Across Weirdish Wild Space

JK Rowling' s Harvard Commencement address about her time at Amnesty

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:57:52 GMT

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Things I'm loving about Songbird's release candidate

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:59:57 GMT

Songbird just popped out a 1.0 release candidate, a huge jump from the 0.7 release they’ve had on the site. Lotta talent behind this mozilla-based music player including some of the master crew behind the llama-ass-kicking winamp.

I’ve never been that big a fan of iTunes. I’ve always considered it a necessary evil because of needing podcasts seamlessly (downloading via rss in NetNewswire and related is never as smooth and integration with my iPod (particularly automatic syncing of podcasts), but fact of the matter is it’s at best a mediocre music player, lacks customization, and I really, really dislike the way everything gets pumped through the iTunes music store. Sure Apple has to monetize those song sales, but really. I never buy from them and after a while it annoys me.

On Linux, there’s been some interesting things going on, but really what I want out of my player is something that’s going to just simply play my music, help me enjoy it more, manage my podcasts and iPod, and probably most importantly, help me discover or find out about other music I might like.

Strangely, because I’d seen previous versions of Songbird, and while I’d liked it better than Amarok (which i think has a schizoid interface), I thought it was a little simplistic as a drop-in replacement.

I have to say though, I’ve just downloaded the 1.0 release candidate and it is really quite impressive. First and foremost the last.fm integration and music recommendation engine is actually well thought out, works well in the interface and is unobtrusive and fast. I learned new things about bands I’ve had in my library for years just tonight. Surprisingly, since I don’t go to many concerts, (mostly because I never find out about them in time), I really like the concert feature which lets me know when bands in my library may be having concerts near me in London (I’d love it if it alerted me when certain bands I’ve flagged are playing in London until I turned off an alert since usually my problem is never being able to know about tickets before they’re sold out), and really loving the lyrics feature which has already let me know how wrong I’ve been singing along to some songs I’ve had for years to.

To be honest, it could easily replace my iTunes on my desktop, though now I have to find a way to get the equivalent functionality I have in SizzlingKeys (or that I could get with QuickSilver, I’d love that too) so I can keyboard command the thing without moving off the keyboard. There really needs to be a OS integrated way to deal with manipulating at least the fast play/pause, fast forward/switch/back function from the keyboard and would love it if it had some sort of growl or equivalent integration (correction: just found a couple of growl integration add-ons here but none updated to the 1.0rc yet).

A few bugs I ran into but overall for a release candidate, a pretty damn solid version of the software to look at. Oh, and another nice thing, it manages my iTunes collection from Songbird meaning that I don’t even really have to switch at the moment.

Obama Zombies !

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:26:21 GMT

God, I love The Onion. I”m very glad that even their ability to poke fun at those in power hasn’t been dampened by Barack’s election win. Seriously, the one good indication that democracy and freedom are still alive and well in any country are people poking fun at politicos with impunity.

And in other political parody awesomeness…

Episode XLIV : A New Hope

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:55:15 GMT

Well, much like the rest of the jubilant free world, it’s hard not to look at Obama’s landslide election in the United States and hope that, well… finally they’ve come to their senses. It’s been a hard eight years, and I don’t think anyone would argue that things have gotten amazingly worse than they were under the tender ministrations of the Bush years.

Also, the historic precedent of the 44th president can’t be denied and hopefully will reverse some long-standing horribleness about racism and the politics of exclusion in the States.

Anyhow, the poor guy has a hell of a job ahead of him and a whack of messes and crises to deal with. Let’s hope he can live up to the potential and promises of his campaign and the speech he made in front of the Tiergarten in Germany.

As I write this, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri are still processing votes with it looking like Obama will take two more of those states, but currently,

Electoral College votes : Obama 251 – McCain 171
Senate : Dems 56 – Reps 40 (4 remain)

Let’s hope the next four can do something about the last eight.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly.
- interwiewee on NPR Radio

OMG it is soooo snowing in London

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:21:46 GMT

Seriously, 28 Oct and the snow is coming down in huge, big fluffy flakes and sticking to everything. It’s actually very beautiful but I can’t believe it’s snowing this early already.

Wow… I am seriously jonezing for some snowboarding now though. Anyone got any ski trips planned yet ?

Got a novel in you in November ?

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:07:40 GMT

I’m pondering whether I could pull off National Novel Writing Month this year and pen a novel in the month of November as the nights get longer and the days colder.

50k words by the end of the month ? That does seem a little daunting. Say 2000 words a day over 25 days ?

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a good novel, but…

Any great suggestions anyone ?...

Excellent Get Out the Vote viral from moveon.org

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:58:18 GMT

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

Wassup 2008 - the Bush years

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:27:53 GMT

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

Great Warren Buffet quote and interview

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:19:16 GMT

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being just an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview:

”... you only find out who’s
been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

(via clusterstock.)

