my workspace, recently

1. one's primary focus is to understand, and then achieve, what is important to himself.

2. what is important to me is, to a significant extent, my career. 

3. most nights, i find it of great importance that i spend a few hours focusing on my career. 

4. sometimes, when one is focusing on one's career at night, one needs a drink. 

5. white wine is nice in the summer, even if all you've got is a whiskey glass. 

6. mic6 tooling plate makes for a pretty nice coaster.   also it's useful when you're measuring things.

7. seltzer with a little orange flower water and a slice of lemon is also pretty refreshing. 

8. folks who do 3d design and *don't* use a 3d mouse are crazy. 

9. moisturizer is important. 

10. things that smell a nice way are nice.  my candle kinda sucks but it works in a pinch. 

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1. thumbtacks are cool.  i got some aluminum ones that i like, and i like using them. 

2. cork is cool.  i got some raw cork bark when i was in portugal a few years ago, and i like it. 

3. managing a tackboard is weird.  also, tacks aren't a great way to hang coiled-up iphone cables, but they work in a pinch. 

4. spare buttons are totally inconvenient to keep.  so you're at your desk and you just pin them to your tackboard. 

5. i've gotten two tickets on my bicycle in the past 6 weeks. 

6. books are dying. 

7. books are kinda nice. 

8. if you're going to make a book, make it specific to paper.  paper is a great medium to display high resolution data, which makes it great for graphics, layout, texture, etc.  it's not particularly great for words. 

9. whatever.  i have a couple of books in my place now. i rarely look at them.   i did just get the 2012 Feltron Report, which is really beautiful and which i'm super excited about.

10. i live on top of a loud, bright corner.  which has its pluses and its minuses. 

11. curtains are effective but the means for procuring and installing them are inconvenient, and the design options that are available are limited. 

12. linen is available by the yard for pretty cheap.  and it lets a nice amount of light in. 

13. the street is still loud and bright, but if you want to live with perfect environmental control, you can totally just find a cave and move there. 

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what it's like to cook with me

man, i *fuck* with cooking.

in business, my experience has tended towards large projects - endeavors that span years, where progress from week to week can, at times, be hard to distinguish.  i find these to be highly rewarding.  one begins with a mental construct which is necessarily incomplete, and which develops in ways that are impossible to predict.  in ways, this is psychologically challenging; my concept of myself has been deeply entwined with the projects i've been involved in, and the inevitable fact that i will be proven so deeply *wrong* about what i'm working for is troubling.  but the experience is also exciting.  moments come in which one feels he has a complete - fleeting, but complete - view of what he's doing.  it's an exhilarating feeling.

times are, from time to time, that once i get home i want nothing to do with managing any project (read: sitcoms are kinda awesome).  but more frequently, i find myself craving something that i can experiment with in a low-stakes setting.  

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as a result, i tend to go a bit overboard.  i will go against specific orders to keep shit simple.  i'll make noodles-and-butter into a dish with a dozen ingredients.  i become a parody of myself at the grocery store; i fiend for complexity:

me: shit, fiddlehead ferns are in season. 

companion: what are fiddlehead ferns? 

me: uh, i mean, i think they're just fern heads.  they grow wild... i think they're good.  i've never had them. 

companion: how do you cook them? 

me: i don't really know. [grabs bag, reaches for ferns] 

companion: wait-

me: no, this'll be good.  i've always wanted to cook fiddlehead ferns. 

companion: but-

me: [tosses bag of ferns into basket] oh, they have ramps too... 

companion: wait - uh, what are ramps?

me: i think they're like garlic. [grabs ramps] i've never had them. 

etc.

it's kind of the best.   cooking is fun.

thoughts on standards, revisited

late last year, i posted some thoughts on technical drawing standards on my now mothballed business' blog.  they were an attempt to clarify some things i had been thinking of over the past year or so, and they remain a useful starting point for my own style guide.

i'm now in the position of revisiting many of these items, and will be writing more of my thoughts in the coming weeks.  in the meantime, i'm reposting my initial thoughts here.  some of them are now more fully developed, and some have been partially discarded.  regardless, i continue to welcome any comments. 

I've been spending some time organizing myself and my designs, and am working on creating standards for myself.  A few ideas I've had are below, in no particular order.

• When producing documentation, adopt and use standards that are optimized for digital, not physical, reproduction. 
• Minimize printing whenever possible. When choosing paper sizes, prefer ISO to Architectural, and Architectural to ANSI. (Do so in spite the fact that, at least in North America, this ranking is... inconvenient.)
• Prefer decimal inch or metric dimensions to fractional inches, which round inaccurately, produce inconvenient decimals at small resolutions, and encourage draftsmen to use decimal equivalents with unnecessarily high precision standards.
• Use single spaces between sentences. (This will take some getting used to; the double slap of the spacebar has been drilled into me from years of practice.)
• Track revisions.
• Name all dimensions. Name key features.
• Produce and maintain job books which refer directly to named features and dimensions and explain fit and function of all important design elements.
• Choose cross-platform standards, assuming they don't hurt too much.
• Have fun, etc.

As always, your feedback is encouraged.  I'd be interested in hearing other peoples' experience with and philosophies on standards and documentation aesthetics.

