Today’s teenagers – all of them – watch a family-friendly introduction to the internet that was made in the 1990s when we thought Windows was cool and even wifi was unimagined.
Naturally, today’s teenagers – all of them – like it and wish we could return to these good old days.
Please picture us having a mug of tea and chatting entirely without the aid of research or statistics, possibly therefore without even facts.
Beats headphones aren’t as good as we’re told.
I was in the aforementioned tea and chat situation last night with a friend. Where you might and a surprising (to me) number of people turn to me for information about Apple, this friend is the guy you would and I do turn to for anything to do with music and hifi.
Let’s call him Steve.
No reason.
I asked Steve about Beats music because I hadn’t heard of it before Apple was in talks to buy the service, its headphones and its people. Steve had heard of it before. He can even pronounce the name of its head guy, Jimmy Iovine, with confidence.
He agrees with just about most things we suspect: he thinks that yes, Apple bought Beats in order to get Iovine. He knows his streaming music and why Beats is considered good at it even though it hasn’t very many listeners compared to Spotify.
But the other thing he knows, as an audiophile, is that the Dr Dre headphones by Beats are not perfect. He doesn’t like them at all but I went searching online and found a lot of praise from them for various corners of the audiophile universe. Except Steve’s problem with them is a problem for every review and every reviewer I could find: these headphones are made to suit bass-heavy music.
Great if you like bass, not so much if you don’t. And despite my being a rubbish audiophile, I don’t like the idea of artificially whacking up the bass on a recording: I know what work goes into making a mix and even if I can’t get it to its best effect, I won’t deliberately change it.
There’s this WWDC announcement tonight. Nobody knows what’s going to be talked about – not really – but maybe Beats will come up in the presentation. I have had such a good time with Apple gear, it has helped me so much, that when Apple brings out something new I will at least hear about it, I will probably take a look. I don’t think I’ll be buying Beats headphones.
Actually, is this really specific or is it remarkably wide open? MyNorthwest just profiled The Purple Store in Seattle:
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you followed through on that crazy idea? Adam Sheridan, owner of The Purple Store in Seattle, did and now he’s shipping thousands of everyday items, in the color purple, to fans across the country.
It might seem an odd business choice, but Sheridan said he simply saw a void and filled it.
“People who like purple really like purple and in a perfect world, something fun like The Purple Store should exist,” he said. “We have found that you have an enthusiastic fan who might see a little bit of purple in a department store, but when they come here, their eyes light up and their jaws drop.”
Nothing but purple at Seattle’s The Purple Store – MyNorthwest.com
So it has to be purple, but otherwise it could be anything. Going through the website – of course there’s a website, of course it is purple too – you can currently buy purple dog bowls, a purple camouflage teeshirt (where exactly would that work other than here in The Purple Store?) and, well, other things. Okay, no, I’m going to say it because it took me ages to work this out. The Purple Store has a section called “Oh My!” in which, after you have clicked to say that you are over 18, it shows you purple sex toys. The first one I saw was purple electrical tape (3-roll set, $4.25, naturally only available in purple) and I’m still not 100% sure what – never mind, anyway.
The whole and the wholesome store is online here. Take a look at the full MyNorthwest article and the brief Time magazine report that told me about it.
It’s good to focus on things. Most of my productivity advice works whatever your job is but I chose to concentrate on writers because I am one and because this stuff helped me so much. Sorry, I say the word ‘concentrate’ there but ever since I heard of The Purple Store I’ve been wondering about the women moonbase staff in UFO and whether they got their hair there.
Oh.
Follow this handy guide based on how much you like Apple:
You’re vehemently anti-Apple:
Go anywhere you like and you’ll find plenty else to watch. I think there’s football somewhere. Or is that next week?You’re vehemently an Apple fanatic:
You already know the answer.You’re a vehemently uninterested in anything to do with technology:
Well, thanks for reading this site anyway.
