Update: the 1,179 news stories I won’t read

Five days ago I wrote about The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read. If you’ve heard me wibble on above ten minutes then you might figure that these 319 are sports stories. No. I ignore sports but just as one amorphous blob of nothingness, I don’t understand it enough to determine individual news stories.

The 319 were the Apple news stories in my RSS newsreader. And right now there are 1,179 articles about Apple. That’s quite a lot of stories and I would like to tell you about them, except I still won’t read them.

I may never read them. You can be sure that a gigantic majority are to do with the launch of the iPhone 6 and whatever else Apple may or may not release tomorrow. I’ve been staying away from the firehose of news because most of it is wrong, much of it is clickbait emptiness as well as wrong, and you end up being convinced that Apple will announce the discovery of alien life.

After tomorrow’s event, there will be many more stories and I might read some of those. But these 1,179 are dead to me.

All of which is a long way of saying that a lot gets written about Apple, that a lot gets read about Apple by me and that is KILLINGLY DIFFICULT to ignore 1,179 articles.

Apple is streaming its event live on apple.com from 6pm UK time tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ve skipped the articles but I’ll be watching the event. If you enjoy these as much as I do, please write in and explain what I get out of them.

Stop me. This is a bad new habit

I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.

That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.

This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.

For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.

I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.

This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.

If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.

Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.

When one keyboard just isn’t enough

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Previously… I first enthused about the Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard for the IPad Air, then I had some problems with it and posted a little less enthusiastically.

Not so much less enthusiastically that stopped using it.

But while I was writing about this, I did mention how I’d previously used a couple of external keyboards for my iPad. One went to Angela, a very good and quite cheap Logitech one that she still uses and an Apple wireless keyboard. In some ways better than the Logitech, in some ways not as good. But more expensive. And when I had that and Angela had her Logitech, we would even write together. Sitting in a café in the Lake Distract, propped-up iPads leaning against each other.

Now that I’m used to carrying the Belkin keyboard case around, though, that Apple wireless keyboard has lain forgotten in my office.

Until this weekend. I’m behind on a book and we were going to lose quite a bit of time to a workshop I ran in Newcastle and then a London trip to see Kate Bush. (Yes, by the way. Yes. Astounding. It wasn’t a concert, it was a delicate shotgun.) But Angela then got a thing to do during both Saturday and Sunday and I planned to hole up and write.

And for some reason, I brought my old Apple Wireless Keyboard. As well as the Belkin case.

I am persistently tapping the wrong keyboard; there’s a handy iPad key on the Belkin one that isn’t on the Apple one. Plus, I had thought I would never get used to a particular design decision on the Belkin where they moved the semi-colon to beside the keyboard. I still get it wrong when I’m writing on that but it turns out that i must be at least seeping in to my muscle memory because I keep pressing the Belkin key on the Apple keyboard.

But I can’t pretend that this isn’t true: I’m enjoying the writing and it is working faster because I’m on a very good keyboard. A very good and also full-size keyboard.

And if you think I look daft typing with two keyboards, you’re right. I’m just fine with that.

Refresh app: just when you get used to it feeling creepy…

It’s still not out in the UK so you’ll just have to trust me here, but there is this iPhone app called Refresh which parses your calendar and prompts you with conversation starters for people you’re about to meet.

Refresh is very clever and it seems supernatural how it combs sources like LinkedIn to present its information. But as well as the fact that I will never use its suggested conversation openers – I prefer “Hello” to “Say, weren’t you on holiday in Marakesh from 16 July to 18 August?” – there are oddities. And these oddities keep reminding you of how Refresh is sitting on the very line between useful and creepy.

It’s meant to prompt you before a meeting and it does so, but not always. I forgot that I still had it after reviewing the app. Until one day, two months later, it pinged with details of the woman I was meeting to discuss a writing project. I showed her what it said and she revealed that it was all wrong: she had purposely lied on LinkedIn and Facebook in order to defeat this kind of thing.

But then I had a meeting right after that and Refresh didn’t do anything. But then I had a third meeting and it pinged.

