I ordered the Cinch camera strap the morning that I got the email on December 26th, 2011. I’ve wanted a Luma Labs sling ever since they first came out.

Thoughts after using it over the last 4 months:

• Stable
• Comfortable
• Easy to use
• Versatile
• Beautiful

The one thing that I don’t like:

No swivel. While simple and stable are great, there are times when I need to use my tripod and I have to take it off. However, putting it back on again requires me to undo the buckle strap from the tripod mount, attach the mount back to the camera and re-thread the strap, otherwise I have a lot of twists in the strap. A swivel or quick release would solve the issue.

It’s not a big deal. It functions beautifully 95% of the time.

It strikes me that a swivel or quick release was probably in the works had not Black Rapid been issued their patent.

Definite fan of it and I’ve already convinced two others to purchase it.

I found an amazing Quora answer on “What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?” in my RSS at both Boingboing.net and Kottke.org:

• You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose “machines” (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small – see http://www.tricki.org/tricki/map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.


• You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space. It’s not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it.

That’s just the first two bullet points.

It’s an amazing read.

Personal anecdote regarding math (well physics, really)

My wife’s father-in-law has a Ph.D. in Physics and is a semi-retired Nuclear Physicist. When I read this Quora answer, it made me think of him.

His sheer genius is pretty impressive, and in one instance, when my wife and her friends were getting their asses kicked by 3rd-year Quantum Mechanics, he offered to help.¹

The conversation, as I understand it, went like this:

My Wife: “Dad, we need help in Quantum Mechanics or the three of us are going to fail.”

Father-in-law: “Okay, give me a weekend to study up.”

And that was it. He retaught himself Quantum Mechanics in a weekend.

Over the next week, he taught my wife and her friends Dan and Bryan quantum.

Unbelievable.

I mean, I was pretty good at math and physics, but I could not relearn something like high school calculus in a weekend, much less teach a person how little I know about it.

Personal anecdote #2 regarding math

I’ve always been good at math and physics, but never brilliant.

One of the points in the article really resonated with me:

• Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled. For example, when answering a question about a high-dimensional space (e.g., whether a certain kind of rotation of a five-dimensional object has a “fixed point” which does not move during the rotation), you do not spend much time straining to visualize those things that do not have obvious analogues in two and three dimensions. (Violating this principle is a huge source of frustration for beginning maths students who don’t know that they shouldn’t be straining to visualize things for which they don’t seem to have the visualizing machinery.) Instead…

Ah. This is the exact problem I fell into when reading those popular physics books while still in university. I was pondering, over the span of weeks, on what does a blackhole look like in 3D space. Often, it is depicted as a weighted ball sitting on a stretched out blanket (2D plane), but this belies its complex nature–it actually looks like this from any angle you look at. It’s hard to visualize.

There’s a point where my understanding of mathematics and physics couldn’t help me anymore with understanding things like superstrings and general relativity. No simple metaphor or visual mental model would help anymore. Things just couldn’t be intuited because they went against common sense.

However, it did pique my future-wife’s interest in me when I sat down at her table in the student union and asked her and her physics buddies “What does a blackhole look like? No, seriously, what does it look like in 3D space?”

I guess she thought, “Why would a guy studying gym want to know about this?”²

I can’t say it worked out too badly for me in the end.

MG Seigler notes:

Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any.

I’m starting to feel more comfortable leaving them off.

I had the opportunity to read more blogs and listen to a few podcasts this past holiday. In particular I started listening to the B & B Podcast by Benjamin Brooks and Shawn Blanc and Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann.

When you start consuming one media form (e.g., a blog) you inevitably stumble upon their podcast.

Now all these guys seem to know each-other, and they tend to propagate similar world-views (e.g., minimalism, pro-apple, great design, great UX, care and craft, etc.). By in large, that isn’t too interesting to me (probably because I have the same mindset). It’s when they differ that their commentary and interaction (which is already very thoughtful) goes to the next level.

Daniel Jalkut wrote a piece called Learn to Code which posited that “high-order” scripting is the new literacy. No doubt that this is empowering. It’s definitely helpful for me (although I think if there is one thing a person should know, it is RegEx, because that shit has saved my bacon a dozen times over). You should read Mr. Jalkut’s post if you haven’t already.

