them a single penny if those customers ordered their products from a web kiosk or not.

This reeks to me of trying to pre-empt customers’ needs, as if some executive or consultant looked at an online-only business model and said, “hmm, I dunno, I have to have my secretary do all my internet for me. Maybe you should have some stores just in case someone as clueless as I am wants to buy your product.”
Sustainability is great, but how does buying a pair of $100 khakis made from organic cotton (and spandex) save the planet? I’m not suggesting it doesn’t help, but just as Nau failed to provide a compelling narrative for their product, they also didn’t really expand on their mission enough to make spending a premium on drab, earth-toned sportswear seem like a good deal.
I think one of their biggest blunders was donating 5% of every sale to one of ten charities (chosen by the customer from a list at checkout). That was a nice gesture (both contributing and letting the customer pick), but it contributed to the lack of focus. It seems like it would have been smarter to either (a) use that 5% to purchase carbon offsets, which would have been a “more bang for your buck” eco-proposition (“we’re sustainable and carbon neutral!”) or (b) cut prices by 5% to maybe lure in more customers.

Ultimately, I think there was a way this company that could have been profitable, or at least viable enough to attract more capital even in a bear market. The retail stores were a fatal error, the marketing was a mess and the product compelling but neither luxe nor accessible enough to attract the right kind of audience.

I really like these pants of theirs I’m wearing, and it’s sad that these are the only pairs I’ll ever be able to own. But at the same time I’m well aware that while I love them at $50, I might never have walked into the store if they were $100. That’s not because I’m not willing to spend $100 on pants, I’m just not sure I’d have spent $100 on these pants. And though I’m not a typical consumer in the broader sense, I think I am pretty typical of the target audience for these clothes. If it took a 50% closeout sale for me to even begin to consider their product a good buy, they were overpriced.

There was a definite “we built it, why aren’t they coming?” aspect to Nau’s fall; they were green, they made nice clothes and they acted as if they were a brand to be reckoned with. It seems that along the way, they just got so excited about themselves they forgot the most important rule of mercantilism: if you sell shit, make sure you’re not spending more money selling it than you can expect to get back.

Late Update

There’s no denying the capital markets are rough right now, and suffice to say I’m glad I’m not in dire need of investment cash. And as I’ve had to remind friends, business partners and at least one girl I’ve taken out for drinks lately, I’m only an armchair economist. But I do study business and solve problems for a living, and after reading some of the comments posted online by Nau’s workers and fans, I feel I should say a few more words to put the above into context.

Let me first point out that I am not usually in the habit of spending a thousand or so words bitching about things I don’t care about. Like I said, I was interested in Nau before they closed shop and I’m happy with the items I bought from them during yesterday’s closeout. The more I wear this pair of twill cargo pants, the happier I am, and the more I back down from my earlier “$100 for this?!” viewpoint.

But isn’t that kind of the story of Nau in a nutshell? Given a little more time they could have refined their marketing message, or could have found enough new customers via word of mouth that it wouldn’t have mattered. The next collection’s looks may have been more confident, more focused. If they’d weathered the economic storm, a stronger dollar or lower shipping costs might have made it viable to offer the same great clothes at more accessible prices. All of the nitpicks could have been addressed, given time.

More than anything else what strikes me about this story isn’t that Nau went out of business, but that it seemed so sudden and took everyone so much by surprise.

It’s easy to just attribute everything to those pesky, inscrutable capital markets. But seriously: five stores? I’m having trouble understanding why, if the web store or any of the four existing stores were not yet profitable enough to at least sustain themselves, Nau felt it was a good idea to burn capital on opening a fifth unprofitable store even as it was becoming increasingly obvious that this was going to be a rocky year for retail. If the existing stores were in the black and the company still collapsed, then there were deeper problems.

In any event, it’s not like there weren’t canaries in this here coal mine. Nau may not have been able to escape disaster, but they could have bought themselves some time. Instead they bet everything and tragically lost.

