Notes on a Square-shaped career

A jack, and his trades, on a quest for some type of mastery.

In the interest of self-congratulation, and because (who knows?) maybe it’s better to mix some parody into one’s résumé:

Things I have done in the past, and will do again if you pay me.

Worked in subzero conditions for days on end.

You know how they say some things build character? Well, being cold is miserable, but I always remember it fondly.

Demolished a load bearing wall.

This shit is tricky. You gotta build a temporary wall to keep the load supported, and then you get out your sledgehammer and knock the old wall out. Extra points if you actually *lift* the load up beforehand, using a bottle jack or similar.

Organized my music collection with a shell script.

Most practical use of my years on Linux. I had all these old Napster-era files on my hard drive and had (obsessively) named them all in a particular naming sequence (“Artist Name — Album Name — Track Number — Track Name”, if you must know). But a lot of them were just in the root of my “Music” directory, and I wanted them to be sorted into a directory structure that only halfway existed. So I wrote this script that identified all of the relevant fields in the filename and searched to see if the necessary file path existed, and then created it if it didn’t and moved the files into the right path. I was an amateur and spent like a weekend on the script. It executed (and probably sorted through a couple dozen gigabytes of music) in like five seconds.

(Shamelessly) done my own photography.

Hey, I’ve got nothing but love for your selfies. I spent *years* with a tripod and a remote trigger. About the best investment I ever made was a muslin backdrop, and I’ll curate & color correct the *hell* out of some soft-focus product shots.

Been to China.

Incredibly (and to no particular credit to myself), this is maybe my most marketable achievement in the past three years. I visited like ten factories while I was there, and was wooed by some number of dozens of potential suppliers of machined/extruded/moulded parts. I was apparently also charming enough to get a local girl to show me around working-class Pudong (in a non-romantic way). I was out of my element, and accidentally brilliant.

Spliced both three-strand twist *and* double braid rope.

Three strand is easy once you get the hang of it. Double braid rope comes in all varieties, and you really need to know what you’re working with to get it right.

Vetted SMT assembly shops.

Not that I knew the first thing about how SMT is done. But supplier vetting is more about understanding the people you’re talking to than it is about understanding the processes they’re performing.

Finished The Power Broker.

You want commitment? You got it.

Attended Edward Tufte’s one-day course.

Edward Tufte has a vanity gallery in Chelsea, and he seems pretty good at getting a couple dozen suckers to plunk down $380 to listen to him rap about information design for a few hours. Which, if you count my ability to gush about John Snow and claim expertise on the ways in which PowerPoint distorts intellectual discourse… Well, let’s just say it was money well spent.

Attended The Landmark Forum.

You have no idea how many things occur to me that.

Unlocked basically all the privacy settings on my Facebook page.

If you’re scared of hiring me because — gasp — there are pictures on the internet of me drinking beer with friends, well, move right along.

Had a letter to the editor published.

And let me tell you, there are some key phrases I wish I had reworded beforehand.

Been the president of a nonprofit.

You gotta watch out — speak up at the first meeting, and they just might call on you.

Derived the syntactical structure of sentences like “The man that the girl that is nice met is cool.”

If you don’t think that’s grammatical, well, check this out.

Made coq au vin.

Though I must say, chicken bones in my stew is a little weird.

Been at the helm, at the start of a race, in a 38' sailboat, when we crashed into the committee boat.

They were parked; we were probably doing 7-8 knots. Not my brightest moment. Everyone was okay, and after that was clear I accepted my lapse in judgment and got back at the helm.

Told a supplier that we were working on developing in-house capabilities in his field.

I had no idea how to splice rubber extrusion, but I pitched the idea to my bosses and eventually we figured it out. The supplier was really cool about it, too — we paid him a retainer and he taught us what he knew (which wasn’t very much) about the process. Rubber transfer moulding is really simple, but — even with our supplier’s support and advice — we struggled with the details for months. I still don’t understand precisely what is happening chemically as rubber cures, but in the end I guess that wasn’t really relevant.

Fired a subcontractor.

Guy was an asshole. I made a key mistake, though, and didn’t limit my list of reasons to “you’re an asshole.” If you’ve got that card, play it — and leave the rest to yourself.

Let my boss convince me to let an employee go.

This was a huge mistake. Ultimately he was right, but his lack of trust in my judgment was a harbinger of bad things to come.

Spent way too long sharpening a chisel.

But man, sharpening stuff on a Japanese style waterstone is so cool.

Stayed at home and written silly things for the internet.

:)

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With apologies to Mike Arauz and his excellent post, Square-shaped is the new T-shaped.

From the Archives: Pizza, Philly, 2008

In 2008, I was living in Philly and decided to start a blog about all the pizza I was eating. Suffice it to say that it never took off (I composed six posts over a three month period before drifting away from the idea), but I like some of the writing. Below is my (slightly edited) review of El Greco, a totally crappy joint near the totally crappy workspace I kept in North Philly. It was originally posted 2008.05.30. I particularly like the last paragraph, which sums up my feelings about slice shops well.

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El Greco is a neighborhood shop, and it's just a few blocks from my workshop. I stop by every once in a while, and it's an experience.

Today, as usual, there were a bunch of people inside. Three behind the small (but tall) counter, a driver or two outside, and three or four customers in the long, narrow area inside. I order two slices, which are put in a box. (A bit of a downer for me - what, they don't want me eating in front of the shop? Put it on a plate, please...) I go outside and stand by my bike and eat them - warm, gooey, and very sweet. The cheese is thick and chewy, the crust is soft and light, and the sauce is sugary and squirmy. 

The slices are floppy - they fold, and don't crease - and drip red-orange oil as I squeeze the fluffy crust to keep the whole package together. The first bite requires me to hold the crust side above the rest of the slice, so that it doesn't unfold and go limp. Eating the slices produces a texture that resembles, almost, mollusks. As I stand there eating, I observe the scene. A tall, gaunt man sits on the stoop, then stands and mills around the storefront, smoking a cigarette. Three customers who came out of the shop just as I was entering sit on a stoop next door eating their slices and talking. The traffic on 2nd St. whizzes by, passing the small community at Jefferson - the slice shop, an auto tag store and a barbershop.

I like El Greco in a way. It's not exactly gourmet, but talking about the quality of the food misses the point of the business. It isn't high quality - some might go so far to argue that it's hardly pizza. Either way, it's food, it's part of a neighborhood. And sometimes that's all you need. 

The best question

The best question is the one that gets the most interesting response, whether it answers the question or not.

The best interviewer is the person who elicits the most interesting response - not the one who asks the most interesting question.