A few weeks later, I was going to an event I’d produced and it pinged with what it called a dossier about a particular someone else who was going. That was freaky-plus because my calendar just had the event name and there was nothing I could see that named her – and didn’t name half a dozen other people that Refresh was ignoring.

But still, you know, even though I could just delete it and walk away, I am drawn back to it. There is something so smart about what it does that I’m fascinated at the algorithm. Plus, it gave me the name of someone’s partner and I’d forgotten it. So thank you, Refresh.

Except, last night I got something new. Have a look, see what you think. Is this what I was really doing last night?

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Bounce an AA battery to find out if it’s spent

I don’t exactly know that I needed the whole of this 5’32” video to grasp the concept: if you drop an battery it will bounce if it’s empty, it won’t if it’s full.

Empty. Full. Really I suppose I mean empty as in used up, full as in still has a charge. The folks behind this video call them good batteries vs bad batteries, though that just seems harsh.

Watch the start for proof and a demonstration of how you don’t have to throw the batteries on the ground to test this. Then carry on for an examination of why it may all be true.

Weekend read: What went wrong at Motorola?

Apple is the hottest technology firm at the moment but it will die. It nearly did before. They all go. The unassailable get assailed. IBM was the big deal, now it isn’t. Microsoft ruled the world and now it’s more tolerated.

That’s not to say that Microsoft isn’t earning a lot of money. But it’s earning less and the facade that it was innovative hasn’t so much been seen through as turned away from. You don’t expect Microsoft to do anything interesting.

I mean, even if you’re into this stuff, you don’t expect Microsoft to do anything interesting. If you have no taste for technology, I lost you right back on line one anyway.

But I love this stuff and not because it’s technology. All tech does is speed up the process: companies that used to rise and fall over decades now boom up and collapse back much quicker if they are technology ones.

I went to some talk once where a speaker used Dell as an example of a fantastic business success story and a model for anyone who wanted to do any kind of business. Ahem, I said, haven’t you updated your slides recently? Dell really is a fascinating business studies case now because of all this speaker said plus the number of times the company shot itself in the foot and just how well it aimed. It’s no longer the model to follow but it is one to keep an eye on.

Whereas I knew nothing about Motorola. It did phones, I think I had one once, and I knew it made TV sets because there’s a reference to it in A Billion for Boris, Mary Rodgers’ little known sequel to Freaky Friday. Otherwise, zip.

Which makes this Chicago Magazine feature deeply absorbing. How a company became a great success but:

…great success can lead to great trouble. Interviews with key players in and around Motorola and its spinoffs indicate that the problems began when management jettisoned a powerful corporate culture that had been inculcated over decades. When healthy internal competition degenerated into damaging infighting. “I loved most of my time there,” says Mike DiNanno, a former controller of several Motorola divisions, who worked at the company from 1984 to 2003. “But I hated the last few years.”

What Happened to Motorola – Ted C Fishman, Chicago Magazine (25 August 2014)

Do get a coffee and read the whole feature.

Living in metaphor

I’ve just been talking with someone who uses the word ‘manifest’ a lot. She says and she believes that if you do this thing, you will manifest what you want.

I stuck my hand out and said “And I just want a million dollars”. (It’s a Friends quote.) Still waiting.

But this is real to her. Think of something and you will manifest it. Don’t think of something and you won’t. This works for her every time, she says, without fail. It’s very important that you think of this thing you want and then you put it out of your mind and don’t think of it again.

Now, I offered that there might just be a touch of confirmation bias there: if you do what she says, then the only time you think again of something you wanted is when you get it. So you only remember the successes.

That kills the every-time-without-fail point for me. And you can tell that I’m not sold on this concept. But I agree with the thinking of it and it will come lark: if you don’t think of something, you can’t do anything toward getting it or being it or achieving it.

But I see that as having the idea and then working to achieve it. I see it as work. I reduce that whole chain to the one word. Whereas she reduces it to metaphor.