You’re everybody else:
The short answer is that you should go to Apple’s WWDC Event page . That’s not only short, it’s obvious. But it’s also new. I’m sure I’ve seen some Apple announcement streamed live but until recently the quick way to find out what is and isn’t announced is to check out an unofficial Mac website and watch as they live-blog the event.
I loathe live blogs. I have mocked live blogs. I can live without being told what music Apple is playing before the event.
And I can live without any of the actual news Apple announces. Yet I like these events, I enjoy them and I would be watching the new live stream. Except:
You’re me:
Throughout the event you’ll be driving to a place near Stratford to talk with a reading group that you’re going to write a story for.
I am obviously and understandably excited about that, but yes, you can bet that on my way home I will see if the recording of the event is up.
Seriously. This is really just a longer way of saying the maxim “don’t get it right, get it done” or how one shouldn’t be paralysed by the search for perfection. But it’s an interesting longer way:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
What 50 Pounds of Clay Can Teach You About Design – Chanpory Rith, Medium
I think the professor was a bit of a git, knowing that half the class would fail – and which half – yet cheerily lab-ratting them. But I am now very much of the opinion that getting a thing done is important: I find it immensely satisfying to think of something and then make it real.
I’d say, then, that I fully support this idea of saying nuts to perfection, let’s get on with it, except that I’m not. I read a book of flash fiction by an interesting guy who had spoken at an event about getting on with writing, about getting flash fiction done. His big point was that it’s easy and I’m afraid that the writer’s ease is not my concern. The final material is and though one can presume that he’s getting better each time he writes a flash fiction book, as a reader I just saw text that wasn’t very engaging. Great ideas, just not quite there somehow.
So there you are: please sort this out, quality vs quantity. Off you go, let me know how you get on.
I’ve never jailbroken my iPhones: never worked around Apple’s software to get other, unsanctioned apps onto my phones. I look at the whole idea of hot-wiring your iPhone, of tweaking settings and having to exploit undocumented holes in the system and I just think to bollocks with it all.
If you want to get your hands that dirty just to install some game or something, go get yourself an Android phone.
Jailbreaking fans argue that it’s worth the effort because you get much better apps this way. You get all these fantastic apps that Apple won’t allow on iPhones for, you know, minor reasons like security.
Name one app that’s actually worth the trouble.
And while you do, let’s remember that this trouble is not a one-time deal. It is at least every time there is a new update to the iOS software – any update, not just the biggies like moving from iOS 7 to iOS 8. Anything. Get an update, go back to your screwdrivers. And hope that Apple hasn’t closed this particular loophole.
Except.
If I had to name one app that was worth it, I’d pick this. OkSiri brings an Android feature (not available everywhere, not a regular Android feature but available on at least one Android phone) that I would like to see on iPhone. It makes Siri listen all the time. No pressing a button and waiting a mo before speaking to Siri, it is listening all the time. And specifically it is listening for a phrase such as “OK, Siri” that it then recognises as its cue to work.
The website 9to5 Mac that reported on this also reports that it’s flaky and the execution isn’t as good as the idea. But that’s Android and that’s jailbreaking to me.
Genuinely, this absorbed my attention and I knew so little about it that I had to look up what the initials stood for. CMO is Chief Marketing Officer and CIO is Chief Information Officer. Probably every corporation has them but allegedly most corporations don't have them working together very much at all.
But I was very tickled by how this piece pointed out a truly gigantic change that has happened with these jobs. It used to be that marketing people were a bit vague and nebulous, they had ideas but you coudn't really test them before doing them. It used to be that technology people in a company were the ones who knew how things could be done, what they would cost and what exact impact it would have.
Today marketing people have so much detail about customers that they can and they do model things like price changes and they know what the outcome will be. Whereas IT people are the ones who can't predict how much budgets will go over, who can't guarantee security and whose great work is undone by every member of staff who brings in an Android phone.
