Scrambling Eggs Is Easy

In 1992, I was working at the computer lab help desk in Sweet Hall at Stanford. A woman came up to the desk in tears. She explained that she was an art grad student, and had been randomly selected to participate in the beta test of Stanford's new online class-registration tool. The registration deadline was fast approaching, and she couldn't figure out how to use it. After helping her slog through the terminal-based, command-line, completely non-intuitive tool, I realized that there had to be a better way. I had come to believe that computers could -- and should -- be tools that anyone can use, and this wasn't the way to do it. That experience led me to focus on human-computer interaction for the rest of my time at Stanford, and eventually led directly to my current career.

I was reminded of that today thinking about Steve Jobs, and the impact he had on my life and so many others. Had Steve not driven the development of the Lisa and the Macintosh, what would have given me the idea that computers could be used by "normal" people? Had Steve not driven the development of the NeXT cube and NeXTStep, would we have the Web today?  Without the Apple ][, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, where would we be?

Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventor.  Steve Wozniak was the one who created the Apple // hardware.  The modern graphical user interface was invented at Xerox PARC.  And of course, there were plenty of MP3 players before the iPod, plenty of smartphones before the iPhone, and even tablet computers long before the iPad.

What Steve Jobs brought to the table was an uncanny sense of how these technologies could be put together in ways that people could actually use them, and, more importantly, how they could be packaged up in ways that people would buy them.  He didn’t always succeed, but when he did, he transformed industries.

Steve’s idea of selling the Apple ][ as a complete package – a case with a built-in keyboard where you just had to plug it into a TV -- was untried in the computing world.  It is credited with creating the home computer industry.

When he visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979, Steve saw the value of the graphical user interface that Xerox’s own management never quite got.  He incorporated those ideas into the Lisa, and then the Mac – and no matter what device and operating system you’re using to read this, those ideas are still very much part of it. 

And of course, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and iPad have already had profound impacts on the music, communications, and (again) computing industries – not only because they have made Apple billions, but because they have shown the path that just about everyone else follows.

When Steve failed, it wasn’t for lack of boldness.  His insistence that the Apple /// not have a fan meant that it had a nasty tendency to overheat.  The Lisa, and later the NeXT Cube, were just too expensive to go beyond a niche market.  One might surmise that he learned from those mistakes – certainly the Apple of the 2000’s has been extremely successful at bringing out the right products at the right price point at the right time.

Perhaps Steve Jobs’ biggest strength was his drive to strip his products down to their essentials.  Technologists mock him for insisting that the Mac mouse have only one button, but in hindsight, his decision to drop the no-longer-necessary floppy drive and serial ports from the iMac was brilliant.  And the sleek design of the iPad and iPhone are possible in no small part to the simplification down to one big “home” button.  Other companies have always tended to think in terms of feature lists – Steve thought about the product as a whole.  He may not have been a designer himself, but Steve Jobs certainly personified design sensibility.

In the end, Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy isn’t Apple alone.  It’s the way that, by succeeding, he has driven the leadership of the rest of the computing industry – and, honestly, every other product industry from automobiles to kitchen implements – to FINALLY TAKE DESIGN SERIOUSLY.  Steve proved that good design, combined with good technology and good execution, can actually sell.

Steve Jobs inspired an entire generation of technologists to think differently about computers and computing devices, and pushed everything in our lives – not just Apple products – to be better.  Thank you Steve, and may your memory be a blessing to your family and loved ones, to your colleagues and coworkers, and to all of us who want life to be just a little bit more elegant and a little bit more fun.

If you live in California and watch any TV or listen to the radio at all, you’ve probably seen or heard ads encouraging you to vote yes on Prop 16, the so-called “Taxpayer’s Right To Vote Act.”  The basic claims of the ads are:

1. Local governments currently don’t have any limits on how much public funding they can put into going into the electricity business (as some cities have done, and others are considering doing).
2. Local governments can do this without the approval of taxpayers.
3. The state government is in a massive financial crisis.

So, the ads continue, you should vote yes on Prop 16, which requires a 2/3 taxpayer vote for any attempt of local governments to go into the electricity business.  Because it’s your money and you should get a say of how it’s used.

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP.

First of all, guess who’s funding this campaign?  Shockingly, it’s Pacific Gas and Electric, the largest private electricity supplier in California.  Because, again shockingly, this initiative would make it harder for local governments to compete with them, by requiring a 66% majority of voters – pretty damn hard to get.