The best interviewee is the one who is able to both yes-and the interviewer (it's not about agreement, it's about agreeability) and provide the most interesting response to the question at hand.

From my own archives: On Content

What follows here is excerpted from a personal email I wrote earlier this year. It remains representative of how I feel about my own content creation - reckless enthusiasm and all :)

It appears slightly edited, for formatting and privacy. 

- - -

The way I see it, there are really two types of content: curatorial and original.  

There are a *lot* of curatorial blogs. The best, e.g. Kottke, are *excellent.* The worst are just commonplacing, which is actually pretty cool. I suppose you could argue that curation in a digital age should occur in Evernote or a similar document storing platform, but at that point, who cares. It's fun to have an aesthetic perspective, and if all you do is reblog photos, what's wrong with that?

Original content is, to me, closer to the heart. I like this quote, from a recent post by Keenan Cummings:

But regardless of wherever that team and those designers might fall on the criticism-worthy spectrum, I’ve learned to not question the intentions and sincerity of anyone. It hurts my work. It makes me cynical, competitive, fickle, distracted. My heart is in the work that I do, and I do better to assume it’s the same for others.

But that's just from my perspective as a viewer - and I certainly don't mean to imply that you're any of those things.

As a creator it is - at least for me, in the point in my career - even more important that I defend shitty content. Shitty content is "a way to make your soul grow." And if you want to work in the idea economy - or, I mean *fuck,* any economy where you need half a brain to succeed - the best way to show employers/clients that you're worth their time is to: 1) be able to show them *something,* and 2) have been creating that something for long enough that you've gotten halfway decent at it.

viz., my blog.  My blog is silly - the things I write are *way* too long, and I'm too focused on creating a long argument that's based partly on something personal. I love writing this shit, but I'm still way green at it.  And if I want to work at a place like [REDACTED] - and don't I? - then I *need* to be doing it all. the. time. Or else someone else who is will get the job from under me.

With regard to the light drowning out the stars: I think it's not nearly as bad as that, you just need to believe in it. Spielberg: 

You shouldn’t dream your film, you should make it! If no one hires you, use the camera on your phone and post everything on YouTube. A young person has more opportunities to direct now than in my day. I’d have liked to begin making movies today.

But then again, consider who's talking. *Everything* is important to me right now, and remarkably little of it is getting looked at by anyone - let alone anyone of note. But I'm okay with that. Anonymity is good for me right now; it gives me the opportunity to make mistakes. Just give us all a year or two - once we've had a little more practice, we'll be showing *everyone.*

The 3D Printer version of an iPhone

The funny thing about Jobs' 2007 iPhone keynote is that they hype-iest thing he said turned out to be absolutely true. The iPhone isn't a phone at all: it's a totally revolutionary general purpose device.  

Indeed, Jobs undersells the product. He says it's three things - an iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device. In fact, the iPhone is far more than that. It's the most general purpose user interface that we had ever seen, and one that enabled whole new categories of interaction - ones that go well beyond "internet communications."

3D printers are a wholly different animal, and they attack the problems of their industry from the opposite angle as the iPhone did. 

To me, a MakerBot is to manufacturing as Tinder is to mobile computing. The iPhone is the layer that we use to access Tinder - and hundreds of thousands of other apps. It's a platform that enables digital interaction. MakerBot is just a node in a manufacturing paradigm.

The MakerBot Replicator is a tool that can be used for a very specific purpose - laying down beads of PLA and ABS to form a physical object. All the layers above it - the CAD software used to design a part, the web interface used to share and transmit those design files, the slicer used to translate a solid file into GCode, the embedded circuits and software that the Replicator uses to interpret and execute GCode - those will be what's driving changes of massive proportion to the way we think about product development, fabrication and distribution.

I believe that the rise of 3D printing will - and has already begun to - necessitate much needed advances in general manufacturing. But it's what 3D printers are driving us towards that's the real cool shit. The printers themselves are just nodes.

Five Whys: TCD

In 2006, I had just graduated from college and was making a decent income doing construction management in Northern California. But I was socially isolated and looking for something to occupy a particular part of my energy, and so began accumulating the skills, knowledge and tooling required to build bicycle frames. 

When the renovation I was working on was completed, I felt a desperate need for change. I moved back East and tried, for three years, to build a framebuilding business. It was a formative part of my career, but in the end I left it behind me. Although it has remained a fond period of my life, I have struggled to integrate the lessons I learned from it into my life - and to understand the many lessons I never learned in the first place.

In an effort to accelerate and document my struggles, I've been wanting to perform a Five Whys postmortem on my short lived career as a framebuilder. I choose the Five Whys method not because I think it's the most effective, but because it's an interesting format, and one that I hope will constrain and guide my explorations - which otherwise might tend to ramble - a bit. A disclaimer: I'm new to this method, so stick with me a little.

Round one.

My framebuilding business failed. Why?

Because I gave up on it.

Why?

Because I was offered a position doing work that I considered more engaging, interesting and lucrative. 

Why?

Because I had put myself in a position in which I was moderately qualified for a position setting up a prototyping shop for a small- to mid-sized company that was not expert in prototyping mechanical assemblies, and I happened (by pure luck and fortitude) to be related to two key people who ran such a company.

Why? 

Because my primary interest in building my business was to develop effective methods of developing and producing interesting products, and I had organized my business to optimize my ability to do so.  

Why?

Because I wanted to be compensated for my ability to analyze problems and come up with effective solutions to them, and I wanted my medium to be physical products. And the prototyping and short-run production oriented machine shop that I built for my business fit those goals nicely.

Round Two. 

I gave up on my framebuilding business. Why?

Because I misunderstood, on a basic level, the degree to which my professional interests would be fulfilled by a career building custom bicycle frames. 

Why? 

My experience working on bikes in college was collaborative (I co-managed a nonprofit cooperative bike shop), and gave me an incredible opportunity to solve problems (I started working there at a highly transitional time in the business, which had slipped, in many ways, into organizational chaos). I cared deeply about the entity - both as a business and as a social venue - and I conflated my enjoyment of these two things into one.

Why? 

I think the implicit assumption I was making was that I was starting a brand that would be cool, and that cool people would be drawn to it and want to work with me. 

Why? 

Because I was naive? I suppose the better question here is: Why weren't they drawn to me? The answer is largely that I wasn't proactive about getting my message out there - I wasn't writing, barely had a website, and didn't like hanging out in bike shops or with many bike people.

Why? 

