Not This Day. Not This Course.

Ever since I ran 20:05 in last October's United Against Domestic Violence 5K I have been thinking about those 6 seconds between my finish time and the satisfaction of running a "sub 20." I know that on the right day, on the right course, I have a sub 20 in me. I keep telling myself I just want one, then I'll be satisfied.

Today I ran the Russell M. Durgin Memorial 5K in Henniker, NH. Sub 20? Not this day. Not this course. I should have known the course would be a significant factor, just based on its starting point - at the parking lot entrance to the Pat's Peak Ski Area. No, the course didn't go up the slopes, but the roads in the area aren't exactly flat. It was an out-and-back course, and there was a nasty hill in the third mile that just killed my time. I ran a 21:31, which was good for 23rd overall (out of 245 finishers listed in the race results) and 8th out of 33 in my division (M40-49).

Bragging rights go to my work running partner, Dan, who finished with a strong 20:33 - 16th overall and 6th out of the 33 in our uber-competitive division. He pulled away from me toward the end of the first mile, and I just didn't have it in me today. Go Dan.

You think I'm kidding about our division being uber-competitive? Five of the top 6 finishers (all but 3rd place) were guys in the M40-49 division. A full one third of the top 30 finishers were from the M40-49 division. And every race is like that. Every once in a while I think I'll be glad when I hit the M50-59 division (which is now a LOT closer than it used to be), except that all these guys are getting older at the same rate as me!

It Shouldn't Be This Hard

I have used Palm devices since the very first Pilot. I love the Palm OS. I love my Treo 650. I'm trying really hard to stay in love, but the BlackBerry Pearl keeps singing that siren song, pulling my thoughts again and again toward going CrackBerry.

Today didn't help.

One of brilliant successes of the Palm OS, in my opinion, has always been the ease and simplicity of HotSync. From the very start, it was brilliant and it just plain worked. Pop your Palm device into its cradle, press the HotSync button, and magic happens. It's always been wonderful magic. And it seamlessly updated my data from the Pilot, to the Palm III, to the Palm V (oh how I loved the sleek design of the Palm V - IDEO design really shined on that one), to the Treo 300, to my current Treo 650. That's 11 years of data transfer across 5 devices.

But lately Hotsync has been a nightmare for me. I sync at work on my work laptop. We use Outlook, and I could never get the Palm Outlook conduit to work, so I have been using the Intellisync conduit with a completely acceptable level of success. Well, at least until I started getting that cryptic error message every time Hotsync started. And then there were the syncs that never ended (until I used Task Manager to kill the process). Oh, and the random Hotsync crashes too.

I never lost any data, but each and every sync was turning into a "hold your breath" moment.

So today I had enough. It took nearly two hours (with the normal office interruptions) to:

• Stop both Intellisync and Hotsync, uninstall them, delete their folders from the disk, and manually remove all traces of them in the registry.
• Download and install Hotsync (Palm Desktop Manager, really).
• Download and install Intellisync.
• Call Intellisync tech support and get them to reactivate my serial number, as it seems the uninstall didn't correctly notify their license tracking system.
• Finish activating Intellisync.
• Download and install the latest Intellisync patch updates (at the suggestion of the very helpful tech support person).
• Uninstall and remove all traces of Hotsync and Palm Desktop again, as I was once again getting some mysterious DLL error, and my address book and memos were certainly not syncing correctly.
• Reinstall Palm Desktop again.
• Install the Intellisync patch update again, partly out of superstitious behavior, but also to get the Hotsync software to know about the Intellisync conduit.

And now finally I am able to sync seamlessly and painlessly again. Ugh. It shouldn't be this hard.

