Seth is wrong
Seth Godin has a post today about how Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about Chris Anderson's book. At least, I think that's what the post is about. As usual, Seth is speaking as a deep insider and assumes I've read everything "Malcolm" and "Chris" have written. I haven't.
Anyway, Seth is responding to and offering some criticisms of Anderson's new book - Free. In his response, Seth writes, "A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it?" My goodness, NO!
One of the many reasons I do still read newspapers, albeit usually their digital versions, is to get reliable, easy to find reviews of restaurants and books. I don't want reviews of movies because I don't want to know too much going into the theater. Sites like Amazon and Yelp have many, many book and restaurant reviews. My problem with these reviews is the same thing Seth is pointing out - anyone can write them. Let's face it, most people should not write book reviews. Book reviews on Amazon, much like restaurant reviews on Yelp, are often poorly written, hard to follow, irrelevant, boring, the list goes on. Reading through readers' reviews does not save me any time when decided to buy a book, and it may not even help me make that decision.
For a rather fair example, see the reviews of Heat, a really fun book by Bill Buford. Right on the page you can compare the usefulness of a review by Anthony Bordain and those made by readers. I say the example is fair because the readers' reviews aren't the worst examples I could find. One of the reviews begins, "I don't go to restaurants. I don't watch FOOD Channel. I don't even order take-out. I'm just a pizza and burger guy with an occasional side trip to Taco Bell for my veggies. So why was I reading this book?" Please, why am I reading this review? I read reviews in established publishing sources because I know who the writers are and have some reason to trust them. 270 readers on Amazon thought the review that started with that line, about a cooking book, was helpful. That shows me that both the reviews and the people who rate them are not to be trusted when I'm deciding how to spend my book money.
Amazon's statistics about what people buying books I liked, like Heat, also bought are more helpful. Those stats are about user behavior though, not user contributions. Not all reviews are equal. To have more reviews is not necessarily better - it just makes finding the useful ones harder. I have in the pipeline a site that will address that problem for restaurants by aggregating reliable, professional reviews - Food Pilgrim - but for now, I'll just avoid the reader reviews on Amazon and stick to trusting the reviewers at Salon, the NY Times, and my local library.
iPhone’s glass is broken. What to do?
UPDATE: I got my iPhone fixed by Mission: Repair and am very happy. See my review post.
Yes, I dropped my iPhone today. Yes, that drop, from less than 3 feet, cracked the glass. Yes, I wanted to cry.
Now what do I do? I went to the Genuis Bar at the Briarwood Apple Store right away, and they told me, as I expected, that they could get me a replacement iPhone for $299. You read that right. They didn't offer to repair my phone; they offered to replace it, maybe with a refurbished one, for the same price I originally paid. I asked if there were repair options, and they said not with them. Paying $299 would also get me a new warranty that lasts until August. As is, my warranty is void since the break was accidental. So,
Option 1: Pay Apple $299 and hope they give me a new one instead of a refurb.
I looked around online for other options. Since my warranty's void anyway, I'm not that concerned about a warranty-saving repair. This guy's site - http://3gcrackedglass.com - is pretty much right on about repair options and prices. The two sites I see mentioned most often when I search for repair info are iResQ and Mission:Repair. iResQ is supposedly an Apple Authorized repair provider, but they have some service and PR issues. Apparently that particular problem was resolved. So,
Option 2: Pay iResQ $129 or Mission:Repair $137 to fix it and ship it back overnight
Of course, I could always just live with the cracked screen, making
Option 3: Put the iPhone back in its case, and live with a cracked screen.
I had an InCase skin on my iPhone for awhile. I took it off because it made it really hard to get the phone in and out of my pocket. It also made it bulky. Oh, and, I was a little irked at having to pay $30 for an accessory to make the iPhone marginally more durable. The other $300 cell phones I've owned didn't need cases to be durable. If I'd had my case on today, my screen may not have cracked. I take responsibility for dropping my phone. I still think it's ludicrous to offer only replacement and not repair. I get that Apple makes a load more money doing it that way, but the process is infuriating and wasteful.