It is bollocks that if you think of it, it will manifest. (Still waiting.) But it is true that you can’t do anything without thinking of it first. I like that. I’m happy with that. I don’t need and really I don’t want magic. She doesn’t have magic, she just has the label, the term manifest.

It’s a shorthand, it’s a metaphor, and that’s fine. Metaphor compares and contrasts, it helps us grasp, it comments on reality, it is a connector. But it definitely sits in that area between us and what we don’t yet understand or maybe don’t yet have. If you treat the metaphor as the reality, then the metaphor becomes your aim. You’re no longer thinking of things to do or what you want to improve at, you’re thinking of the word manifest.

I think that’s like ignoring the bottle of pills and instead believing that the bit that says “Read directions carefully” is what you need.

Sorry, is that a metaphor?

Apple campus: less a spaceship, more Moonbase Alpha

That’s what I thought at the top of this video, a flyby of a drone over the new Apple office buildings currently under construction.

And I would like to say now that no, I haven’t gone back on my word to not read Apple news stories – see The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read and, incidentally, the total a few days on is 947. I came across this while looking for productivity videos for you to watch.

Your boss can read your mind, a bit, with some help

Imagine one of your managers walks into their subordinate’s office and says, “Our data analysis predicts that you will soon get restless and think of leaving us, so we want to make you an offer that our data shows has retained others like you.” Would your employees welcome the offer, marveling at the value of your HR analytics? Or, might they see images of Big Brother, and be repelled by a company snooping on the data they generate as they work? Predictive analytics can enable a customized employment value proposition that maximizes mutual benefit for organizations and their talent; but at what point do predictive analytics become too creepy?

Predict What Employees Will Do Without Freaking Them Out – John Boudreau, Harvard Business Review (5 September, 2014)

I think predictive analytics are creepy, full stop. I’m just okay with it up to the point when some bloke – you know it’d be a man – says anything to me like “Our data analysis predicts that you will soon get restless” and says it with a straight face.

But if figuring out that someone is going to leave means bosses take steps to keep you happy, I’m good with that. The full piece goes on to show that it’s worth these company’s time and investment in analytical software. Unfortunately, it also goes on to creep me out more:

Consider this object lesson from marketing. Pregnancy is an event that changes otherwise stubborn purchasing habits, so retailers want to know about a pregnancy as early as possible. Duhigg’s New York Times story reports that Target marketing analysts built a predictive algorithm to identify pregnant customers based on their purchasing habits and other demographic information. They sent those customers ads for pregnancy related products. What could be wrong with helping pregnant women be aware of products or services they need, as early as possible?

Apparently, women responded negatively if it was obvious that they received pregnancy ads before they revealed their pregnancy. They responded more positively if they received “an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers.” Duhigg reports one executive saying, “as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons…As long as we don’t spook her, it works.” Duhigg also reports that Target company executives said the article contained “inaccurate information,” so the story may exaggerate, but the lesson remains: Effective predictive analytics depends on how real people react, not just on the elegance of the analytics.

Let’s just repeat a sentence there: “Apparently, women responded negatively if it was obvious that they received pregnancy ads before they revealed their pregnancy.” I am torn between saying “Well, duh” or “You think?”

It’s interesting to me that these quotes are from the same Harvard Business Review article but HBR didn’t spot the connection. If a marketing firm can accurately predict when you’re pregnant, so can a personnel department. If given the same data anyway. So you’re at work, you haven’t told anyone you’re pregnant – because you’re never going to tell anyone before the first 12 weeks, are you? – but your boss knows. I don’t like where that’s going.

Samsung sells KITT or something

I might buy if it were really KITT. As it is, the actual product isn’t all that clear in this new ad but I’m fine with that. Unfortunately, I could be wrong but it doesn’t sound like William Daniels doing KITT’s voice. Boo.

If your dad maybe mentioned the show, I can’t say you missed out. But I liked the car. Which is odd since I’m not a car kind of guy, but. Have a look at Knight Rider yourself.

Via The Medium Is Not Enough