In Command and Out of Control

Maybe I don't get out much, but I just ran across the phrase "in command and out of control" for the first time while reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. I was immediately struck at how well that describes my idea of good management, and the style of management to which I aspire. Here's the paragraph from the book:

Van Riper carried this lesson with him when he took over the helm of the Red Team. "The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control," Van Riper says, echoing the words of the management guru Kevin Kelly. "By that I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn't depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward. Almost every day, the commander of the Red air forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together, using these general techniques of trying to overwhelm Blue Team from different directions. But he never got specific guidance from me of how to do it. Just the intent.

From Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005, page 118

This is clearly a military example, and Van Riper is Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, United States Marine Corps, retired. But even though "command and control", or in the case "in command and out of control" may have military roots, I still find it compelling and highly applicable beyond that context. The phrase fits well with my own mental image of my management style, in which I try to point out where we need to end up, but leave it up to the individuals in my group to chart their own path to the objective.

I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that the management guru is this Kevin Kelly.

Five Essential Design Skills

Last week was CHI 2007 in San Jose, CA. The opening plenary address on Monday was given by Bill Moggridge, one of the founders of IDEO. Bill is also widely known as the industrial designer of the world's first laptop computer (circa 1979).

Much of Bill's talk centered around a list of 5 essential design skills. Bill said the list emerged through several conversations he had with Chris Conley (bio, blog) of the IIT Institute of Design. Here they are (all transcription errors are my own):

1. To frame or reframe the problem or objective.

2. To create and envision alternatives.

3. To select from these alternatives, knowing intuitively how to choose the best approach.

4. To visualize and prototype the intended solution.

5. To synthesize a solution from all of the relevant constraints, understanding everything that will make a difference to the result.

Bill used video clips from the DVD included in his new book, Designing Interactions, to illustrate each point. Brilliant. I have the book (a post on that topic sometime soon, I promise), but probably would never have cracked open the DVD if not for seeing these snips. Hearing Larry Tesler describe the night that Bill Atkinson invented pull-down menus during the development of the Lisa is alone worth the price of admission.

On the Reading Stand

My reading tends to go in spurts of themes, and the Civil War has been the dominant theme over the past few months. Here are the most recent books to pass my reading stand, roughly in order of reading...

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of the battle's major players, including Lee, Longstreet, and Armistead on the Confederate side, and Buford and Chamberlain on the Federal side. The novel shines in many areas, including Chamberlain's holding of the Federal's extreme left flank at Little Round Top, the sheer insanity of Pickett's charge, and the tension between Lee and Longsteet over the right course of action. This novel was also used as the primary source for the 1993 movie, Gettysburg.

Gods and Generals, by Jeff Shaara. Written to be a sort of prequel to his late father's masterpiece, this novel continues Michael Shaara's technique of telling the Civil War story from the perspective of the central figures. Here we start back in 1858 and work up through to 1863, from the points of view of Chamberlain, Hancock, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps not as quite a masterpiece as his father's work, but nonetheless still very enjoyable. I think if I were to do it over again, I'd read this first, then read Killer Angels.

Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, by Stephen Sears. With nearly 23,000 casualties, the Battle of Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American history. We simply cannot imagine this today - twenty three thousand casualties in less than 24 hours. What I most liked about this book was the set up that helps us understand the significance of the battle itself - the political landscape with the threat of Britain and France supporting the war on the Confederate side, the role of the Emancipation Proclamation in stemming that threat to the Union, Lee's march into Maryland, the battle at Harpers' Ferry, and the Union discovery of Lee's Special Order 191 are all well told. The battle itself is told in full detail - at times I thought just a little too much detail. But still - twenty three thousand casualties. Can you imagine?

1776, by David McCullough. What's a Revolutionary War book doing here? I snuck it in because I needed a short, quick read during a recent trip to California. This is an excellent read that goes from the seige of Boston, to the British success in driving the Revolutionary army out of New York City, to, of course, the Battle of Trenton. To me, Washington's growth as a commanding general really came through in McCullough's book. This book should be required reading in every high school history curriculum.

Grant Takes Command, by Bruce Catton. An excellent look at Grant from just before he was given overall command of the Federal forces in 1863 through to end of the war. I'm about half way though this book right now.