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog from Mike Cohn from Agile 2008

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:16:27 GMT

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

Interestingly, we have noticed as well, the difficulty in prioritizing at the story level rather than epic or theme level so I thought this was a pretty nice presentation.

Really liked the idea of Kano analysis as an additional screen on the product backlog : exciters/delighters, and mandatory/baseline. Particularly the idea of driving that via a simple survey of just a few tens of users – a functional questioning asking how people feel if it’s present and a dysfunctional question asking how people feel if it’s absent.

Bit long, but definitely worth your time if you’re using doing agile development and working with a product backlog (doubly so if your backlog is more of an attic that never gets looked at). Weird little thing, note the slides appear below the video of Mike doing the hand waving and talking which makes full screen not so useful on it. You’ll miss important stuff… so maybe move the browser down 1/8 of the screen before starting the presentation.

(via someone, but I don’t remember who… =< )

The rock balancer of Stanley Park

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:06:59 GMT

I was surprised to see this posted on the 37Signals blog today as I was combing through my feeds. I used to live on English Beach in Vancouver and this guy would be balancing rocks as you see in the video all the time. It is truly astonishing to see, and more so late at night when there is no one around and the tide has come in and there are all these isolated anthropomorphic figures separated on little rock islands by the tide. I don’t think the video does it justice, but considering this was literally right outside my door when I lived on Beach Ave, figured it needed a post.

Plus, really getting tired of England the past week and missing Vancouver and Canada and living next to the sea and friends far away (and really tired of absurd internal politics at work). Nice reminder of how beautiful the city is. Do kind of imagine I’ll be living back there someday…

OK, one final picture from my flickr just to rub it in…

(via Signal vs. Noise.)

Sculpted not built.... the new mac notebooks

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:56:32 GMT

Admittedly I have an unhealthy obsession with my mac notebooks.

They are not only slight fetish objects, but my office, the centre of my digital and online life and basically some of the best designed objects I’ve ever owned.

For some reason, it seems almost just that a company so fanatical about design has made its next big leap, not through building, but sculpting its product. Very impressive. And also, I am very very happy they are now environmentally friendly (Congratulations Ze !! You won ! Can you start talking to me again now if I buy a new one ?... =] )

Now the real big question is whether I get the Macbook Air in early November now it’s addressed my concerns (graphics and SSD storage space up to 128GB) or grab one of the new macbooks.

Also, the keynote was fascinating to watch in terms of the drivers of what’s made them successful and their momentum.

I’m also stunned they’ve managed to give their customers more of what they want and make it cheaper. Barring serious issues coming to light with the new products I can’t see why you would want to buy another laptop (even with how nice the Lenovo 301 is).

Carrotmob Makes it Rain... Environmentally

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:19:09 GMT

Meant to post this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

(thanks to Anu K. for the link)

Sequoia Capital RIP Good Times presentation and Survival Maximization

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:03:53 GMT

Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.

While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).

It’s good and explains some very complex issues reasonably simply (hey, you didn’t want someone with an economics background like me presenting it, trust me) and if it doesn’t make some startups batten down the hatches, start cutting expenses and try to eek it out for a while, I don’t know what will.

Their bottom line : It’s not a normal downturn and recovery will take quite a while. I love the slide, Get Real or Go Home as a conclusion.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

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I’m not sure I really believe Sequoia really thinks things are this bad, but having the presentation out there probably has put the fear of God into some startups whose burn rates have been something like it was in the 90’s.

Interestingly, the most inadvertent reaction came from VC watcher TechCrunch who had the Post line “Profit Maximization V. Survival Maximization.” While the article was focusing on the role and blame a lot of VCs have (I believe) incorrectly pinned on VCs for the downturn, I thought the headline was a more basic question that I thought a lot of companies should have been asking themselves a while back. Sure, you need a balance of both, especially if the question of shareholders enters the picture, but the fact is a lot of companies have been, for a while now, confusing profit maximization with survival maximization and a lot of them are probably going to be treated unkindly by the increasingly likely recession coming on.

Long term view, stick with the three rules of why you should be starting a company :

You can do something no one else can do
You can do something better than anyone else can do (and defend your ability and advantage to do so)
You have a particular insight into consumers or businesses you can capitalize on better than anyone else

You’ll notice that these are all based on survival maximization rather than profitability.

Things are fine. Don't Vote.

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:58:24 GMT

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages.

And I really especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think…

Love it. Not easy to tell who is responsible but the DNS record whois mentions Pollinate media in Oregon.

Now, if someone came up with something like this for the Canadian elections… =<

via scaryideas.