A lot of it was insecurity, no doubt. I had this idea that I wanted to be putting out a product that was fully baked, and I kept waiting for the day where I thought that what I was doing was good enough to pimp in a real way. That day eventually came, but not until I had exhausted my ability/willingness to stick through it alone, not to mention my desire to continue financing my career on debt.

Round three. 

On at least a few levels, I didn't get what I wanted out of my framebuilding career. Why? 

There are a bunch of ways to answer that question, but the most prescient approach would seem to be one that considers the present state of my career. I am, by any reasonable definition, unemployed; and yet it's likely that I'm happier with the state and direction of my life than I have been since (at least) I left college. At the same time, I can't help but feel that I didn't make the most of my time, money, and efforts between 2008 and 2011 (the period of time where framebuilding was my sole occupation).

Why? 

Well, the money I spent during that period is kind of inexcusable. I was - and remain - fond of referring to it as "my MBA," and it did teach me a lot about running a small business. But the truth of it is that I could have been much more focussed on what I wanted to learn. I made only small pivots during that three year period. Mostly, I struggled through the hardships that I was putting myself through - an experience I hope not to repeat. 

Why? 

I struggled through it because I didn't know what else to do. And because I had a particular idea of myself and my career goals. 

Why?  

Because I was short sighted, and wasn't capable of taking a long-term/objective oriented view of my life. 

Why? 

Because despite my deep belief in big things like happiness, reason and critical thinking, I couldn't see past the things that I had romanticized for so many years: design, physical product, and the value of engaging in an industry that is believed - by some, at least - to be environmentally friendly.

Roundup. 

Well, I'm not totally sure what that tells me - or you, dear reader. I look back at myself during those years as being unreasonably idealistic (it's likely I inflate my idealism, FWIW), but most importantly I held basic misunderstandings about what it is that I value. I'm sure many of these persist (I've become fond, recently, of telling near-strangers that "my career is way existential these days"), and I accept them for what they are - a basic quality of the human condition. At the same time, I hope and try to enrich my understanding of what it is that makes me happiest, and when I find that thing, I do not plan on struggling with some romantic notion of craftsmanship in lieu of pursuing it.

Machinery's Handbook should be a Wiki.

That's it. 

What I want my sailboat to tell me.

I only own a racing dinghy - a standard Laser - but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the challenges of owning a midsized racer/cruiser. I'm thinking in particular about boats in the 25-50 foot range, whose owners who use them for recreation only. In my experience, a boat can become just like a second house - except that you don't live there, and a lot of what you do when you're there is maintain it. It's also particularly difficult to monitor, though with improvements in wireless technology and low-power sensor networks, there are a lot of opportunities in this space.

There are currently a few services for monitoring boat status. Siren Marine's products are especially cool, offering position/geofencing alerts, bilge activity, temperature battery monitoring, and basic security features - all accessible from an iOS app. BoatMonitor offers mooring/anchorage geofencing alerts too, though their system requires a smartphone or tablet to be left powered on onboard the boat. Gost Global offers what appears to be a robust marine security system, aimed specifically at protection from theft.

Of the three, Siren comes closest to what I would want: A full marine monitoring suite which treats a boat like Nest treats a home. In addition to what Siren, BoatMonitor and Gost give me, I would want access to the level of every consumable (fuel, water, cooking gas) onboard; a variety of exterior environmental monitors; detailed data on bilge and sump pump usage; a variety of sensor data from the living cabin; and the ability to trigger any number of onboard instruments and functions from a remote location. If you'll excuse the "x for y" analogy, it's Canary for your boat. Here, in more detail:

• Quantity of available drinking water
• Quantity of available fuel
• Quantity of available cooking fuel (LPG)
• Waste holding tank status
• Boat bearing
• Wind direction/speed
• Barometric pressure
• Wave height
• GPS location (optimally via GPS RTK) 
• Cabin temperature
• Cabin humidity (taken in multiple locations to isolate potential leaks/open hatches)
• Presence of fuel in the bilge
• Presence of microbes in the bilge
• Sound level in the cabin
• Vibration on the mast/shrouds (useful for detecting rigging failure) 
• Vibration on the hull (useful for detecting that the boat has run aground/been struck by another vessel) 
• Cabin entry monitoring
• Remote circuit breaker control
• Most recent bilge/sump pump activity & duration
• Bilge/sump water level

Most of these factors I'd want current and historical data on, so I could see, for instance, a sharp spike in cabin humidity due to a leak. I'd also insist that the entire system be self sustaining via solar cells or wind power - there's too much of each of those for me to be draining my batteries to power a couple of sensors and a GSM antenna.

I'm hoping to be working more on this system in the coming months, and will update my progress as I do. 

Work-ish: 3D printed dropout protectors

I think Nick Pinkston has it absolutely right: "3D printing is great, but it's only a small part of the solution." The current hardware revolution is about the workflow from development to manufacturing to distribution. Sure, I'm sure I'll have more and more 3D printed objects in my life in the next 5-10 years. But the effects of product customization (which will be significant) and kanban/just-in-time manufacturing (which I believe will be huge) will far outweigh the designer's ability to neglect draft angles when designing plastic parts. In the near future, I expect we'll be buying more stuff that hasn't been built yet than we have since the industrial revolution. In the next decade, I expect Amazon (or whomever) to be literally building the parts required to fulfill my order the night after I place the order. 3D printing will be a big part of this process, but so will distributed manufacturing and rapid delivery systems. And innovative ways of finding new products (and, on the flipside, innovative ways of finding new customers) will totally change the game.

I tend to recoil at most of the crap that's made with the current generation of FDM machines, but I've spent some time recently trying to think of objects in my life that I would accept being shat out of a MakerBot. A few traits I was looking for:

• Needs to be made out of plastic
• Needs to be disposable
• Needs to have a rough surface quality (low layer resolution)
• Needs to be something that's hard to find in a brick-and-mortar store
• Relatively low part mass, to reduce print time & cost
• Low dimensional accuracy to accommodate all sorts & conditions of printers
• Bonus points if I wouldn't want to buy it from Amazon due to package quantity, lead time, etc. 

I'm sure there are better use cases, but one thing I came up with was dropout spacers. When shipping a bike, you usually remove the front wheel and install a dropout spacer into the fork. The spacer protects the dropouts from impact from below and also protects the fork from impacts from the side. Most consumers don't keep dropout spacers around, and wouldn't necessarily think to go to a bike shop to pick some up (most shops give them away) when they're shipping their bike. When the bike is unboxed on the other end, the spacers usually go straight to the trash, and surface finish is totally inconsequential. Plus, the spacer itself isn't very massive, and the dimensional accuracy required is low.

