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37 signals, and nothing’s on

No wonder they disabled comments on 37signals’ blog Signal vs. Noise. For “a design and usability blog,” their content sure has been… uh… noisy, lately.

Some highlights:

• How to fix your gutter problem. You do have a gutter problem, right?
• Recommending fussiness as a design strategy. We’re not sure what you should be fussy about, but… y’know… be fussy.
• Ignoring their users. Tired of hearing about how your content is sub-par? Turn off the comments! If only there was as easy a solution for my damn gutters…
• Shampoo bottles. Cutting edge design and usability here.
• Nostalgic for “tightly cut” 80s action movies. Extended versions are wasteful.
• Bitching about their bank. Yup. Citibank, you’re on notice.
• Wishing they’d get more press. Because apparently they recently invented being a “small” business.
• Not understanding modern art. It’s like Jakob Neilsen in high school.
• Still kind of groggy from Thanksgiving. Next up: why do they call it Thanksgiving, anyway?
• Remaining oblivious to sweatshops. Wow! A logo mashup! Witty!
• Remaining firm on intellectual property rights. Unless they’re witty logo mashups, of course. Then brand dilution is fun!
• Not understanding programming. You can’t have a meaningful progress bar for an operation with no upper bound, or with an upper bound which is several orders of magnitude greater than the mean operation complexity. In other words, you should have used ReiserFS.
• Burning bridges when they get to them. Well, your abortive Basecamp upgrade sure seemed like it was a problem. Maybe some forethought would have been a good idea.
• Getting self-conscious. Yes. You have jumped the shark. I eagerly await their new CD, entitled “37signals Gets Real With Christmas.”

Maybe the transition from a consulting company to a branded services company is a rough one. I wouldn’t be surprised. Thanks for Rails, guys. Now go work on Getting Real, or Finding Where The Beef Is, or Establishing What Willis Is Talking About, or some other catchphrase which indicates not only your proprietary relationship with reality but also your affinity for incorporating elements from 80s slang into Edgy Business Lingo.

Hmm… maybe it’s time to start floating that business book treatment I’ve been working on–Partying On: Constructing Bodacious Brands With Gerundial Phrases.

Until the interns stop posting LiveJournal-worthy material, SvN gets the boot from the blogroll. Buhweeted!

Berkeley’s Finest: Saving Us From The Nasty, Evil Bicycleses

So, I got pulled over. Not sure why, but I did. I was coming down Bancroft after meeting with my friend Matthew when a cop (behind me, to my left) yelled at me on his loudspeaker to “pick a lane.” I was slowing down anyways (red light, don’tcha know), so I turned to him as best I could and said “But I’m going straight!” To which he replied, “How about you pull over and I cite you?” Whee!

The cop was a total dick about it, natch. When I tried to explain what I had been attempting to do, he started yelling at me, so I figured I may as well cut my losses, said “cite me,” and tried to keep my trap shut. I don’t know why he was so irritated; he may have to deal with Telegraph-street fixie hipsters all day, I don’t know. We did the license-and-current-address dance, and he handed me a citation. Mmm… moving violations.

From what I could tell (him yelling at me to get in the left lane, I couldn’t ride in the center), he wanted to to cite me for a violation of VC Section 21202. While he may have had a case, there were several exceptions to this law: the bicycle must be traveling slower than normal traffic (I had been suppressing the urge to pass cars all the way down Bancroft), and riding in the left lane must be safe. (Bancroft is a one-way street, which means in California, at least, you can ride on either the right-most or the left-most side of the street.)

For those of you following along at home, just crack open Google Earth and search for “Bancroft and Ellsworth, Berkeley, CA”, zoom in a whole bunch, and rotate the view until north is to the left. Bancroft is the three-lane street running top/bottom(east/west), and Ellsworth is to the right (south). I was in the left-most lane on Bancroft until it closed to two lanes, right before Ellsworth. You can see the arrows and lines of paint indicating that. It opens back up to three lanes right after Ellsworth, but I didn’t merge into the left lane for two reasons:

1. There was a car behind me in that lane. Bicycles which cut off cars which are potentially travelling much faster don’t fare too well. It’s not a habit I’ve accquired over the years, and it’s not one I intend to pick up.
2. If you look a bit farther down Bancroft, the right lane splits off into a dedicated turning lane, at which point I would have been in a legal position again. I had the option of making an un-safe and possibly illegal lane change, or sticking it out for another 5 seconds and being back in what this officer considered to be the good graces of the law.

The total amount of space in which I could have possibly been in violation of that statute was 400ft., the last 200 of which I had spent trying to figure out what the cop behind and to the left of me wanted. Yes, he wanted me to cut him off, I suppose; I’m still unsure. It’s the end of the month, and it’s entirely possible that the Berkeley PD is expecting quotas to be met–I know if I were on the South Side beat, I’d probably spend most of my time checking out girls, not writing tickets.