This Macworld piece is about Liz Allen, a former Apple marketing exec who has followed this change over the years and has a lot to say about it. I tell you, I was reading her comments on my phone as I raced around. Didn't have time to stop and read it properly yet couldn't help myself grabbing the next few seconds to read a bit more.
I’m not sure why it feels like there’s been a spate of talks becoming animated cartoons, but here’s another one. The animation is fine, I think I’d just like to concentrate on the audio as it’s David Bowie being rather interesting about separating audience reaction from one’s own perception of a piece of your work.
Via Nackblog
There’s not going to be some great life-changing Hallmark-Card-like slice of advice here, I’m just wondering about something I have wondered about a lot.
I wonder when things are over.
There must be a day when something is done. This first popped into my noggin some years ago when I read a line somewhere about how Dar Williams‘s new album was coming out soon. (I think it was Many Great Companions, which is so good that when a friend asked what I liked about Dar Williams, I just bought her the album. It’s cheaper to write reviews, but I wanted her to have it. I want you to have it too, but I’m a little short today.)
I can’t remember when this was but I was surprised because up to then, her previous CD had been the new one. My own Doctor Who releases go through a similar thing.
Actually, Doctor Who, there’s a thing. I go through various processes writing those, there are the same types of deadlines to the same types of timescales and in theory I could say my involvement ends when I deliver the last draft. Well, you don’t know there won’t be more to do then. So call it when the scripts are in studio, that’s definitely the end for me. Well, sometimes I’m in studio and working on scenes. Okay, post production. Definitely no involvement there, so that Doctor Who is over and I’m looking for the next one.
Except there are liner notes to write for the CD. Quite often there are interviews to do.
So okay, when it goes on sale. But that’s when I start talking about it all, I suppose officially because that’s marketing and promotion, but really it’s because now I can FINALLY talk to you about it.
I don’t put “Tweet about Doctor Who” in my OmniFocus To Do list. It isn’t a task, it’s what I do for fun. So by the time we reach the tweeting stage, you can bet that my OmniFocus Doctor Who project is long completed. So that’s definitely it, that’s definitely over. I have ticked off everything I have to do, everything I have to deliver, I can mark the entire project as done.
That seems very satisfying.
And that’s why this is on my mind today. I did an event yesterday that has been some preposterous number of months in the making and this morning I’m doing my OmniFocus review, I’m getting to that project and I am about to grandly click on Done, when I don’t.
Because I’ve thought of some more tasks. Well, call them tasks because it would be bad if I didn’t do them. Just wrapping up stuff, there are so many people I want to thank for getting this done for me, for instance. That could go in the fun pile, that needn’t be a task To Do per se, except I’ll feel very bad if I forget someone in the rush. So I jotted down who it is. And okay, I know it’d be handiest for this person if I phoned and for that person if I texted, and so on.
Then there’s the money to do with the event. That truly is a task. That is several tasks in a row.
When that’s all done, then, that’s when this event is over.
Okay.
Sorted.
I just need to keep the event details around because I’ve had a lot of praise for it that might help in the pitching for the new one.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the headline. What’s Sunday?
Over on LinkedIn, Ilya Pozin – who gets a special badge marked ‘Influencer’, I think it’s like being a prefect – argues reasonably persuasively that Sundays are useful for work:
Sundays aren’t just for rest and recuperation. When used wisely, they’re actually the perfect way to start your week with a bang.
Mondays often feel like a catch-up day from the weekend. There’s usually a full inbox and things that need your immediate attention as soon as you walk into the office. To avoid this productivity-killing situation, I schedule some time for work every Sunday to get my week started with a clean slate.
Why Productive People Work on Sundays – Ilya Pozin, LinkedIn (27 August 2013)
I say he’s reasonably persuasive because if he were very persuasive I’d be working now. As it is, you can choose to read this as persuasive, you can choose to read it as inspirational and then on top of that you can have the extra choice of whether you’re going to get up this morning or just stay right where you are.