I spent an hour or two modeling, and got Shapeways to print me the result for $13. It's a bit more than I would want to pay for a piece of plastic, but the FDM version would be basically free. The finished version is shown below. I rather like it, and think that things like it will be printed - not in the home, probably, but by brick-and-mortar third party services like Kinkos, or web shopping platforms like Amazon and Shapeways - as a matter of course in the future.

If anyone is interested in printing one of their own, I'd encourage them to grab the model on the Thingiverse. I also published the model and a bunch of other stuff in a GitHub repository. 

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Inventor and Shapeways.

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Inventor & Shapeways. SLA parts from Shapeways tend to have a bunch of powder slag in any crevises; this one was packed full. 

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Picking out SLA dust.

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Back to front: Injection molded rear dropout spacer; injection molded front dropout spacer; my SLA front dropout spacer.

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GitHub for 3D Design

In the past, I've used Autodesk Vault for version tracking & backup of 3D design files. I was using Inventor for work at the time, and was a part of a group that sometimes (though not often) shared files. It was useful but totally inconvenient, and I'm happy to now be setting up GitHub for my own 3D design file sharing, version control & backup. 

Not being fluent with GitHub in the past, I'm still a little hazy on the terminology and process. Over the past few months, I've cobbled together a system or organizing 3D part and assembly files from SolidWorks and Inventor. For some reason, I set up separate folders  (named "SolidWorks" and "Inventor") in the "Documents" folder of my hard drive. Inside each of those folders is a bunch of separate project folders. When I create a new project, I choose a two-letter shorthand for the project; the project folders have been named, e.g., "CS Cycles Parts". Inside is a bunch of part and assembly files, and usually a subfolder called "Static Exports" which contains STLs, STPs, PDFs and JPEGs.

I'm doing this all from Windows 7 on Boot Camp, so I downloaded the Windows GitHub client and got started. First, I tried creating a new repository on the GitHub web interface and then adding existing files to it, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out the dialog. Then I realized that I could drag and drop a directory from my hard drive into the desktop GitHub client, but for some reason it kept wanting to reassign the repository to .../Documents/GitHub/. Also, it complained about special characters, so I removed all the spaces from my directory names and replaced them with underscores.

Finally I just created new repositories in the desktop client, but named them the same as the existing project directories. GitHub kept wanting me to put them in the /Documents/GitHub directory, but this time I could change the location to be /Documents/Inventor/ - the parent of the existing repository directory that I was trying to set up. 

My first commits all just had titles like "First Posting," and I published the commits immediately. To my immense pleasure, I'm now able to see the contents of those directories in GitHub, and a bunch of the files in the "Static Exports" directories display in Git's STL viewer within the browser. 

I'll be interested in seeing how GitHub fits into my design workflow. For now it's - at the very least - a great backup system. I hope it becomes a collaborative tool for me in the near future. 

If anyone has tips for how to use GitHub to host design projects, I'd love to hear them. 

I think Tinder is okay.

And how dating, like most things, is mostly about showing up and wanting to be there. 

Note: This draws from my personal experiences with a variety of romantic and dating approaches. It in no way is meant to be a comment on the dating preferences of others, or - more importantly - the qualities of the women I've seen, cared for, hurt, or been hurt by. Also: YMMV.  

Why I date.

I date because I like being romantic with women. Romanticism allows for openness that doesn't usually exist elsewhere in life. It offers different joys, and different pains, and is, has been, and will (I hope) continue to be a net positive in my life. It allows me opportunities to learn about other people's hopes, dreams, and ways of communicating. It teaches me about my own strengths, weaknesses, and inabilities.

Having an endgame is not my game. Dating is not a chore; I date because I want to date. Showing up to a date wanting anything else but to be there, with this person- I find that highly disrespectful.

There are, as far as I can tell, two factors that determine whether I enjoy being on a date:

1. Whether I want to be on the date.
2. Whether my date wants to be on the date. 

OkCupid encourages me to message, and presumably date, people who fall within the compatibility profile that I claim for myself. If I insist that I wouldn't date someone who smokes, OkCupid will lower the compatibility ranking of smokers. If I admit to owning a dog, OkCupid will match me with people who like dogs.

Sorting through matches on OkCupid is an exercise in establishing criteria for who I'm willing to see, and then exercising judgement based on that criteria.  The thing is, I find my own criteria to be largely reactionary and arbitrary; I have a great deal of mistrust for my own prejudices. Moreover, I am not at all sure that the ideal relationship that I am presumably imagining even exists - and, assuming that it does, whether it would ultimately make me happy. 

So I rank suitors on whether or not it seems that they want to go out with me, and I weight the result with the accuracy I believe they have in their assessment of my character. On OkCupid, I find a high portion of people to be deeply ambivalent about dating. I choose, insofar as I am able, not to date those people.

It's possible the same holds true for Tinder; I suspect that it likely applies across the general population.  But because Tinder selects for mutual attraction, I find that interactions there tend to be a bit more enthusiastic. In addition, Tinder pays due homage to the arbitrarity of attraction. Despite whatever I might say in my OkCupid profile, it would be dishonest of me to enumerate why I am attracted to any one person. For that matter, I can't honestly say why I've fallen in love in the past - and I suspect that the same holds true for most of us. And yet OkCupid insists that I have some insight into what type of person I'll fall in love with next... I just don't believe them.

Call it what you will: Hot-or-Not; a vanity machine; strictly for hookups. I think Tinder is arbitrary, weird, and insightful. And I see no reason why it would be any less effective than anything else out there.

Starboard

A generalized usage for an existing word that I'd like to encourage: Starboard. 

In sailboat racing, there are a few means of determining right of way, and they're taken seriously. The most fun, in my experience, is this one: 

When boats are on opposite tacks, a port-tack boat shall keep clear of a starboard-tack boat. 

This rule applies when two boats are crossing paths, but usually when both boats are on similar tacks - both either heading upwind or downwind. Depending on conditions, they might be approaching each other rapidly. Regardless, the boat who yields right of way will lose ground in the race, so when one boat asserts right of way, it is commonly done with gusto.

"Starboard," in these circumstances, is such an assertion. The speaker - commonly the skipper of the boat claiming right of way - is indicating that he's on a starboard tack, and is requesting that a nearby port-tacked boat yield.  But more importantly, "starboard" is an acknowledgement that we are playing by well-accepted rules, and we agree to act accordingly.