I have to say, the vast majority of interactions with the police anywhere have been negative, regardless of whether or not I was a victim, suspect, or bystander. I think it’s something about the job which structures most of your interactions with others in an antagonistic framework, and makes every perceived infraction of the law seem like a personal rebuke. The amount of power a police officer wields kind of lends itself to condescension and paternalist anger. If there’s any good cops out there, keep your heads up.

There’re two punchlines to this story. First, he listed my speed on the citation as 7mph; frankly, I’m insulted. I push 5mph when I track stand (ask Peter–I’m horrible at it).

Second, he cited me for a violation of VC Section 21650.1, when I think he meant to cite me for a violation of VC Section 21202. 21650.1 says that “a bicycle operated on a roadway, or the shoulder of a highway, shall be operated in the same direction as vehicles are required to be driven upon the roadway.” And if he thinks what I did do was worth citing, I’d hate to imagine his reaction if I actually had ridden at 7mph up the center lane of a one-way street in the wrong direction. Traffic court will most certainly be entertaining, and may involve discussions as the feasibility of time travel.

Thank you, Berkeley’s Finest, for keeping the streets safe from us evil, bastard cyclists.

Update (Dec. 2nd 2005):

Well, it turns out that police officers get a mulligan when it comes to tickets. He sent me a form in the mail saying he really meant to cite me for violating CVC 21202(a), but was so shaken by my disregard for the sacrosanct laws of traffic (as interpreted by the One True Prophet, Ofc. Bartalini [Turn Signals Be Upon His Name], who happened to be waxing a bit wroth that day) that he stacked it on the first try. Gold star for effort, but he’s gonna lose this one.

A Ruby HOWTO: Writing A Method That Uses Code Blocks

One of the first things about Ruby which absolutely delighted me was its implementation of code blocks. They take a potentially ugly construct–anonymous delegates–and turn them into a readable, time-saving structure:

chunky_bacon = %w(moo hoo ha ha)
chunky_bacon.each { |cb|
	puts "--> #{cb}"
}

So how can we use this wonderful little bit of functionality in our own code? Well, break out a text editor and a terminal window, because it’s time to write some Ruby! Until the Tryptophan kicks in and we lurch around, belly exposed and bulging, wondering how long it’ll take until we’ve digested enough food to go back for another slice of pie. Happy Thanksgiving!

(continue reading…)

The whole thing is actually written in a Charlie Chan accent…

Okay, this is not cool:

Like most Asian immigrants, the parents of sibling authors Dr. Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim (a doctor and a lawyer), came to America with only two hundred dollars in their pockets. They didn’t arrive with a lot of money, but what these parents carried with them was far more powerful than money when it came to raising successful children. They carried an extremely strong value system and well-thought parenting techniques. OK, so maybe in this drama obsessed culture of ours, the rags to riches tale is a bit stale, and nobody enjoys being told how to raise their children. Here’s what we think about that. Get Over It!

As television commercials tell us that it’s valid to avoid reading to your child by tricking him with cool DVR features, and as food companies push microwavable dinners because parents just don’t have time to cook for their children, it is wonderfully refreshing to read that some parents still ask and answer issues such as, “How family wealth can sometimes hurt a child’s education instead of helping,” and “How to instill a love for learning.” Notice the “love for learning.” Doesn’t it seem like most Americans are taught to view learning and education as a chore, or simply a responsibility. These two issues, among many more, are why Asians and Asian-Americans make up only 4% of the U.S. population, but 20% of the Ivy League, not to mention 42% of Berkeley and 24% of Stanford.

Wow. Just wow. Way to mobilize the “model minority” ethnic stereotype to make a buck. Soo, Jane: you are horrible people.

Now, I spent some time at Berkeley, and I noticed the predominance of Asian students there (really 42.8%, but who’s counting?). I also noticed the fact that some of my friends were being run ragged by their parents, and shuffled off into “useful” fields of study which would make them “successful.” They hated their time at Berkeley, and they were driven more by a fear of failure than by anything resembling “a love for learning.” This was a laid-back crowd, too; you haven’t seen the depths this can hit until you’ve seen some poor kid hyperventilating over an intro English paper because all they can see is their admittance to an Ivy League grad school sliding down the drain. Flop sweat is not an indicator of “a love for learning.” It’s an indicator of family dysfunction.

When all you see of your child is his or her income in five years, you are a bad parent. Full stop.

I want my children to do what they want, not what I want. I don’t want to try to drill my idea of success, based on my personal failings, into my children’s heads, and make my love for them conditional on their authority-validated achievements. I want them to be good people, and I think they have to figure out for themselves what that means.

Repeat after me: your children are people in their own right. They will bury you and everyone you know. You have one chance to make sure they bury you out of love, not out of a sense of duty.

“A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.”

“Imagine if you were an alien, watching Earth from space, looking for signs of advanced life. This is what you’d see. A dark world with blue roses opening all over it.” — Warren Ellis

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