Mini rant about Apple
In the last 2.5 years, I've spent about $4100 on Apple hardware - 2 laptops and an iPhone. My MacBook required two new logic boards, three new keyboards, and a new hard drive. My MacBook Pro requires new fans and probably a new logic board. None of those 8 repairs were my fault. My laptops have spent about 2 weeks at Apple service facilities and require another 5-7 day stay to fix the fans. My iPhone has worked fine since I bought it in August, but the fact that it cannot withstand a rather routine and expected fall made me furious today. I've been patient with my other Apple hardware. I've sent my computer in for repair and tried to work on my dissertation using backup data and backup computers. I've been through the ringer with their hardware, and I'm exasperated. I don't want to be a whiner, and I don't want to minimize my role in breaking my iPhone. But, I don't think I can recommend Apple products anymore. They either come broken like my MacBook, break almost immediately like my MacBook Pro, or require unreasonable gentleness like my iPhone. At twice the price of comparable laptops and cell phones from competitors, I expected more. Sigh. I'm no longer convinced that the software advantages Apple platforms provide make them worth the hassle or cost. I'm left thinking maybe I should have stuck with my Dell and my BlackBerry.
Oh, and the total cost of ownership for Apple products are even higher. Every laptop needs $30 adapters to work with external monitors, and apparently every iPhone needs a $30 case to protect it. Yes, needs. So add 1.4% to your laptop bill for each adapter you need, and add 15-20% for a case for each iPhone. And those are just the beginning.
Why not Time Machine?
A couple of commenters asked why I use the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! combination instead of just Time Machine. The main reason? Time Machine uses too many resources. It's also slow. For awhile I avoided it because I wasn't sure how to make a bootable backup, but Mac OS X hints has instructions.
I don't always have my external hard drives plugged in since I'm rocking a laptop and am pretty mobile. Time Machine complained every hour, on the hour, that it couldn't find the drive it wanted for long enough to annoy me. Eventually it stops complaining about not being able to find the drive it wants.
Even if you leave the drive plugged in while working at your base location, for me it's my home office, Time Machine sucks up resources to do those intermittent backups. Even when I'm working on my dissertation, my data is not so mission-critical that it needs to be backed up every hour. Mac OS X Hints has a solution for changing the backup interval too.
ChronoSync can do in 39 minutes what it takes Time Machine over an hour to do. SuperDuper! beats the initial setup by about 20 minutes. So, the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! setup saves me resources, time, and headache.
One more thing - I have an Airport Extreme router, and I hang a hard drive off it via USB also. That drive is open to anyone on our home network. Apple's not kidding when they say Time Machine does not support network backups except to Time Capsule. When I tried using Time Machine to backup to that USB drive off the Airport Extreme, it would run my CPU up to about 80% and break many of my network connections. You may have better luck there. I didn't troubleshoot or try to fix it; I just gave up.
I ordered a rocstor ROCRAID from mwave last week, and that should be here on Tuesday. I'll try out RAID storage for my stuff and see how that goes. It has FireWire connections too, and I'm interested to see how much faster that can really be. I really don't want to have to give my laptop to Apple for a week. They won't let me keep the hard drive and send it in with a different one, and they won't give me a loaner. So I paid $2500 to have a laptop 98% of the time. Would I get it 100% of the time if I'd spent $3000? Sorry for the minirant, but having to get my MacBook Pro's fan fixed is what prompted this latest round of backup chatter.
Storing, sharing, editing data
I'm starting a new research project on which I collaborate with two other people, one in Ann Arbor, MI and one in Phoenix, AZ. We use Macs and PCs. We have no budget for software. We're likely to have a bunch of qualitative data to keep track of and share.
My first task is to gather some information on potential participants for our study. I've spent enough time working with databases to prefer them to files and folder structures for these purposes. Databases have advantages in that they can store relational information, can sort data, are easy to search, can be viewed and edited by more than one person at a time, the list goes on. Bottom line, I want a database. I starting by building a Drupal site to keep track of the data about those potential participants - who they are, where they are, how to contact them, how they're related to each other, what my thoughts are about them. I ended up abandoning Drupal to build my own MySQL/PHP website that stores and displays the data; I also built insert and edit pages to ease those data functions.
This is my third try-and-abandon with Drupal. I can understand how Drupal might make maintenance easier for non-technical users, but as a quasi-technical user, Drupal gets in my way at every turn. My MySQL database has 9 tables with 2 - 10 fields. I would have to add all <90 of those fields by hand in Drupal. Then, I'd have to create views to see them and views to edit and views to add/insert. How is that better than just building a PHP site myself? If most of the work is during setup, how does Drupal save any time or frustration at all? It seems like Drupal has taken the command line, coding aspects of building my own database-driven site and replaced them with a convoluted web-based GUI. I'm not sure I see the point or the cost savings there.