So I'm proposing that we expand the use cases for this term. The first place I can see using it is in cyclist-pedestrian interactions, where right of way is often ceded - or worse yet, wordlessly assumed.  I think a bit of clarity could be injected here, and it would be useful to just acknowledge - aggressively, defensively, or otherwise - that we want to live in a system that has some means of negotiating conflicts.

I also see it in day to day interactions. Starboard means "you wronged me," it means "I'm sorry." It's meant to be something that we agree will make our interactions better. It's "I should have done the dishes." It's "You buy the drinks this time." 

The point is: Acknowledge someone else's perspective. It's the best way to resolve conflict that we've got. 

3D Printing: One part of a New Paradigm

I often have the urge to cut-and-paste an email I've written onto a blog post.  Ideas mull around in my head, and it's often the case that an email chain prompts me to finally compose the thoughts that I've been meaning to get down for months. 

This morning, I had cause to write a message regarding the questions I have about 3D printing, and managed to nail down a few points that I've been working through recently. 

Note: I would be remiss not to mention the sources of much of my thinking: 

• Nick Pinkston's January post, "Some Thoughts on Digital Manufacturing"
• Autodesk CEO Carl Bass' Wired piece, "An Insider’s View of the Myths and Truths of the 3-D Printing ‘Phenomenon’"
• Rakesh K. Sharma's June post, "3D Printing: Still A Long Way To Go?" 
• This great Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences article on "Printing Tiny Batteries."
• Personal conversations with Jordan Husney, Brad Dickason, Nick Foley, and others. 

- 

As a hardware product manager, I've sourced 3D printed parts (SLA, mostly) on a few occasions in order to prove out basic functionality. As a prototyping tool, it's been very useful to me (notwithstanding the value that inexpensive CNC prototyping shops like rapidmachining.com offer). As a manufacturing technology, though, I'm a little less impressed with 3D printing, especially because the industry seems most interested in replacing inexpensive injection molded consumer products with their FDM analogs. As SLS/SLA models become more cost effective and - more importantly - easier to procure, I suspect that the cost-benefit will shift, and I'll begin to see more 3D printed objects in my personal life.  

But the model for producing those parts is far from settled, and I'm most interested in how the big players (I figure that Shapeways, Kinkos, and Amazon are probably best situated) will integrate the entire manufacturing process: 

• Design (cf. Quirky; the current proliferation of hardware crowdfunding & acceleration programs)
• 3D printing (SLA/SLS, and *limited* FDM) 
• Secondary operations (namely drilling/tapping)
• Assembly (monolithic consumer objects are boring; it'll only be once 3D printing is integrated with fasteners, wiring, electronics, etc. that it becomes really interesting)
• Distribution (ten days to ship a Shapeways model just isn't sustainable)
  

In short, I'm interested not in 3D printing itself, but in a new paradigm for product development, manufacturing, and distribution. My work background is in traditional manufacturing, where information systems tend to be closed and resistant to change, and I'm particularly interested in hearing people's opinions about how, over what timescale, and by what means these tendencies are likely to change.

John Dickerson on identity

"What self do you return to, when you are at liberty on vacation? Is it your college self, who is slightly more risk-taking? Or are you just a mom dealing with kids going off to the go kart place, and you're just doing your duties but in a different place and wearing sandals?"

John Dickerson, speaking on the Slate Political Gabfest, 2013.08.30

I've been thinking a lot along these lines recently. This week I spent a few days back in Southampton, where I grew up, escaped from for six years in my twenties, and then returned to for my young adulthood. I've only recently moved away from this place, and my circumstances now are much different than when I left for college. From 2008 to 2013, I made my life here, and I built an infrastructure that, to some extent, remains here, for me to pick back up when I return for a weekend. And I enjoy doing so, though it's not clear to me to what extent I want this lifestyle to be a huge part of my life. 

Right now these are questions that are a big part of my life writ large. Last week, I spent a few hours fixing a fancy espresso machine. I'm being paid to do so, but am also giving away a bit of my time in the interest of learning about how a machine works. I enjoy learning about new machines, and I'd like to think that understanding this one - a Rocket Giotto - will make me better at designing something of my own. More broadly, I consciously believe that it'll enrich my understanding of the world at large.

I'm not sure if either of these feelings constitutes a good reason to have taken on the work. I'll be paid very little, and it likely won't heighten my prestige or lead to an interesting job opportunity.  It's possible, though, that I actually enjoy the work enough to make it worth my while. But this question is even more difficult to answer: Do I enjoy doing the work? Or, put a bit differently: Given that I have a limited amount of time, and assuming that I could make a rational decision regarding what in my life to prioritize, should I rank my jaunt into espresso machine repair above anything else in my life?  

No answer presents itself to me, but I would love to hear your thoughts - I'm sure others out there entertain similar quandaries.  

Happy vacationing. 

Jason Stirman on management

Earlier this month, an excellent specimen of hype-work appeared on the "The Review" section of the First Round Capital website. Titled "How Medium is building a new kind of company with no managers," the piece is essentially a profile of the relationship between the management team at Medium and holacracy, a system of management ideas and software which... well, it gets tricky. In fact - maybe it's best just to lay out a few facts:

• The article focuses on Jason Stirman, who apparently holds two roles at Medium: People Operations Lead; and Word Master. 
• Holacracy is a system of organizational governance. If you really want the philosophical details, just read the wikipedia page. The extent to which holacracy can be considered separate and apart from HolacracyOne (a Pennsylvania LLC that provides training and distributes management software based on holacracy) is unclear. The article seems to treat them as one and the same. For some context, however, see Oliver Compagne's response to my question about HolacracyOne's management structure on Quora.
• The article is peppered with pull quotes like "Traditional management just didn't agree with me," which I, for one, have a bit of a hard time taking seriously.  

Nonetheless, I can't help but vibe with Stirman on a few of his points. He describes a shift towards a personal relationship with his teammates, and it's highly compelling:

He started taking his reports out to lunch, to drinks, to coffee to see what was up. How was their wife settling into her new job? Did escrow close on their new house? This is the stuff that people bring into work with them but never talk about, Stirman says. As soon as you ask, the pressure starts to dissipate.

I have had a difficult time knowing the boundaries between my personal life and my interactions with employees. I have made the mistake of trying to be friends (I see this as distinct from trying to relate to their personal life), and accepting their mistakes as a result, and I have made the mistake of not being friendly enough. But I suspect that Stirman's approach is the more effective one, and is likely more enjoyable, too.  

Stirman also discusses the degree to which information is disseminated in an organization: 

Stirman hit another wall trying to shield his team from external drama and politics. “Classic management advice, and all my mentors told me that insulating your team from things so they won’t worry will make them more productive and happier,” he says. “But they just got angry, and confused, and disconnected. I was constantly censoring all this information and they were way happier when they knew everything.”