Guy English had a different view:

I appreciate where they’re coming from. I can, from a certain perspective, agree with the argument. But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy¹. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of. We don’t, as a society, need more people who have the mechanical knowledge to turn RSS feeds into Twitter spam. We don’t need anything more posted to Facebook, we don’t need anything we photograph to appear on Instagram and Flickr. If “scripting” is the new literacy then we’ve failed. We’ve become Mario drowning on a Water Level.

To be honest, I’m kind of appalled at the idea that there might be a day where societies are judged by the percentage of the population who can code (if you want to use that as the benchmark of literacy). Then again, I work at a company that sells eBooks and my livelihood is based on people buying books.

One of the things that I find interesting is that this type of interaction, at least when I first started blogging back in 2002, was done typically done via the comments feature that MovableType had.² These people are writing really thoughtful responses and taking ownership of their words. You don’t have the anonymous troll or link spammer in the comment threads anymore.

One of the new things that I am noticing is the “No Comments” trend. Some people like John Gruber have been doing it from the beginning. The authors are encouraging people to twitter a response, email them directly or post a reply on their blog (if they have one). Matt Gemmell posted a 1-month update on his experience after turning off comments. There are two points that I wanted to call out:

• I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.
• I feel more positive, and I think the tone of my writing has evolved.

Bottom line, he feels it has been positive for him. I agree. I think comments are a barrier to the authoring experience. They require maintenance on the author’s part (although Disqus has a great admin interface for this), but more importantly, I’ve always felt that the directness of the feedback loop left me open to attack. Consequently, back in the early part of the 2000s, I felt that everything I needed to write about had to have some sort of gravitas. Exhaustion soon set in.

No comments makes me feel that I own this blog, versus me feeling like I manage some sort of BBS.

To the handful of readers out there who actually read this cubbyhole of a website, Happy New Year and best wishes to you, your family and the people (or pets) you love.

In the past, I’ve struggled with the end-of-year post. Is it a year-in-review post? Should I create a top 10 list?

In the end, it’s best to be thankful for all the things that have happened to me this past year. It has been a fantastic year for me personally and professionally. I can only hope that 2011 was like that for everyone else and that 2012 will be, at a minimal, as good if not better.

Happy New Year.

In ”The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” Steve Denning writes about Roger Martin’s new book ”Fixing the Game”:

“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Martin. “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”

Emphasis added by me. Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Looks like I picked the right profession to be in. Fuck yeah.

I’ve been thinking of the Writer’s Process and I’ve been wondering how to best optimize my time so that I can write more.

Aside: It occurs to me that I really should just concentrate on writing rather than wasting time focused on things that don’t actually contribute to the content authored in this blog.

I wonder how professional bloggers like Shawn Blanc and John Gruber focus themselves to write. Do they set aside a specific time in the day to write?

I wonder what their typing speed is? Mine averages at 48 aWPM (or so says Mavis Beacon). A lot of the bloggers I read come from some sort of computer science background–they typically type very quickly.

For me, I find that I often have the itch to write at the end of the day; late into the evening. That’s when things are quiet enough.

What are the tools that they use? What type of keyboard do they use? I notice that I don’t type nearly as fast on my Macbook Pro than I do with an external keyboard. In fact, I hope to one day upgrade my Apple wireless keyboard to one of those pricey mechanical keyboards that feature those tactile CherryMX switches. (I type faster with the mechanical feedback).

I’m a bit obsessed as to how these writers interface with their profession (whether digital or with pen and paper). I’m a firm believer that having great paper and a great writing instrument help elicit great ideas. It helps me when I sketch.

I suppose the same would be with how I write this weblog. What text editor do they use?¹ BBedit? jEdit? Textmate? Sublime Edit? Do they use an external monitor? What environmental factors do they share (solitude, music, temperature), or are they like me? (I type this stuff on the dining room table of my home until my wrists hurt…then I move downstairs into the office and type until my feet get numb from the cold).

Perhaps I’ll just email them.

When I was on the plane from San Fran to Toronto, I managed to watch a Nova episode called ”The Smartest Machine on Earth” about the development of Watson, IBM’s computer that bested Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the 3-day Jeopardy challenge.

It documented the challenges of computationally interpreting the English language. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, contestants are confronted with a factual statement. They must correctly provide the question (e.g., For $200, a contestant will see “This device lightly burns slices of bread.” The contestant must answer, “What is a toaster?”“).