The real problem here is not that I still haven't found Drupal useful or advantageous. The problem is that I still don't have a great, easy, usable way to enter, edit, store, and share data with my colleagues. Even after I build this mySQL/PHP site by hand, I'll still have to figure out a way to get the data back out so we can analyze it. That opens a whole host of problems whose current solutions such as NVivo and Atlas.ti are expensive ($240 and $119 for students, respectively). Opportunities abound for helping qualitative researchers capture, store, share, and analyze their data collaboratively. What price point would be appropriate here? If you're a researcher, how much would you be willing to pay for a personalized, secure, web-based data sharing solution? Would anyone else even want such a thing?
Becoming Manifesto-y, Telling Stories
A couple weeks ago, my advisor counseled me to make the research statement I was writing for a job application "more manifesto-y." A few days later, we elected Barack Obama President of the United States, spurring at least one manifesto [story from the Boston Globe]. This week I have watched an embarrassing number of episodes of The West Wing on DVD. The characters on The West Wing are constanting publicly declaring their intentions. Today, my brother sent me a Tom Peters manifesto from ChangeThis. Manifesto seems to be the theme of my life for November.
man⋅i⋅fes⋅to
[man-uh-fes-toh]
–noun, plural -toes. a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization. (from Dictionary.com)
This definition from Dictionary.com seems to be missing some of the "flair" I normally associate with a manifesto. For me, a manifesto is not just any public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, but an energetic, empassioned public declaration. Without passion, it's just a statement.
Why blog this? Well, I'm worked up. My guy won the White House. A close friend wrote something that was entered into the Congressional record and may find a public outlet for other important work. My brother sent me something from non-academic workplace literature that made me sit up and pay attention while I read. President-elect Obama. We millions who voted for him. My friend the policy researcher. Tom Peters. These people made public declarations of their opinions and objectives, and they did so with passion.
It seems silly to compare those actions to the kind of effort my advisor asked me to use in my research statement. I don't think I really understood when she told me to "be more manifesto-y." I definitely improved my statement after that advice, but it did not turn into a research manifesto. It's probably too early in my career for me to be writing research manifestos. After all, I need some political capital in order to get a job. I don't have the protection of tenure to shield me in the event that my manifesto is unpopular.
I don't think my manifesto would be unpopular though. My manifesto would be about doing research that helps us change the world by working together. Research that helps us solve problems like AIDS, bioterrorism, crumbling civil infrastructure, and the uncertainty and pain of starting new careers. Those are the problems the people I study are solving. My research will be useful to them. My research will help us work together better. My research will help us organize our projects so that we can accomplish more together than on our own. My research will help us feel better about our work, about what we can accomplish, about our relationships with our colleagues. My research will enable us to get more from ourselves.
That is the research statement I can make here, on my blog, after regaining hope in my country, after watching my friends do their best to change the world, after reading about how to succeed. I make it here because it's not appropriate for my job packet. I make it here because while reading #17: Work on Your Story in Tom Peters' manifesto, I was reminded of my frustrations about presenting and discussing academic work. Tom Peters claims that "he/she who has the best story wins!" He claims that telling stories is better than simply giving presentations. I am a great story teller. Ask my friends or the people who come to my parties. My friend Caroline, for sure, will vouch for me. I want so much to believe Tom Peters that being a storyteller will help me succeed. The trouble is, I'm not sure my audience can handle it. I'm not sure my conference presentations go over that well when I try to be a storyteller. I know reviewers get frustrated when I don't stick to intro, method, results, discussion and bullet points. I'm pretty sure a hiring committee would rather I send them the statement I did than something like the paragraph before this one.
Am I asking too little of my conference audiences, of those hiring committees? Would I be better off if I showed them the passion I have for the study of collaboration? I'm not sure. I do know I want to be more manifesto-y. The stories about the work I've done and seen could inspire. I don't know who would listen to them though. I don't know what audience would match my energy. The dry, monotonous style of academic publishing, both in print and at conferences, does not lend itself to manifesto. We academics are reserved; sometimes we are cynical. When I'm all worked up like this, that reservation, that cynicism is troubling. I see some value in a cold, passive, rational approach. I do. Just not tonight.
Google Makes My Life Harder
I like my new iPhone a great deal. I especially like good apps. For instance, the Yelp app rocks; it uses the "current location" feature of the iPhone to show me stuff nearby (such as restaurants). And it's Yelp, which I already use a lot, so it includes user-contributed reviews and info. The Yelp app takes something I love and use from the Web and makes it available and awesome on the iPhone. Easy, specialized, familiar, fast, localized, all things I like in a mobile application. Why can't Google do the same?