Relativity

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:54:28 -0600

Let me ask you something, internets: how long is “too long” for an un-replied-to, un-acknowledged e-mail message to sit in one’s inbox? When I started thinking about this issue sometime last week, it was solely in a business context. But as I may have mentioned in this space I’ve been messing around with online dating. And about 10 days ago I got a flirty message from an interesting girl, and per my usual practice I wrote her back immediately. The girl didn’t respond at all since then, so last night I sent a follow-up message in which I acknowledged the possibility that maybe my first message was simply a turn-off. Well, this morning she finally responds, but only to make two points:

She’s been really busy, which excuses any delay on her end.
I e-mailed her pretty recently, the implication being that I shouldn’t be so impatient as to expect her to respond in less than ten days.

There was no apology (or if there was it was pretty fucking implicit), no attempt to maintain a flirty tone — it was actually a pretty dry “get off my back!” kind of e-mail. Needless to say, it was a little bit of a turn-off.

But my point in telling this story is not (I swear) to bitch about some girl rejecting me or failing to live up to my standards of e-mail etiquette. Rather, I’m trying to illustrate something I’ve come to refer to as my “Theory of Relativity,” which is quite simply this: the busier you think you are, the lazier you appear to an outside observer.

I’m a big fan of Josh Kamler and Axel Albin’s blog Tiny Gigantic, and last May Josh wrote a post called “Busy-ness is blindness” in which he drew a really super-useful distinction between “busy” the mental state, and actually being busy:

I’ve got a friend who, when I ask him how he’s doing, invariably answers this way: Dude. Soooo busyyyy. And he says it sort of breathlessly, drawing the last word out into a kind of falsetto. But when I ask him what’s got him so busy, the answer doesn’t vary much either: Oh man. All kinds of crazy shit.

Thing is, that doesn’t mean anything. If I press, it’s mostly work, family, and personal obligations—the usual stuff that fills up most everyone’s day.

Now, if the person who is sooooo busyyy is just an acquaintance or a friend you’re not depending on for anything — i.e., not someone you’re waiting on to help plan a surprise party or move a couch — then it’s no big deal. The relativity theory comes into play when you (a) are waiting on a response/action from the other person, (b) have a reasonable expectation of when to expect said response, and either (c) don’t yet know the person well enough to have a feel for when they return e-mails or (d) have been burned by them in the past and know that they’re not going to get back to you in time.

Here’s the thing about busy-ness: we’ve all been there, and in talking about friends, clients and anonymous internet girls’ falling back on the sooo busyyy excuse I really don’t mean to imply that I haven’t done the exact same thing myself. When you’re sooo busyyy, you’re in survival mode, where you’re just trying to stay afloat and deferring any task or obligation — like returning an e-mail or phone message — that might keep your head below water a second longer than necessary.

This isn’t the same thing as being in crunch mode; that has a limited scope, and besides, it usually comes off so much better when you can give people a specific reason why you back-burnered them. Busy-ness is special because it’s open-ended and amorphous. You’re not ignoring people in favor of some specific, more important thing. That can still sting, but at least it’s a reason. Busy-ness says you’re ignoring me because everything is more important than me, our relationship, our project, etc.

And that’s where the perception of laziness comes in. After all, what is laziness but simply another word for wasting one’s energies on bullshit?

I have a client who’s been frantically pushing me to finish their project as soon as possible, and I’ve been trying to accommodate them. But when I e-mail or call this guy to get a sign-off or ask a question, he’s never around. On a good day, I get a response within 8 hours. But more often, I’ll get an incomplete answer late the following day, prompting me to send a follow-up e-mail which in turn will start another 36 hours of wheel-spinning.

This client’s frantic about the project we’re doing together, but they also have at least two other major web projects plus a separate core business. I know in the back of my mind that the reason he finds it hard to stay engaged with our project is because he is (sing it with me now) just sooo busyyy, and I try to empathize with that.