It immediately reminded me of the challenges that Apple has gone through in the development of Siri and why Siri is in “Beta”. It’s not the voice recognition algorithms, it’s all about machine learning and the gathering of voice data.

Generally, I have a hard time using any type of voice recognition software. I attribute it to my rather monotone and low-pitch voice. It just doesn’t register. Everytime I have to go through a voice controlled menu, I cringe. It just doesn’t work.

The only success I’ve ever had is with Google Android’s voice transcription. Similar to Siri, it uses a data connection to process the sound in the Google cloud. The reason why this is so accurate is Google has a huge corpus of voice data collected through a short-lived mobile service called Google 411:

GOOG-411 (or Google Voice Local Search) was a telephone service launched by Google in 2007, that provided a speech-recognition-based business directory search, and placed a call to the resulting number in the United States or Canada. The service was accessible via a toll-free telephone number. It was an alternative to 4-1-1, an often-expensive service provided by local and long-distance phone companies, and was therefore commonly known as Google 411. This service was discontinued on November 12, 2010.

Similarly, it allowed for Google to:

…build a large phoneme database from users’ voice queries. This phoneme database, in turn, allowed Google engineers to refine and improve the speech recognition engine that Google uses to index audio content for searching.

So I’m sure when Siri comes out of beta, Apple will have built a similar phoneme based on all the people using the service right now. It will only get better and I am sure that this is the next interface revolution coming in to mobile.

On globetrotting

I don’t know how Mike does it, or any of the executives that I know. Travelling across the world on a plane, even in business class just ruins the body. I suppose you get use to it after a time.

Anyways, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris (with about 24-hours notice), France to present the Kobo Touch and be judged for the prestigious Janus de L’industrie award at the Instutut Français du Design.

This is the first award nomination for the Kobo Touch. It kind of validates our approach at building “frictionless technology” and my personal goal at making a better book.

I’ll just say that all presentations were suppose to be 20-minutes plus a 10-minute Q & A session.

We were there for 2 hours

I couldn’t have done this myself, I have such an amazing team at Kobo.

How did it end off?

Well, I’m just going to say that I can add “award winning designer” to my CV now.

Idle time on the flight

I really need to install games on the laptop. Sometimes you need a break from writing. I started the migration while on the return flight to Toronto. Figure I could get the lion’s share done.

It occured to me that the best way to create the markup for the blog was to create a textpattern template that outputted each post with the right YAML file header. Then I realized that the bulk of my posts are in MovableType! Conversely, all I need to do is fix the hard-links and upload the static files to the site and Bam…old versions available. That’s pretty amazing and probably the fastest way to do that.

This means I only need to move about 30 articles from my Drupal install as well as a few dozen that existed at ttohinteractive.com (That’s a blog I started incognito–I still use the URL, mostly to VNC into my Hackintosh).

One of the things that fascinate me is reading old posts that I used to write. I’m amazed with the openness that I used to write with. Right now, everything is a bit start-and-stop. I certainly don’t feel like things are flowing out of me, but I suppose it is just about practice. The former GM always said that, “Practice is the heart of excellence.”

Poor Hackintosh

I’ve been trying to diagnose the constant kernel panicking on the Hackintosh. I installed Lion on it 2-3 months ago and it was running great. I even managed to install the 10.7.2 update without a hitch. Then about 3 weeks the machine started kernel panicking all the time.

Is it the Hardware?

I immediately suspected the overclock (from 2.8 GHz to 3.4 GHz) was the problem, but putting the machine back to its original defaults did not help. I then turned my attention to the RAM, but testing using memtest86 seems to indicate that the ram and the bus seem to be in good shape. I’ve moved most of my data to other drive, so should protect a harddrive crash.

Is it Software?

I’ve been troubleshooting for about 2 weeks and I’ve just about given up and am considering doing a full-reinstall. That sounds unreasonable, I’m sure, but in the realm of reality when you’re dealing with Hackintoshes.

I certainly hope it fixes it.

One of the cool things with Octopress is that it has a built-in integration with GitHub. I’m not too familiar with distributed versioning systems, but this is cool. I used to do this with my other sites HTML templates using Subversion (I had a remote Gentoo server at one point).

GitHub has a free account status–you’re given 5 public repositories.

Public? Yes, I was wondering if that was a wise thing, I mean, anyone could download my blog and replicate. Then again, you can do that right now with very little effort.

Tai