(...)

"Most of the time, you know your manager’s responsible for firing you and how much you get paid. I wish I would have sat down with my reports and said, “You know what, here’s what being a manager at Twitter actually means, and here’s a list of the decisions I have the authority to make.  I wish I would have broken that power dynamic, and been a better leader as a result."

I'm not sure I understand, or really care about, the holacratic approach. But positive feedback and open communication are powerful tools, and I hope to use them to the greatest extent possible in my life and career.

- 

CORRECTION: As originally written, I made the mistake of claiming that First Round was an investor in Medium, which it is not. After posting, Jason Stirman contacted me and very politely noted my error. 

A valid question

You know, you don't just take, import, slowly curate, sit on, hang out with, critique, and then upload 43 photos that you took over the past month or so without questioning the point of what you're doing. 

I used to use Flickr.  Pretty heavily.  And I posted to a lot of groups, and I tracked what got views, etc.  I like Flickr.  But it never really stuck.  Flickr (or at least my interaction with it) depended on developing new networks.  None of my friends really used it, and the way I generated views was by interacting with other users.  So, time passed, and eventually I ended up on Instagram.  

Instagram offers a way to interact with people I care about.  But the story that's told within the app is a purely collaborative one.  It's some weird average of the perspectives of the people that I follow, whose individual profiles I rarely - if ever - look at.  And I'm happy being a part of a larger narrative, but I also want to create one of my own.  One that I curate, and that I'm fully responsible for.   

Which is to say: Instagram is great, but the story doesn't belong to any individual user.   

I'm not sure of a product that allows an individual user to create a story like a traditional blog does.  Perhaps Tumblr does, but I always used it as something between Instagram and an RSS reader - but with a powerful reblogging function built in.

Regardless, it's clear to me that I'm operating in a world that's a few years old.  If anyone has any ideas for how I should be modernizing, I'm all ears.

When to give up your product

Product ideas are free, and if you put any effort at all into finding them, they're strikingly easy to come up with.  I keep a list of product ideas that's pages long, and I try to be open about sharing them with friends and potential collaborators.  However, there's always the protective instinct there - I don't want to give my ideas out to just anyone, especially if I think they might actually do something with them.

In the past few months, I've been particularly interested in developing new ideas, and have enjoyed talking to anyone else about their own visions.  I try to keep an open mind when talking startup shop; it's more fun, for sure, to listen to someone's half-baked pitch with enthusiasm.  I think it's also important to be delicate when following up on an idea that strikes me as a good one.  Intruding on someone else's project can be dangerous, and I try to be careful to not overstep on a friend's personal flame.  In particular, it's important to not try to change the focus of an idea.  From personal experience, I know it's all too easy to become protective over what one sees as the core idea of an product, and if someone uses my idea's shell but replaces the seed (the metaphor is a bit of a stretch, sorry), my reaction tends to be defensive.

It strikes me that despite the proliferation of high quality snark surrounding Hyperloop, Elon Musk has made an impressively brave decision in releasing his idea to the public.  It takes real guts to put what, by many accounts, is a totally harebrained idea into the ether.  

My own ambitions are admittedly smaller.  My product list includes a handful of blatant ripoffs (ostensibly with small design improvements, but whatever), lots of generic furniture/EDC items, and is generally full of stuff that's been pretty well picked over.  A good portion of my list wouldn't pass the "market need" test.  There are more well designed LED flashlights out there than I could shake a stick at; if I haven't found one that's perfect for my needs and meets my aesthetic requirements, that's because I haven't googled hard enough for it.

In the end, a product idea will sink or swim partially on the creators' ability to create a successful marketing platform.  Doing so allows otherwise uninteresting product ideas to flourish (this is, IMHO and with no offense intended, how Best Made Co. works).   If your product is generic (e.g., an off-the-shelf axe with a painted handle)  and relies on an iconic brand image to succeed, then you have nothing to worry from someone else taking your idea.  

Ditto if, on the other hand, your product is too large or complex for you to pull off alone.  Hyperloop falls into this category.  Musk himself is likely too overworked to launch it himself, and anyway would need municipal support that he can't get alone. 

From my own list: I want to build a public database of parts - an API that would aggregate specifications from suppliers like Digikey and McMaster-Carr, with a web interface that would allow users to manage the parts they have on hand in their own shops.  I see it as an ecosystem for managing inventory and procurement, with IoT opportunities that could change the way that workshops, R&D labs, and warehouses deal with parts on hand.  It's a project that's too big for me to take on alone, and if someone builds it while I'm busy boning up on the skills required to complete a small part of it - well, all's fair.  

The harder ideas to give up, for me, are the ones that make a big dent in a small workflow in my life.  For years, I've lamented the sad state of laundry hampers.  I want a hamper to be architectural, and to be made from materials that I'd find elsewhere in my home.  I want it to stand on its own, but fold down quickly for trips to the laundromat.  And most of all, I want *one* all-purpose device; I see no need to use one container for in-closet storage and another for transport.

A few years ago, I sketched up an idea for a hamper that fit my specifications.  It's something that I'm fairly well qualified to build, and wouldn't cost more than $100 in parts and a few hours of my labor to complete.  But it remains on my backlog, and it'll likely be there forever. 

What do competent, driven designers do with projects like this?  Presumably, Quirky was built for just this use case: something that could be a decent idea, but which I just don't have the bandwidth to move forward on a meaningful timescale.  But to hand over my baby, however half-baked she is, to Quirky's "design experts?"  The whole idea just hurts a little bit.  It's silly, but I want the product to be *mine,* whether or not it ever gets built. 

Optimally, I think each of us needs a network of collaborators - people who we can work with, for, and against (against is important) in the pursuit of something shippable.  Immediate feedback and real, honest enthusiasm are things that Quirky (and Kickstarter, for that matter) isn't very good at, and to many people those are important parts of the design and development process.  I'm constantly working on expanding my product development network, but I'll admit that it's still far from where it want to be.  And more importantly, my skills at communicating with someone about product ideas - both theirs and mine - are crude, and anyway the ideas that I can bring to the table are mostly harebrained.

