I finally got bored of the crap on my fireplace mantle today, and decided to reorganize.  Instead of the usual myriad of knick-knack shit that ends up on the mantle, I decided to be a bit more selective.  Here’s the result:

OK, so it’s not the height of cool, but I did try to be thoughtful about my selections.

The first thing is the little toy tractor.  A few years ago I got back into woodworking, and this little toy was one of my “signature” pieces.  This was a one-off that I did in cedar, and I’m rather pleased with the way it came out.

Next up is one of my favorite old cameras.  I still put film through this camera once every few months, and it always delights and amazes with its nearly-inaudible “click”, and its ability to fold up into a “pocket” sized camera.  Slight caveat around “pocket”, since it would have to be a purse-sized pocket to fit.

This little Welch clock was a fairly recent restoration project that came out rather nicely.  The case is covered in a mahogany veneer, and with a light oiling it really comes to life.  It still keeps pretty good time and has what many would call an “obnoxious” hourly chime.  I like it, and it reminds me of my good days as a watchmaker.

This box is made out of wenge, and the hinge was my own design.  Everything is handmade out of wood, including the dowel pins.  I never used screws or nails in my woodworking; the only thing holding it together is a traditional hide glue.  Another nod to my woodworking past.

And finally, the aloe plant.  It brings the freshness of life to my mantle!

I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte recently. He said something that really stuck with me: “clutter and confusion are not attributed of information; they are a failure of design”. Tufte also discussed why websites should not be the traditional tree-like hierarchy, but rather a “cloud” of information with many thoughtful, intuitive paths to information.

In other words: why force people through some clumsy hierarchy?

The best example of this that I can think of is Wikipedia. Wiki encourages people to create links to other articles, and the result is anything but a hierarchy; it’s more of an informational “walk in the park” that goes from topic to logically connected topic.

It’s brilliant.

So where does Sharepoint come into this? It doesn’t, except for the fact that I’m doing some Sharepoint training right now, and it’s entirely counterintuitive to Tufte’s methodology (which I happen to agree with very much).

For instance: we create sites within sites. Just getting to the project or group site you’re looking for generally means starting at the top and drilling down, or using the largely incapable search bar that never seems to be ‘tuned’ properly (that’s tech-speak for “we can’t figure out how the fuck to make it work”).

My second beef with Sharepoint is the married-at-the-hip interconnectivity with Microsoft Office. Large corporations who drink straight from the Microsoft teat may see this as an advantage, and the armies of drones (clerks) in accounting departments will love the idea of staying in Excel.

Think about it, though: the whole point of web 2.0 is to cut the umbilical cord connecting us to fat applications like Office. A web application that simply reshuffles the 25+ year old methodology of disparate files created using locally installed application and stored in kludgy, unindexed local file systems is a bit like designing modern cars around the driving paradigms of a Ford Model T.

Yes, it’s comfortable. Yes, the drones all know how to use Microsoft Excel and are very capable of saving things on floppy disks.

And does it move us forward? Not one iota, unfortunately.

Wikipedia allows users to create rich, indexed, hyperlinked content with a simple markup language compatible with any web browser on the planet. True, you can’t create spreadsheets in Wiki, but I’m also guessing that it’s a fairly short leap from Mediawiki-style collaboration to rich web applications like Google Spreadsheets and Writely.

And before you ask about mobile devices that don’t always have network connectivity? I can’t think of a better place to implement an open standard for document exchange - open standards that would facilitate a variety of productivity applications.

We can boil this down to three basic ideas:

• choice
• enablement
• Lateral Thinking

On choice: Microsoft not only does not give us choice, but it actually totes the deep interconnectivity between Sharepoint, Office, SQL Server and Windows Server 2003 as an advantage. To that end, none of these products would be considered the best-of-breed in their respective industries; do we really want to weld our methodologies to these non-standards-based proprietary applications?

This smacks largely of FUD - and it works.  After all, they certainly didn’t build their multi-billion dollar monopoly on quality.

On enablement: Sharepoint’s rigid hierarchical paradigm is mired by an impossibly incapable search utility (to that point: I’ve yet to see a Sharepoint search bar that actually returns consistently good results. They may exist, but they’re certainly elusive), and a frighteningly archaic adaptation of hierarchical file structures into a pretty web-based front-end. There’s nothing enabling about this, and I can imagine the same endless file repositories kludging up corporate Sharepoint portals that clog up corporate network drives today.