But from my perspective, it doesn’t matter whether his time is being sucked away by business or by Rock Band — he simply is never there when I need him to be, which makes me want to think twice before putting myself in a position to need anything from him. In other words, it makes me think twice about continuing to do business with the guy, even though we’ve made a bunch of money together.

It’s like having a friend who screens your phone calls but never hesitates to call you if they need something. The total silence in between times they come begging speaks volumes about how highly they value the relationship. The client or friend or random stranger in question surely doesn’t think they’ve done anything to offend you, and would be surprised if you called them on it. Which is exactly the point: when you’re trying to focus on everything, you’re focusing on nothing, which is a big problem if you’ve got people depending on you for things.

What elevates this above mere annoyance is the fact that we’re talking about e-mails here, or phone calls or IMs. All it would take to fight the perception that they’re slacking is for the offender to just send you a quick ping, saying that they haven’t forgotten you.

Another Sign the Presidential Campaign Must Be Stopped

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:55:57 -0600

So why is it the black teddy bear has this unbuttoned, casual look going on, while Hillary-bear and McCain-bear get to look all presidential in suits? Is the Vermont Teddy Bear Company saying Obama-bear isn’t a serious candidate to be stuffed animal-in-chief?

And what the fuck is up with that apple pie?

Google is Drinking 37signals's Milkshake

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:33:25 -0600

I’ll have (lots) more to say about the new Google App Engine later on, but for now I want to weigh in on the eerie similarity between HuddleChat, the Google-developed App Engine case study, and 37signals’s Campfire, an app which I frequently describe in all seriousness as the greatest HTML-based software interface ever designed.

Like so many other Web technologies, real-time chat isn’t especially unique or proprietary. Sure, there are ways chat is implemented that can be patented, but in practical terms no one can really claim ownership over the concept of passing little bits of text around at subatomic speeds — hell, the whole internet is to some extent based on that concept. So when it comes to chat programs, the factors that matter — which distinguish one product from another, and which therefore should be considered proprietary — are user interface design and feature set. And by all indications, HuddleChat has ripped off Campfire in every way that matters.

I’m having to go by my sources here, since I can’t find a way to log into HuddleChat right now, which (hopefully) means Google’s left hand just caught onto what their right hand was doing and pulled the thing offline. But still, this is a major product launch, their first and biggest response to Amazon’s growing presence in utility computing. And somehow no one — not in PR, not in marketing, not in development — realized that their way-cool example app was a rip-off of not just another company’s product, but one of the coolest products from one of the best-known companies out there.

Even ignoring the depraved indifference to 37signals’s intellectual property rights that seems to be afoot here, this is just bad staff work. The App Engine could represent a sea change in the way apps are developed and hosted, the spark that moves all of us from building our own hosting stacks and having to be as much sysadmins as developers. To let that message be overshadowed by three morons’ utter lack of creativity and proper supervision is just staggeringly stupid.

Update: Nope, it’s still around, I just didn’t find a working link to it until 8 PM Central. And then around 9 PM Google took it offline for realsies:

Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we’ve decided to take it down.

Of course, I’d say it should never have been put up to begin with (at least not with the Google seal of approval), but this is at least a head fake towards contrition.

Xbox 360 Is Your New Bicycle

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:51:52 -0600

Before I tell you what I have to tell you, you should know that in my life I’ve never identified myself as a hardcore gamer. As a kid I cut my teeth not on the PlayStation or on PC games, but on the old Super Nintendo machine. While many of you craved, and still crave, the adrenaline rush of Quake or the immersive, novelistic aspect of a Zelda or Final Fantasy, I liked Dr. Mario, Mario Kart and, yes, Super Mario Bros.

Anyway, today marks the logical next step in a return to console gaming that began a year or two ago with the purchase of a Nintendo DS, and continued last year when FedEx brought me a much-coveted Wii system. Today, for the first time, there is an Xbox 360 in my house.