How do other designers deal with these issues?  I'd love feedback, or simply to connect.  

privacy and serendipity in a connected world

i've been thinking recently - i was prompted by a trusted editor and interlocutor - about two potential impacts of the development of the Internet of Things. the first concerns, essentially, the right to privacy; the second concerns serendipity and randomness in an increasingly automated world. i'll attempt to address them both here.

the Internet of Things and privacy

the concern here goes roughly like this:

if everything becomes a connected device, will kids no longer be able to steal from the cookie jar?

this is a valid concern. in general, i believe that it's good for people to make their own mistakes. i've spent plenty of time making my own, and i continue to employ off-label uses for many of devices in my life. similarly: i jaywalk, and i would hate for the NYPD to be tracking my phone and prosecuting me accordingly.

ultimately, we as individuals need to come to an understanding with each other about the extent to which we want to police our actions. as a dog owner, i would have no qualms setting up an alert to notify me if Libo manages to get into the trashcan. but as a parent, i would hope that i might cede some control over the liquor cabinet as my children grow into adults. it's worth noting, also, that the degree of nuance that connected devices could provide is much greater than the all-or-nothing nature of recent technology, e.g. lock and key. i can set up notifications and then decline to act on them; i can allow some degree of leniency; i can turn device protections off remotely, or simply turn my phone off.

as a society, the stakes are higher. our new information age has shown that we desperately need to rethink the way we police the distribution of ideas. it is my feeling that the same realignment is needed in the physical world. this problem is not unique to the Internet of Things, and i tend to think that it's the fault of our criminal justice system, not of the technology that it chooses to implement for code enforcement. our system allows for minor laws (speeding, jaywalking, using your parents' HBO Go account) to be routinely broken, but then prosecutes them stringently when a charge is needed. the risk of this kind of action will increase as the world becomes more connected and individuals become more trackable. to avoid societal paralysis, it is the responsibility of citizens to push for, and of legislators to enact, more sensible regulations.

it is worthwhile to note that the massive availability of sense data that the Internet of Things could bring has positive implications as well. as MGI notes in their recent report: "It will soon be possible to place inexpensive sensors on light poles, sidewalks, and other objects on public property to capture sound and images that can be analyzed in real time — for example, to determine the source of a gunshot by analyzing the sound from multiple sensors." in short, there are upsides and downsides of knowing more about the physical world - but we as a society must decide for ourselves where we fall on their overall value.

the Internet of Things and serendipity

the worry here is a more tender one, and i hope that i don't do it an injustice by breaking it down into a formal argument:

random personal interactions produce net positive effects.

the Internet of Things will reduce random personal interactions.

∴ the Internet of Things will produce net negative effects.

this argument reminds me of similar ones aimed at older, more general purpose technologies. for a related example, see Stephen Berlin Johnson's discussion of serendipity and the internet from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From:"

If you visit the "serendipity" entry in Wikipedia, you are one click away from entries on LSD, Teflon, Parkinson's Disease, Sri Lanka, Isaac Newton, Viagra, and about two hundred topics of comparable diversity. That eclecticism is particularly acute at Wikipedia, of course, but it derives from the fundamentally "tangled" nature of Tim Berners-Lee's original hypertext architecture. No medium in history has ever offered such unlikely trails of connection and chance in such an intuitive and accessible form. Yet in recent years, a puzzling meme has emerged on op-ed pages with a strange insistence: the rise of the web, its proponents argue, has led to a decline in serendipitous discovery...When critics complain about the decline of serendipity, they habitually point to two "old media" mechanisms that allegedly have no direct equivalent on the Web. McKeen mentions the first one: browsing the stacks in a library (or a bookstore), "pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding." Old-style browsing does indeed lead to unplanned discoveries. But thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, it is far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is to walk through a library, looking at the spines of books. Does everyone use the Web this way? Of course not. but it is much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring the library stacks, pulling down books because you like the binding, ever was.

i feel much as Johnson does: the internet has increased the level of serendipity in my life. it allows me to interact with individuals all over the world, of course, and it also allows me (via services like foursquare) to coordinate chance encounters as well. i believe that the same will hold true for the Internet of Things: i will be able to interact with my peers - and with connected devices - in much more interesting and engaging ways than my ancestors ever could have.

consider a few examples - cherry picked, sure, but that's what you get :)

• i set up my Roomba to turn on only when my cell phone is out of range of my home router. now not only do i not need to take time to vacuum myself, but Roomba never interrupts when i have company over.
• the TBTA sets up real-time congestion tracking, via sensors embedded in road surfaces, on the Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridges. i'm driving to Connecticut on a friday afternoon, and plan to take the Whitestone, which is a shorter distance from my house, but am redirected to the Throgs Neck to avoid traffic, past the Queens Botanical Garden and Kissena park. my total route saves me fifteen minutes, and takes me through a new part of the city that i wouldn't have otherwise known to visit.
• ditto the above, but with Google Maps/Waze on my smartphone.
• i install an accelerometer, with a small battery and cellular transmitter, in a discreet part of my bike. now i'm able to be less careful locking up in front of a coffee shop, as i'll get a real-time push notification if someone tries to cut my lock. i can travel light to and from my destination, and be less anxious when i get there.
• i set up Twine to monitor (as they're so fond of advertising) moisture content in my basement. now i no longer need to go to my basement and check for moisture, so i can spend more time outside introducing myself to strangers.

again, i must additionally note the huge benefits in resource efficiency that would counterbalance any decrease in serendipity - if such a decrease would occur. MGI notes that "The cities of Doha, São Paulo, and Beijing all use sensors on pipes, pumps, and other water infrastructure to monitor conditions and manage water loss, identifying and repairing leaks or changing pressure as necessary. On average, these cities have reduced leaks by 40 to 50 percent." this kind of improvement is worth, i believe, a significant sacrifice on the part of individual desires.

most importantly: it is, again, the responsibility of the individual to determine how these technologies impact their day-to-day lives. we all have the responsibility - to ourselves - to maintain our own connections to the people and experiences we care for. the Internet of Things will not make our lives better; only one's personal outlook and desire to be happy can do that. but the Internet of Things will free us up to work on more important problems, and it has the potential to make our use of the physical world far more efficient.

---

1. cf. parts one and two of This American Life's recent stories on patent trolling; Edward Tufte's defense of Aaron Swartz; anything written about the recent NSA/PRISM scandal, e.g. this piece in wired; the recent Supreme Court decision re: the patentability of human genes. ↩

2. see kottke.org's recent post on Harvey Silverglate's book, "You Commit Three Felonies a Day." ↩

3. viz. this week's brilliant xkcd. ↩

4. to the tune of $2.7-6.2B annually by 2025, if you believe McKinsey. ↩

Don’t just Sprint — Do Innovation Decathlons

Small teams should diversify their efforts in order to increase their success rate.