Second, local governments also don’t have any legal limits on, say, spending unlimited public funds on building an escalator to nowhere.  Or a monorail. (Monorail!)  They do, however, have budgets, and practical limits on how much money they actually *have*.  And, oh yeah, they have city councils.  Guess how those city council members are chosen?  By voters.  Don’t like what your city council is spending its money on?  VOTE THE BUMS OUT.

Third, the attempts of local governments to compete with private electricity providers has just about zero impact on the state budget, crisis or no crisis.

Why not just be honest, PG&E, and run an initiative to make it illegal for local governments to compete with you?  I’m sure you could make a cogent argument on free-market grounds; many would agree with you.  Oh, right, but MOST WOULDN’T.  So you’d LOSE.

And that, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with the initiative process.  PG&E has managed to put an initiative on the ballot to preserve their commercial advantage, while couching it in terms of taxpayer’s rights.  And they’re spending about 1,000 times what the only organized opposition has managed to raise, blanketing the state with their ads.  I fear that people who don’t bother to look past the surface are going to vote this thing up in big numbers.  I’d love to be wrong.

I hope a future version of the California constitution will require a simple majority vote in the state legislature to pass a budget, and a 2/3 majority of all voters to amend the constitution.  Because we have the opposite right now and it’s killing us.

When you work for a tech company, especially a high-profile one, at some point in your career you end up with access to information that your company would prefer not be public.  Sometimes it’s stuff that nobody would care about, and sometimes it’s a prototype of the next generation of one of the hottest products on the market.

Companies have all sorts of reasons for keeping product details secret.  Sometimes it’s for competitive reasons.  Sometimes it’s because companies are scared of the so-called “Osborne Effect”, where pre-announcing a new product might adversely hit sales of what you currently have on the market.  And sometimes it’s just because the products aren’t done yet.  Anyone who’s worked in technology knows that features sometimes get cut or radically changed at the last minute.  If those features are secret, nobody misses them.  But if everybody knew about them, then they are made more important by their absence – which can ruin the impression one might otherwise have of the product that’s left, which might still be great.

At the same time, I can totally understand why people are excited to find out what’s coming next from Apple, and why journalists are so dogged in pursuing their stories.  It’s the companies’ job to make products that people care about, and it’s the journalist’s job to report what people want to know about those products regardless of what the companies think.  That’s the role of a free press.

What sucks is when those journalists go and reveal the identity of the otherwise perfectly innocent person who screwed up by getting drunk and losing his phone in a bar – irresponsible, but hardly criminal.  Apple almost certainly knew who he was.  Whether his coworkers knew as well is between him, his management, and his coworkers.  As is whether they fired him or not (it appears that they didn’t, for which I’m glad for his sake).  But frankly, the rest of us don’t need to know who he is.  He’s just an ordinary guy in the Valley who now has the infamy of being the guy who lost the 4G iPhone.  For him, it might be a huge trauma, or it might just be a funny story at this point – but that should’ve been for *him* to figure out.

Revealing the identity of a criminal can serve a public good.  Revealing secret information can certainly serve a public good.  But bringing worldwide attention to a relatively minor, if embarrassing, situation, making it into something much bigger than it is – that’s just rude.

At this point I don’t know how I feel about the criminal investigation that the San Mateo County DA’s office has instigated.  The freedom-of-the-press media-literacy junkie in me is bothered by the severity of the raid into a Gizmodo editor’s home, but the citizen-of-Silicon-Valley in me can’t muster much sympathy for these guys.  Publishing the guy’s name – in a fairly smarmy, self-congratulatory article – was just a dick move.

[Of course, as always, these views are mine alone, and should not be taken to reflect those of my employer, family, friends, or anyone else affiliated or not affiliated with me.]

Warning: this post contains a bit of Obamamania.

I just finished reading The Audacity of Hope, our president-elect's 2006 memoir/policy reader. The quick review: every page left me thinking "how did we get so lucky to elect this guy?".

I've been a big fan of Barack Obama since his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, but the Obama of this book comes off as even more intelligent, more nuanced, and just plain more honest than I would've expected from any politician. Simply put: at least from my perspective, he Gets It (tm). I certainly don't agree with everything he says -- his opposition to gay marriage is the most obvious example -- but throughout he comes off as a guy who tries to live a meaningful life, is grateful for what he has, and has learned a lot from his own challenges and mistakes.