Up next... probably David McCullough's John Adams. Yea, yea, I know...back to the Revolution!

Sage Advice - Note from Boss To Employees

I loved Michael Wade's recent Execupundit post, Note From Boss To Employees. After thinking about it for a while, I have one thing to add to his list:

• In the absence of proposals, I will point a way forward. If you have a better idea, then bring it up; don't grumble behind my back. If your idea(s) are better, I'm more than willing to drop mine.

Switching gears just ever so slightly, make sure you read the comments to Michael's post. I'm surprised at the number of petty, sarcastic, and anger-laden responses, although I suppose I shouldn't be. Sigh.

Selected Essays on Software Design

[This post is for Lance-san, who rightfully chided me for starting out with a flurry of posts and then just dropping off the face of the earth. He is right, of course, and I resolve to post more regularly.]

I'm starting up a modest reading effort with the software product designers who report to me. I want to encourage them to read regularly, and I want to ensure that they are aware of what I consider essential readings. I also want them to think more about what it means to be a software designer. Rather than drop a ton of must-read books on them, I thought I would ease them into things with a series of small essays.

Here are the first six that came to my mind. They are all relatively short (most just a few pages in length). They are all thought-provoking (at least to me) and I hope they spur good discussion.

"As We May Think", Vannevar Bush. In The Atlantic Monthly (July, 1945). By far the oldest essay on my list, but essential and inspiring reading. Bush introduces the idea of associative linking, which we see played out today in the Web, 30 years before the invention of the personal computer and 50 years before the Web as we know it. I argue that Bush's essay represents the beginning of the field of Human-Computer Interaction, but I also find it compelling that Bush's essay places our work in a human, social, and moral context - Bush was specifically asking what scientists should do next, after the close of World War II. How will scientists (or engineers, or designers) "find objectives worthy of their best"? Powerful stuff.

"A Software Design Manifesto", Mitch Kapor. In Bringing Design to Software (Winograd, 1996). This essay was first given as a talk at Esther Dyson's PC Forum in 1990, and it first appeared in print in Dr. Dobbs Journal in 1991. Kapor's essay represents a call to arms for a software design profession, and draws a strong parallel between software design and architecture.

"The Right Way to Think About Software Design", Theodor Holm Nelson. In The Art of Human- Computer Interface Design (Laurel, 1990). Nelson's essay draws an analogy between software design and movie-making; the interactive nature of both are key concepts. I liken user interface specifications to movie scripts, and prototypes to rehersal.

"The Designer's Stance", an interview with David Kelley by Bradley Hartfield. In Bringing Design to Software (Winograd, 1996). David Kelley is the founder of IDEO. This interview is a nice short into to Kelley's ideas, and should whet any designer's appetite for reading The Art of Innovation, written by David's brother Tom Kelley.

"Cultures of Prototyping", Michael Schrage. In Bringing Design to Software (Winograd, 1996). This essay discusses the importance of prototyping to creativity and innovation, and draws on examples from the automotive and consumer electronics industries. This essay plays well with my opinion that software design needs to be much more like industrial design, and that we place far too much emphasis on "specs" as the primary deliverable of product designers.

"Designing the PalmPilot: A Conversation with Rob Haitani", an interview with Rob Haitani by Eric Bergman. In Information Appliances and Beyond (Bergman, 2000). Rob Haitani was the Product Manager for the original PalmPilot, and is widely credited with being in charge of the design of the PalmOS user interface. As a Palm user from the very first PalmPilot, I'm an unabashed PalmOS fan. This interview, the longest reading so far at 20 pages, is a fascinating look at the design process and design for the small screen.

I'll start with these essays, but if you have any suggestions to add to me list, please let me know. I suspect I may find a number of interviews to add to my list from Designing Interactions, the new book (2007) out by Bill Moggridge. What else should I add to my list?