Spencer

andon cords

...It is epitomized in the paradoxical Toyota proverb, “Stop production so that production never has to stop.” The key to the andon cord is that it brings work to a stop as soon as an uncorrectable quality problem surfaces—which forces it to be investigated. This is one of the most important discoveries of the lean manufacturing movement: you cannot trade quality for time. If you are causing (or missing) quality problems now, the resulting defects will slow you down later. Defects cause a lot of rework, low morale, and customer complaints, all of which slow progress and eat away at valuable resources.

 -Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (emphasis mine)

evolution

from last weekend's nytimes article on Y Combinator:

He used to tell me, ‘I want to build a product that helps social entrepreneurs and changes the world.’ Now he tells me, ‘I want to be the next Airbnb or Dropbox.’

i find myself deeply ambivalent about this kind of shift.  does it represent a developing cynicism in the protagonist (Strikingly's David Chen)?  or is the second quote simply a refinement of an underlying ambition that the first one masks with evocative language? 

regardless, the real message is in the desire to create the a big, unforeseen, game-changing thing.  which is, as it happens, exactly what i'm (we're all?) looking for. 

nb: it's a good article and a well told story, but perhaps the greatest gem is an exchange about the scent of rain, which apparently goes by the term petrichor.

Baseball is safe as America’s pastime, but MLB needs to fight to retain the relevance of the in-stadium experience.

Growing up, my experience of baseball was mediated through two lenses.  My father’s interest was a mirror of Ken Burns' - slow, nostalgic, and charmingly self important.  It contrasted sharply with the interests of my friends and classmates, who were more allured by the violence of football and the swagger and grace of basketball.  

A few years later, and it's evident that baseball has lost the attention of my generation.  Cultural divide aside, the MLB is under attack.  Incredibly, the steroid era seems not to have killed fans' appreciation of the game.  2012 saw MLB's fifth highest attendance ever, and TV revenues - especially for teams in NY and LA - continue to soar.  But the World Series was the lowest rated ever.  And compare the number of google results for "baseball is boring" (1.4 million) and similar searches for football and basketball (252,000 and 53,000 respectively) - and add the fact that the average MLB game has increased from 2:30 in the 1970s to almost 3 hours in 2012 - and it's clear that something needs to be done.

It seems obvious that the shame surrounding PEDs hasn't helped baseball's image, and that there are changes the MLB could make to the game (e.g. more effective video review; shortening the season; reducing time between pitches) that would make the game more exciting.  But these are pipe dreams given the league's conservatism.  Moreover, the league's history is the feature which distinguishes it best.  Baseball should temper its pomposity, sure, but we shouldn't ask for any more than that.

But the MLB needs to take real steps towards making the in-stadium experience more engaging - and I don't mean getting Shake Shack to expand into more parks.  Luckily, there are ways to capitalize on the very aspect of the game that make people think it's boring - namely, its dead time.

Invest in Wireless.

Professional sports - all of them - need to find a way to get a ballpark full of 50,000 fans online at once.  In-stadium video is rapidly becoming the norm, but the layout of MLB parks makes the prospect of Jerry Jones style jumbotrons impractical.  Baseball needs a way for fans to interact more intimately with the play-by-play action, and the only way to make this a reality is to get real about wireless.

Push the Apps. 

Much to their credit, MLBAM's At Bat and At The Ballpark apps go a long way towards modernizing the in-game experience.  Baseball can't stop there.  At the Ballpark should integrate real-time congestion data for restrooms and vendors.  What about a seat swapping marketplace, where fans could move around the stadium as demand in different sections shifts?  If I need to leave in the 7th inning, I should be able to donate my tickets to a kid who's watching his first game from the nosebleeds.  Nevermind social media integration and connectivity with stat-heavy apps like the one Baseball Prospectus sells - MLBAM has a captive audience, and there are plenty of things they can do on their own to improve and market their apps.

Access to Camera Angles. 

With so much space between plays, baseball has an opportunity to let fans explore the parts of the game that they love best.  MLB should introduce an interface that allows fans to choose which camera angle they want to watch, and to choose when, and at what speed, a replay is shown.  This feature is a glaring hole in the in-stadium experience, which pales to DVR- and replay-enhanced TV when it comes to examining the game up close.  Eventually it should be filled on mobile devices, with features similar to MLB.tv's Mosaic View, but in the meantime, teams should set up in-stadium clubs where fans can look at the feeds that broadcasters have access to.  This kind of venue would bring fans closer to the game, whereas most stadiums' club & restaurant offerings serve mostly to distract from it.

Heated Stadium Seats. 

I mean, why not?  If I shell out $300 for field level seats to a night game in April, I expect a little protection from Yankee Stadium's infamous (albeit possibly over hyped) wind tunnel effect.  And hey, if a $23K Honda Civic can do it, I would expect no less from the Steinbrenners.  Do I hear a HotHands licensing deal looming?

Note: An earlier version of this post inaccurately set the number of hits for "baseball is boring" at 7 million. 

it's not about passion.

It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.

Thomas Keller, of The French Laundry and Per Se, quoted by Mark Wilson on fastcodesign.  Via kottke.