Google's iPhone versions of Gmail and Google Calendar are awful. I used both on my Blackberry, and I have new issues. First, they are not standalone applications. I have to go through Safari to get to them. That means I don't have a little "new Gmail" icon. I have to manually check my mail to see if there's anything there (or use the built in Mail app which I already mentioned I don't like). Gmail on the iPhone doesn't have a way for me to label messages. Sure, I can archive them to get them out of my inbox, but then they're lost in the "All Mail" ether. I couldn't label them through the Blackberry Gmail app either, so this isn't new, but it's still annoying.
Google Calendar for the iPhone lacks a rather important feature as well - Edit. Seriously? Google, you didn't think I'd want to edit calendar entries on my phone? It's not clear how I can view the "Standard" versions of either Gmail or Google Calendar. Google checks, finds that I'm on an iPhone, and serves up these "apps" that make my life harder. Maybe that's not fair. Maybe they just fail to make my life easier. I want to use my mobile device for mobile email and mobile calendar, and Google is making it hard for me to do that.
I'm hoping that there are features of Gmail and Google Calendar for the iPhone that I just haven't found or enabled properly. I don't want to go through iCal and syncing to get my calendar or through the very un-Gmail-like Mail app. Please help!
Blogging on the bus
It occurs to me, while riding the Microsoft Connector bus (MSFT's private, wireless-enabled buses that shuttle us through a reverse commute between Seattle and Redmond) back to my sublet, that I have changed. When you read what I have to say, you may think that only what I think has changed and that I remain the same. I assure you that’s not the case, but that rather, I have changed, my very being is different now than it was. First, I’ll tell you how I know this is true. I prefer Ann Arbor to Seattle.
That’s right, I admit that I prefer Ann Arbor to a bustling city more than twice its size and complete with public transit, professional sports, excellent restaurants, and a slew of other things I’ve been missing for years. The trouble is, working a “real” job with real hours means I don’t have the time or energy to enjoy these Seattle offerings. At the end of a day like today, what I most want to do is to sit in my yard or one of my friends’ yards, drink a beer, grill some meat, and talk about nothing and everything. If I were really lucky, it would be a grilling night at Bill and Jolie’s or I'd be sitting outside at Zingerman’s.
Ann Arbor and Seattle are the sum of their parts, and right now, I miss Ann Arbor’s parts. I miss my roommates, my yard, my friends, my cats, my home office, my 10 minute commute, my kitchen, my chef’s knife, my fellow social scientists. Sure, Seattle has fresh food, hiking, Microsoft, old friends I haven’t seen in a year or longer, poker rooms, a new and interesting research project, and many other things to recommend it. The trouble is, I made a home in Ann Arbor. I thought I’d made some friends and rented a house, but I made a home. And I miss it.
Snow tires
This morning, I ventured out into the five inches of fresh snow Ann Arbor received overnight. I love snow, and I was happy to go out. My roommate needed to go to work; I "needed" to justify my ownership of a 4x4. For the most part, Ann Arborites do a good job driving on the unplowed streets. Why they (including the main thoroughfare) remain unplowed at 10:15am, I do not understand. Anyway, the drivers were cautious and gave one another enough room to maneuver. The same cannot be said for the cyclists.
Ann Arborites like to ride their bicycles. I'm not into biking, so this doesn't make much sense to me. The seat hurts, the sweat comes fast, locks are expensive, you know, whatever. So Ann Arborites ride bikes. Apparently even in five inches of fresh snow. Trouble is, bikes don't work so well in that much snow. I wish I had video clips to show you of the man on a road bike, without a helmet, heading downhill into a busy intersection where pickup trucks were sliding about 45 degrees off straight. He's a smart one. The other helmet-less biker on Tappan was less likely to get mushed between cars, but he also couldn't stay upright for more than a couple feet. If your bike can't handle snow, and you have no helmet, you should walk. Riding your bike in the snow (more like hopping on and off your bike while you push it forward) doesn't make you look tough; it doesn't make you any more earth-friendly than the people walking by in their snowboots; and it certainly doesn't get you anywhere faster than walking.
So, lessons for today: If Ann Arbor gets five inches of snow, you have no car, and they don't plow the streets, walk or get a ride from your Jeep-driving roommate. Everyone will be safer that way.