I truly hope that President Obama will stay true to the Barack Obama who wrote this book. If so, we're in good hands.

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I haven't posted in forever, but I keep thinking about things that I'd actually like to post. For example, I meant to post after Prop 8 passed, on the theme of "life may suck now, but life is long." I've been glad to see the nationwide protests and the court challenges, and I'm still optimistic that gay marriage will be legal in California in the next few years. In the meantime, I've adopted a simple credo - gay marriage is valid and recognized in my book. I have a few gay friends and coworkers who got married recently, and as far as I'm concerned they're as married as I am. This may seem like an obvious statement to other gay marriage supporters, but as I see it it's a critical statement to make. If we, as members of our society, recognize explicitly that gay marriage is valid, then eventually the law will have to follow.

Anyway, I also wanted to post about what I've been reading lately. It's mostly centered on politics, which admittedly surprises me post-election. I guess this year I'm finally not burned out. The book I'm in the middle of is actually Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. I'm a little embarrassed not to have read this before the election, but the farther I get into it, the more excited I am for the man who we elected. He's not only smart, but in this book shows a true sense of honesty, humility, and a recognition that politics should be more than just horse races and gamesmanship. I'm halfway through, but highly recommended.

On the less serious side, I just reread RA Candide's Articles of Federation. This is basically The West Wing set in the Star Trek universe after the events of Nemesis and some subsequent books. It's a fun read, although most of the non-human characters seem to sound like the same Aaron Sorkin characters as the human ones do. But the author does a pretty good job of creating a plausible political system from what we've seen of the Federation government in tv and movies.

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I've been meaning to write this post for a while, thanks to hermetic  and another friend for prodding me to do so.  I'm also emailing it to a bunch of family and friends.

On November 4, by means of Proposition 8, California voters will decide whether or not to add the following words to the California State Constitution:
I don't think anyone who knows me well will be surprised to know that I'm opposed to this proposition.  Some of you may be surprised, however, that I consider this the single most important item on the ballot this year.  More important than alternative energy, more important than Congressional races, and even more important than the presidential election.  Yeah, you read that correctly -- I am more concerned about Prop 8 than about who our next president is. (*)

The simple impact of Prop 8 would be to override the California Supreme Court's decision in May that stated that, according to the equal protection clause of the California State Constitution, the state cannot prevent people from marrying simply on the basis of sexual orientation.  Gay people who have freely chosen to commit themselves to a life partner, and accept the rights and responsibilities of being a married couple, will be told that their commitment is neither "recognized" nor "valid."

I'm a happily married straight man, so you might wonder why I care so much about a law that would never affect me personally.  The answer is that it will and does affect me personally, and very deeply so.  To put it simply, I do not want to live in a society where the rights of my friends and family are curtailed simply because they are gay or lesbian.  I believe that gay relationships have no less potential to be loving, caring, healthy, and ultimately society-benefitting than does my own marriage.  I believe that gay relationships are just as "valid" as my own.

I'm usually pretty good at finding the rational fundamental assumptions on both sides of an issue, even though I disagree with one or the other.  I don't think it's irrational to believe that higher taxes on higher-income people are unfair (although I disagree).  I don't think it's irrational to believe that affirmative action does more harm than good to minorities (although I firmly disagree).  I don't even think it's irrational to believe that illegal immigrants, because they are illegal, don't deserve any access to health or educational services (although I really, really, really disagree with that one).

But frankly, the only fundamental assumption that I can find that allows Prop 8 to make any sense is that gay people, and their relationships, are inherently inferior to straight people and their relationships.  That gay commitments are less valid than straight commitments.  I more than disagree with that viewpoint -- I find it fundamentally irrational and morally wrong.

I know that many religious people believe that homosexuality is immoral.  However, I know many other religious people who believe that gay relationships are just another expression of God's love.  No church, mosque, or synagogue should (or, I believe, will) ever be forced to perform a gay marriage, but neither should they be *prevented* from doing so. 

I am asking you to do at least one of the following, but if nothing more, please do #1 (I am doing all of them):

1)  If you live in California, please vote NO on Proposition 8.  If you're thinking to yourself, "I already was going to do that," then please consider doing either #2 or #3 also.  If your conscience simply does not allow you to do so, please abstain from voting on the measure.

2)  Talk to other people you know in California and ask them to vote no on Proposition 8.  Even if you know that they are voting no, please still talk to them and make sure that they vote.  If they don't live in California, they have friends or family who do!!  Please make sure to talk to the people who are most likely to vote yes and see if you can change their mind.