(reposted from Medium) 

In a consulting environment, the Sprint is a great method of meeting many important goals at once. The client gets results quickly, and is made to feel like you’re pulling out all of the stops to deliver something of real value. The working group, on the other hand, gets to rally around a cause in a way that encourages enthusiasm and mutual support. Everything is done before fatigue can set in, and progress is tangible and immediate.

But in individual efforts and among small teams with limited resources, Sprints can be highly destructive and expensive. Especially in the hardware world, and in contexts where the prime directive is to convert stuff that you don’t know that you don’t know into stuff that you know that you don’t know, weeklong periods that are dedicated to only one project are often totally unfeasible.

Moreover, the biggest challenge for young teams will be finding areas where they can offer real value to emerging markets. Very few startups will have the resources to enter existing marketplaces and compete with established products; the real opportunities lie in needs that haven’t been discovered yet. If Henry Ford had tried (as the possibly apocryphal adage goes) to build a faster horse, he would have had a long journey ahead of him, and would have needed to compete with breeders that had experience and resources that he couldn’t hope to match. Young teams need to learn what they’re good at, and where that fits into the competitive landscape, and focusing on one project at a time isn’t always a great way to accomplish that.

Every team needs to find their balance, but I recommend starting by putting in efforts that are measured in hours, not weeks. When working on hardware projects, I find it rare that I don’t need to order a few parts after a day or so of work. I almost always have open carts on McMaster-Carr, Digikey and Amazon, and keeping multiple projects going means that I put a minimum number of orders out (usually one a week from each of those, plus one or two more from smaller suppliers). This not only allows me to save on shipping, but it also means that I’ve always got something to work on. If I’m waiting on a particular screw to come in from McMaster, I can usually move forward with my wireless mesh network project. If I’m having trouble with my temperature sensor circuit, I can remodel my FM radio enclosure and send it off to get prototyped. And if all my hardware projects are stalled, I can work on product management stuff — constructing storyboards, or writing Amazon-style press releases.

Having many projects going at once encourages team cross-functionality and empowers team members to make prioritization decisions on-the-fly. It reduces emphasis on goals and emphasizes creative and strategic objectives, and allows ideas to permeate between spheres that would otherwise be segregated.

Another advantage to working this way is that it makes the act of pivoting almost unconscious. Projects don’t get discarded so much as they go dormant — which makes the emotional process easier for teams to manage.

Whatever you’re working on, and however you structure it, the important thing is to be learning where your interests overlap with what the marketplace is going to value and reward. My recommendation is to keep the process quick, and to make sure you make progress and recognize good work when you’ve done it — but to remain unemotional about ideas that are fated to remain on your backlog. As Churchill said, “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Get out there and do it — you’ll find your stride in time.

the two types of people who offer help when you get a flat tire in Bushwick at 2am on a Saturday night

TL;DR: interested guys and their tolerant girlfriends, and cute girls walking home with some dude.

to set the scene, briefly: it's summer, and it's hot out.  i'm halfway geared up - clipless shoes, baggy shorts, t shirt, helmet/gloves.  my bike is as it usually is at 2am (lights, etc.), except that i've also got a pitching wedge strapped to my toptube (why isn't relevant), and i'm riding home through Bushwick and then BLAM and i've got a flat tire.  the street itself isn't that busy but people are walking by on their way to or from a thing, and i'm flipping my bike over, changing my tube, and trying to make sure i don't get another flat on my way home.  which is when i realize that not only is there a fairly large hole in my tire, but there's something rattling around inside my rim, and what is it but a chunk of my rim about the size of a peppercorn.  i look around and realize that i must have run over a nail, and hit it dead on, and hit it just right so that not only did it go clear through my tire and tube, but it put a decent sized hole in my rim too.

so here i am, holding my wheel, and i walk into the road and gaze at the asphalt for some sign of what i hit, when: 

"what are you- did something fall off?  are you okay?" 

it's Interested Guy.  

he's rolling a cigarette, walking towards me on the other side of the street.  his Tolerant Girlfriend is with him, and his body language indicates that not only is he asking if i need help, but he's engaging with me, so i jump right in.

"yeah- i think that i hit a nail just right, because it went through my rim!"  i hold the wheel out, indicating the hole there.  Interested Guy is interested, and he walks into the street, and his Tolerant Girlfriend follows.  she's texting, or something.  i tell him i just pulled a piece of my rim out of my rim, and he wants to know if it's possible it was there for a while-

"it wasn't ratt-tatt-tattling around in there before?" 

but i know these things.  i built these wheels, and i don't tolerate rattles on my bike.  he indicates to his Girlfriend that she should check out my rim, and she glances over and then asks if i'm okay.   

"oh, yeah, i'm fine.  i mean, it's a beautiful night out, and at least i've got light here."  i gesture at the streetlight above.  there's no traffic anywhere, and a club up the street is playing Gangnam Style pretty loud.  the Couple obviously agrees with me on some level, but they think i'm being a little generous.  i don't want to keep them, and move towards my toolkit. 

but they're still there, asking if i have everything.  of course i do, and as they walk away - Interested Guy lighting up his cigarette - he maintains his display of interest, and his Tolerant Girlfriend maintains her mild amusement, and i maintain my display of incredulity and enthusiasm.   

time passes.  i put in a new tube, inflate my tire and am putting my wheel back on.  the bike is upside down.  groups pass by, talking.  couples pass by, and they hush up as i, a lone guy in clipless shoes on the side of the street in Bushwick at 2am, (apparently) try to eavesdrop in their private moments.  

Cute Girl approaches.  

she's walking with Some Dude,  but they're not, like, touching or anything.  i think she's talking, and i'm leaning over my bike.  i got these fancy locking axle bolts recently and they're kind of a pain to tighten - which of course is a feature, not a bug.  and anyway, i don't want to disturb a couple in their private moments, so i keep my head down.

Cute Girl is a step and a half ahead of me, talking, when she breaks off, pauses and turns to me.  Some Dude is about a step and a half in front of her.   she smiles gently, genuinely.

"do you need help?" 

i look up and try to seem unthreatening - which, given the flat tire and the clipless shoes, isn't too hard.  

"nah, i'm okay.  thanks though." 

Cute Girl is looking at me.  she's just a little done up, and her eyes are big, and she's pretty.  she turns back, all naturally, and they keep walking.  Some Dude does not look particularly pleased with the interaction.   

i finish up.  i've got grease on my hands, and it's later now, but people still walk by.  i flip my bike back over and ride off, looking for signs of either of my would-be good samaritans.  they are nowhere to be found.