The deciding factor for me was the news this week that Rock Band would (finally) be coming to the Wii in late June, where it was announced that Rock Band Wii would feature roughly the same gameplay and graphics as the compromised PlayStation2 version of the game. Even worse, would not offer any downloadable content or online play even though technically the Wii (with its Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service and flash-based storage) theoretically makes such things possible.

Rock Band is an awesome game even with sub-HD graphics and stereo sound, and I’m not so impatient that I can’t wait until June to get my fix. What was telling to me about the announcement was that despite the Wii’s (admittedly basic) internet features, Harmonix simply didn’t consider it worth the effort to try to bring the same online experience enjoyed by Xbox and PS3 users to the Wii platform, and in fact considered the Wii to be about on par with the now eight-year-old PlayStation2. Except that unlike the PS2, Wii users would have to wait eight months for their version of the game to ship.

And though I didn’t know it until I was standing in Best Buy with an Xbox under my arm, the same is true for the Wii version of Beautiful Katamari, the game I chose to inaugurate my new toy. Katamari for Wii is also coming out in June (six months after the 360 version), after its developers originally hinted that the game might never be released for the Wii.

Let me be clear: I love the Wii. It’s an amazing system and I don’t mean to imply that this is some kind of zero-sum game where the Xbox has drunk the Wii’s milkshake. The two consoles will be living side by side next to my TV set, and I’m sure I’ll play them both often.

But the Rock Band announcement got me thinking. There is a lot of money to be made from downloadable content, and Xbox Live has been the gold standard both in that arena and for online multiplayer gaming for ages. One of Rock Band’s killer features is its downloadable content, specifically the ability to buy, download and play new songs and continue to get some great fun out of the game months or years after you’ve finished off the 60+ songs it comes with. And of course, MTV, EA and Harmonix are likely making a fortune from players who, having already shelled out $170 for the main Rock Band bundle, keep coming back to spend money to add new content to the game. It’s a huge opportunity, so for Harmonix to basically say it is not worth the effort to try to bring that feature to the Wii speaks volumes about the Wii’s viability as an online gaming machine.

Another data point was this Slate article which basically rips into Nintendo for the general shittiness of online gaming on the Wii, specifically as pertaining to the just-released Super Smash Bros. Brawl which should be a natural fit for the kind of world-class online play the Xbox is known for. To be honest, I haven’t even tried to play Smash Bros. or any other Wii game online yet, but that’s probably because the Wi-Fi Connection experience is such a pain in the ass on Nintendo’s other online platform — the DS handheld — that it never occurred to me that the Wii would be any better. Even though my best friend also has a DS and the same games, and now has a Wii with the same games, the process of trading and entering Friend Codes is so cumbersome that we’ve found just waiting until she can come over and play works just as well. Oh, and I should tell you: she lives in Vermont.

As much as I love the Wii’s ability to bring people together and provide some quality fun-time to people who’d otherwise never look twice at a console, there’s something kinda perverse about a console that is known for party games and yet is so terrible at online gaming.

Though Speaking of Milkshakes

Having already said that this isn’t a thing where I’m choosing the Xbox over the Wii, there is one device of mine that — if it were a living thing and not a mass of metal and silicon — should really be quaking in its boots right now: my Apple TV. Without giving you a full rundown of my home theater setup, suffice to say there’s a shortage of HD video inputs on my TV and one of those is currently occupied by an Apple TV that hardly ever gets used.

The Apple TV is great at what it does, don’t get me wrong. The problem, both with its original incarnation and the new “Take 2” software update released last month, is that it doesn’t do enough things or the right things.

It’s fine for streaming photos and music from your computer, sure. But really, how often does one do that? For playing music, it’s usually easier to just plug your iPod into your stereo speakers than to set up streaming. And in my experience people are way more likely to use the computer itself for showing off photos (where they have more control and easier access to their stuff) than involve some other piece of gadgetry. I know Steve Jobs likes to say that photos are great on the Apple TV because they’re “already HD,” but his customers are generally smart enough to know that as nice as their pics look on an HDTV, they look even better on the 24-inch iMacs they already own.