On Lateral Thinking: As I said above, Wikipedia is a remarkable departure from how we manage information in a traditional corporate network, and it works. It has millions of pages and millions of users, and it facilitates the information, the ecosystem and the culture into a wonderfully elegant web application that requires nothing more than a web browser. Writely and Google Spreadsheets take a different approach - leveraging the best of client-side web scripting to replicate the functionality of traditional fat applications in a web browser window - also with decidedly non-exotic technologies on the client side.

These are all examples of thoughtful and resourceful use of the tools - instead of shoehorning old paradigms into a new software box and wrapping it in a thin veneer of web technology that doesn’t work that well in non-IE browsers.

I’m all for innovation and competition and the free-market, but I still don’t get Sharepoint.

I recently made the move to a credit union.  It was one of the best financial moves I have ever made, and its made me think a lot about the banking industry in general.

Some time ago I figured out that banks make most of their money on “commercial” clients.  That explains why a “business” account has about a million extra fees associated with it.  If you’ve never looked at the cost of having a commercial bank account, don’t.  It’s depressing.

And that’s probably the first reason I like credit unions.  They focus on consumer “retail” banking, and they do a darned good job of it.  It’s an odd feeling to walk into a branch and be greeted by smiling tellers who know me by name; it’s an even stranger feeling to actually understand the fee structure of my bank account because it’s so darned simple.

But it goes a bit beyond that.  When I closed my Bank of America account, they had assessed any number of
“inactivity” fees since I really hadn’t used it for a few months.  After a rather long game of staring at the banking officer helping me close the account, he agreed to refund them.  The account was promptly closed.

But was it?  Oh, no - turns out that the refund took some time to process, and then the account stayed in a “pending” state until they figured out what to do with the small balance left in the account.  I called them a month later (when I received another statement for a supposedly closed account) and asked what we needed to do to close this account for good.  They said that they had to send me the money.  OK then - send me a check.  Easy enough.  It arrived two days later.

So why didn’t they just send me a check in the mail in the first place?  Better yet, why don’t they NOT charge me for inactivity on an account?  Imagine - they charge me when I want to do something with my money, and they charge me when I don’t do anything with it.  They might as well use this slogan: “whether you do anything with your money or not, we’re still going to get a lot of it”.

And it’s not just Bank of America.  It’s all of them.

Thankfully, my credit union seems to have a grasp of common logic, and it’s becoming a very good relationship indeed.

hiiya

i am Melanie’s daughter, Tia. You may remember me from my mothers blog, and all of my infamous stories of mischief. Such as: hat stealing, pot smoking, and street dancing while intoxicated. ohhh yes, i am a wonderous one. I wish to inform the readers of this blog that…

MICHAELS POOPING DANK (which is a good thing for all your non-teenagers)

He’s my therapist. I decided. Even tho he wishes bad hair days on me.

oh well oh well.

Who agrees that Michael needs to go clubbing and get some hot chicks numbers.

I told him that and he laughed at me.

He’s fruit cake.

And my new best friend

wooottt.

Behold, the new me - courtesy of Primp:

Now, a bit of history.

For many years I was a stalwart believer in barber shops. The kind with old men who recite sports scores by rote, thirty year old National Geographic magazines in the waiting area and chairs made of chromed cast iron with large bakelite handles and the manufacturer’s name cast into the footrest.

No more.

I’ve never been particularly adventurous with my hair. Sure, I grew it out almost to my shoulders in high school. Yes, I had it buzzed army-short in university. But I’ve never really done anything daring with it.

And to be daring, one needs to find good people to blaze new trails with. I heard about this salon from a few friends and decided to spend more than $12 on a haircut. The affable Lisa did a great job on me - fussing over the thick forest that was once my hair, and turning it into something rather pleasant.

Next time we’re going to talk about colour. And that’s all I’m going to say for now. But - to honor my promise to Stacey (who posted her own little before-and-after photo sequence) - here’s the rather unflattering “before” shot.

(yes, I know it’s not fair to take the “before” shot with a $10 webcam and the “after” shot with a digital SLR, but just deal with it.)