3)  Make a donation at http://www.NoOnProp8.com.

Feel free to send this message on to anyone you want or to use parts of it in your own appeals to others.  Everything you can do to help defeat Proposition 8 is greatly appreciated.

If you would like to talk to me more about Proposition 8, please email me or call me.  Please help me and so many others in defeating this measure.

All my best wishes,
Adam

(*) I'm still very concerned about who our next president is.  Just not quite *as* concerned. :)

I finished watching "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" last night.  I read the book last year, but figured this was as good a time as any to watch the documentary.

The situation with Enron was, of course, reminiscent of what's been going on in the news in the past few weeks and months.  A seemingly solid company all of a sudden collapses because of rot on the inside -- overly complex financial transactions that seemed to be worth billions, but turned out to be virtually worthless.

Now, what happened at Enron was at least partially due to outright fraud, and I'm not particularly convinced that the failing banks and other institutions are guilty of anything that simple and specific.  But it's clear that, just as with Enron, bankers, traders, and executives gambled big money on transactions whose incredible complexity disguised their actual risk.  Financiers saw huge upsides, and ignored or missed the huge downsides.

It seems to me that these problems would be greatly lessened if finance could somehow be simplified.  You get a mortgage from a bank, that bank is responsible for collecting on the mortgage.  You put money in a mutual fund, that mutual fund invests in stocks, bonds, and other securities that are CLEARLY linked to reality.  One or two levels of indirection max before you get to someone who actually sells *stuff*.  Risk is part of capitalism, but in order to work, it has to be understood.

Apparently, Wasilla was charging rape victims for rape kits and forensic exams while Palin was mayor.  She says now that she was opposed to this policy.  But did she stop it?  No, it took the Alaska State Legislature to stop this practice.

Yeah, *that's* the kind of change we need.

Personally, I've had enough of an administration that pursues heartless policies to the point of moronic absurdity.  If you like This American Life, you should listen to this show -- even if you don't, it's worth taking a look.   It's the little things that matter.

The more I hear about Sarah Palin, the less impressed I am.

I'll admit, when I heard about McCain's VP pick I thought it was a bit of an obvious grab for disaffected Hillary voters, but that it was still a pretty gutsy move. Now I'm just disgusted.

I'll ignore the stuff with her family. Any sane person knows that you can't control what a 17-year-old does.

What pisses me off most is her so-called stand against government waste. She didn't stop the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- she supported it until after it gained a notorious reputation.  (see here for more info).  She's not an anti-waste crusader, she's just an expedient politician.  Selling the Alaska governor's luxury jet was a good idea (even if she didn't actually manage to sell it for a profit), but who's paying for the private jet she's now using for the campaign?  Expedient politics.

And, of course, there's her mocking of "community organizers."  ("I guess the mayor of a small town is like a community organizer -- but with actual responsibilities.")  Mayors run cities & towns, and most of the time probably do a fine job.  But community organizers and the movements they create have been the actual agents of real change in this country.  Think suffragettes.  Think the civil rights movement.  Those were grassroots community movements that actually accomplished major changes in our government and in our society. 

And finally, she's a religious-right, put-government-into-my-bedroom (while taking it out of my pocketbook) ultraconservative who would take the country in, I think, the wrong social direction.

Sarah Palin may or may not be "qualified" to be vice president, but I'll say one thing -- were she to end up in the White House, the changes she'd bring are pretty much the opposite of the changes we need.  At best she's just another expedient politician, and at worst she's an ultra-right-winger who wants to impose some idyllic notion of the 1950's on our society.

In conclusion, go Barack. :)

I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare. Seems that in the dream, the Stanford Athletic Department had decided to move our basketball seats around. While all of my friends chose to pay extra for pretty decent seats on the lower level of the arena, I decided to save a few bucks and got cheap seats that appeared to be in the end zone area -- but when I arrived at the first game (against apparently-#1 USC), I discovered to my horror that they were actually outside the arena entirely, and offered a *very* obstructed view of the game -- couldn't even see the scoreboard.

So I went to the ticket office in the arena to complain, and the best they could do was to offer me general admission tickets that didn't guarantee any seat at all -- basically, I'd just have to find empty seats and hope that their rightful owners didn't show up. By the end of the dream, I was so pissed off that I started hitting tables and walls.

The fact that bad basketball seats qualifies as a nightmare says a bit about how nice life is for me right now. :)