Usability and design improvements to the Amnesty International website

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:04:05 GMT

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

But like everything, new technologies and capabilities mean a bit of learning and some of the things we tried didn’t work exactly as planned, and some initial assumptions about the way the site would be used and our audience didn’t turn out as we expected.

So, the web team and our excellent tech partners, CivicActions have been working hard on making improvements particularly in the areas of layout design, information architecture, usability, landing pages (one thing we found is that the main landing page is not necessarily the only landing page due to google’s near pervasive ability to have people jump to places in the site from search results) and improvements to impact both searchability, cross linking and ultimately SEO to make thing easier for our constituents and the people we are trying to reach to find. There are also a few technical improvements on the end to make things run faster and more reliably.

It’s a big piece of work and a lot of sweat and negotiated has gone into the improvements and carefully thought-out trade-offs.

A big, big hand to the web team and our Civi partners for some great work done and getting it up and out the door.

Contrast the new :

with the original launch :

Would love to hear (constructive) comments back. We’ll be doing a big usability push and working on some persona-based design work in the coming months to carve out the future direction of the site and its focus.

Spock ! You Can't Be Serious !

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:38:14 GMT

YouTube has just started putting full length versions of vintage television shows such as MacGyver and (oh no !) the original Star Trek online for viewing with their “theatre mode.”

Apparently, though, it doesn’t look like they’re available outside of the US or Canada unless you’re doing a VPN workaround like evil little me. Yes, ssh tunneling to your own servers is the bees’ knees.

It is frightening how big an influence growing up on Star Trek TOS had on me (my Mom was a huge Trekkie). Besides, fundamental ideas about the future being better, stronger faster and ideas about technological progress, good and evil and fundamental rights, was this underlying theme below it all of the idea that one man, can indeed, summon the future. Oh, and oh yeah, that diversity itself is being attracted to green-skinned Orion dancing women… =] And let’s never forget the show was the first ever television show to actually show an interracial kiss (gasp!).

Anyhow, if giving you that link doesn’t waste most of the rest of your otherwise productive afternoon, I don’t know what will.

via Lifehacker

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving !

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:53:43 GMT

One of the awful things about being an ex-pat way too often is you kinda miss these silly non-holidays (and long weekends) back on the native soil.

Just hope everyone back there in the True North Strong and Free has a excellent Turkey Day and a very good and restful long weekend.

Animated Universal Declaration of Human Rights

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:50:57 GMT

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

Riding Rollercoasters @ Alton Towers

daryls_blog@wakatara.com (Daryl) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:54:10 GMT

So, spent the weekend at Alton Towers grace of a friend who makes a yearly pilgimmage there.

I have to admit I was a little sceptical about a British theme park. As a friend stated back in Canada when I was IMing with them once I got back, “Theme parks seem rather un-English.”

But it was scads of fun.

And besides pondering how much fun it must be to be a roller coaster designer and that a good book scam would be travelling the world and rating all the world’s amusement rides (and getting soaked because of the drizzle, a maniac insisting on a water ride and catching a rather bad cold in time for work on Monday), I have to say that Alton Towers, while small, was absolutely loads of fun. Doubly so if you stay overnight in the hotels. Stay in the Alton not the SplashLandings which is more for kids (but has a waterpark !).

Anyhow, here is my list of rollercoasters tops list :

Rita: Queen of Speed
Just damn fun because of the speed. 100mph in 2.5 seconds off launch. It’s fast… sooo fast…
Oblivion
For sheer holy shit ! value, this had to take it. Literally it’s just a freefall plunge from roughly 200ft up into a dark hole in the ground and pulling about 4Gs but the absolute evil part if they hold the coaster for a few seconds with you dangling over the edge of nothing, before they suddenly drop it. Plus the production value on the slightly orwellian tv screens and commentary as you go up are fantastic
Air
I had never seen a coaster like this, so it was a bit of a first for me. You are strapped in and then tilted up so you are literally doing a Superman around the entire ride. Massively fun with loads of loops, spins and through some engineering marvel, one of the most incredibly smooth rides I’ve ever been on. Way better than Nemesis which is similar in that you dangle your feet.
Pinball-Whizzer
The great thing about this coaster is that the entire car can freely rotate 360 degrees so you are spun about while moving round corners and up and down hills. Fantastically fun and twice as good if you get into the seats facing backwards.

Oh, and a special mention to Hex which takes place inside the semi-restored and absolutely gorgeous castle of Alton Towers (will someone please give them some money to restore this beautiful edifice up to its former glory ?). A ghost story of super high production values with a fabulous little finale that is part ride and a fantastic bit of optical illusion. I have to say I was impressed even though I knew what they were doing.

Hammed it up with loads of posed photos taken on the rides but didn’t think in advance enough to get the oh so important chess playing photo :