The crowning feature of the current “Take 2” Apple TV is movie rental downloads, especially the new HD rentals. But think about that, would you? It’s a ~~$299~~$229 device whose primary benefit is to let you pay Apple another five bucks a pop to watch movies over the internet. I’ve tried this out, and it’s all right. But the catalog is (at least for now) pretty slim, and most of Apple’s movie studio partners are choosing to wait until weeks after a film’s DVD/Blu-ray release to add their content to the iTunes Store. I happen to think video-on-demand services like iTunes are the wave of the future, but the current iTunes offering is very, very 1.0. And even so, Microsoft’s been offering a similar service through Xbox Live for ages, and unlike the Apple TV the Xbox 360 is a game console and DVD player as well as a set-top box.

The buying and viewing experience on an Apple TV is very nice, and it may very well be a better set-top box than the 360. But the 360 is quite simply a more useful device in any number of ways, and if my day-to-day is any indication it’s likely that people just don’t need set-top media center extenders like the Apple TV unless, as on the 360, those features are just the icing on an already delicious cake.

I’m a pretty casual gamer, but I’m an even more casual internet movie renter. If Microsoft’s on-demand movie rentals can come anywhere near the value, quality and ease-of-use on the Apple TV on a device which is also a world-class online gaming machine, they’ll have earned a loyal customer and I’ll have one fewer Apple device cluttering up my home theater shelf.

I Knew There Was A Reason They Call It "Bear Stearns"

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:40:34 -0600

Reporting by the Associated Press, translation by your humble narrator (and armchair economist):

JPMorgan Chase said Sunday it will acquire rival Bear Stearns for a bargain-basement $236.2 million — or $2 a share — a stunning collapse for one of the world’s largest and most storied investment banks. The last-minute buyout was aimed at averting a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and a spreading crisis of confidence in the global financial system.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government swiftly approved the all-stock deal, showing the urgency of completing the deal before world markets opened.

Translation: someone at the Federal Reserve got it into their heads that if Bear Stearns could somehow not go bankrupt, the U.S. economy could just get over its whole “collapsing” thing. And someone at JPMorgan Chase was like, “whoa, we can double the size of our investment banking unit for less than we spent on copying last year? Sold!”

Bear Stearns shares closed Friday at $30 a share. At their peak, the shares traded at $159.36.

At $30 per share, Bear Stearns should be worth over $30 billion. So either the Fed forgot to carry a decimal place or two, or they’re saying that a Bear Stearns collapse and bankruptcy was inevitable and decided to just cut to the part where the vultures make off with the carcass. They’re also trying to put a dollar amount on the firm’s utter stupidity w/r/t subprime loans, in hopes of convincing global markets that the subprime problem has been contained. It’s a tourniquet, and whether it’ll actually stop the bleeding remains to be seen.

The Fed will provide special financing to JPMorgan Chase for the deal, JPMorgan Chase said. The central bank has agreed to fund up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ less liquid assets. Risky bets on securities tied to subprime mortgages — loans given to customers with poor credit history — crippled Bear Stearns, the nations’ fifth-largest investment bank.

Imagine that you’re in a police station, and an emo-looking rich kid is being booked for attempted arson. His dad, a silver-haired man with an American flag pin and a firm handshake, walks in and talks to the arresting officer. The kid is the U.S. economy, and he’s being charged with trying to set the global financial system on fire. His dad is the Federal Reserve, and he’s slipping the cop a couple greenbacks to just chalk it up to a youthful prank — irrational exuberance, if you will — and let this one slide, call it even. What I’m saying is, the Fed is admitting no responsibility for the dominant U.S. economy turning to shit, but is nonetheless willing to pay for the damages to avoid causing a ruckus.

So where is Bear Stearns in this metaphor? Well, it’s the bad kid from the wrong side of town, who our emo-economy fell in with? It seems clear to me that the Fed, with help from JPMorgan Chase, is trying to turn Bear Stearns into the scapegoat for the subprime mess, just as Long-Term Capital Management was the scapegoat for the hedge fund crisis that started our last recession a decade ago. They’re the company everyone can point to, saying “hey, they’re the ones who wrecked the financial system! But they’ve been dealt with, so everything’s gonna be okay! Right? Right?”

And I’m pretty sure that good or bad, the answer to that question will be the top story on Monday’s evening newscasts.

They Shoot Racists, Don't They?

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:32:56 -0600

So, apparently despite suggesting Barack Obama is the Democratic frontrunner only as what Keith Olbermann termed an “equal opportunity stunt,” Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist. Nor are Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter or Bill O’Reilly.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this strange phenomenon of non-racists who just happen to think less of black people in Slate:

Implicit to the racist card is the idea that no racists actually live among us. After reality TV star Duane “Dog” Chapman was taped by one of his sons dropping n-bombs, a more loyal son insisted, “My dad is not a racist man. If he was he would have no hair. He’d have swastikas on his body and he would go around talking about Hitler. That’s what a racist is to me.”

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most “investigations” of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.

Let’s call it “country club racism” — the kind of soft bigotry that comes from having never really needed to interface with actual honest-to-god black people on anything like an equal footing. And it’s not strictly an upper-class phenomenon. You’ll find it in poor suburbs and small towns, working-class neighborhoods of big cities, anywhere where you have a tight-knit group of white folks whose only interactions with African-Americans are over a fast food counter or Wal-Mart checkout lane.

True story: back when I was in high school in Birmingham, Ala., one of my classmates came over to my lunchroom table. He had a cartoon he wanted to submit for publication in a student newsletter I was editing, called “Winnie-the-Jew and Nigger Too.” You can probably imagine what it looked and read like. I was appalled, and I think I barely managed to spurt out a question of whether he thought it was appropriate, or whether he thought it was racist. And he was like “nnnngh, I dunno, I just thought it was funny.” And you know, I absolutely believed him. I have no doubt in my mind that that kid — who, by the way and no fooling I swear, just starred in a major motion picture — “just” thought a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh in a yarmulke was hilarious, just like Gerry Ferraro thinks she’s “just” tellin’ it like it is.

Updated April 3rd when I realized that somehow the Markdown filtering never got turned on, and this post has looked like nonsense for weeks.

Primary Space Madness: March 14

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:38:32 -0600

Holy fallacy, Batman! I think people might have noticed that nothing the Clinton campaign says makes any goddamned sense!

Electoral Politics, Meet Smartass Bloggery: So, on Wednesday the Clinton campaign sent out a memo explaining that since Obama was not likely to win next month’s Pennsylvania primary, he therefore has no shot at winning the state in the general election and therefore no shot at winning the presidency. I’ll leave it to the Obama campaign, who put out their own annotated version of that memo, to explain why this logic is retarded.

That Doesn’t Mean I Didn’t Win: Speaking of logic, Steve Delahoyde and the folks at Schadenfreude put together a series of short parables illustrating the logic behind several of Hillary’s recent assertions.

The Ferraro Flap, Serious Version: Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” the other night about Sen. Clinton’s response to the Geraldine Ferraro debacle pretty much matches my own thoughts, minus me laughing every time I see a new note from the Clinton campaign trying to place the blame on the Obama campaign.

The Ferraro Flap, Funny Version: And finally, if you’re looking for a reason to laugh about all this passive-aggressive racism flying around, look no further than Fmr. Rep. Ferraro herself, appearing on various talk shows this week in a montage from TPMtv.

The Rite of Spring

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:35:13 -0600

Oh my, what a thing of beauty:

The Best David Simon Interview Ever

ddemaree@gmail.com (David Demaree) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:21:13 -0600

I’ve got a longer post in the works in reaction to last night’s awesome final episode of The Wire, but here’s a great, long interview with show creator David Simon:

The main theme [of season five’s Baltimore Sun storyline] is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.