“The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande
The quick summary would be “checklists keep you from screwing up the easy stuff so you can focus your wit, experience, and creativity on the hard stuff. This was a surprisingly interesting book; especially the case studies where simple checklists have made tremendous enhancements to health, safety, quality, and financial outcomes.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my Voxer Walkie Talkie app appearing in the New and Noteworthy section of the iTunes App Store. The app has been around for 18 months so I guess we’re not new—must be noteworthy!
In case you hadn’t heard me blathering about it on Twitter…the app that I’ve been working on the past two years, Voxer Walkie-Talkie, is the #1 app in the social networking category of the iTunes app store (Facebook is #2). Voxer is also #1 in the Communications category of the Android Market.
It’s nice to be working on a hit again. It’s been a while.
With the America’s Cup World Series and the Volvo Ocean Race going on right now there is a tremendous amount of exciting sailing footage to watch. The ACWS is a series of in-port races designed to build interest in the America’s Cup as a spectator sport. Although the VOR is a race around the globe, there are a series of in-shore races at each way-point. The difference in how these two organizations have approached the television graphics for the races is like night and day.
Let’s check out the Volvo crew’s Live Eye virtual reality presentation:
Wow, virtual haze, and virtual city behind the virtual boats. At least the virtual water is more or less the right shade of virtual blue. This is the same style of graphic display that professional yacht racing has been using since forever. These types of displays evolved because yacht racing typically took place offshore and this was just the only thing you could do to show folks back on shore what was going on. It’s boring as hell, and there is no reason to resort to this sort of thing for an in-shore race that is blanketed with live footage from helicopters and chase boats. This sterile showing of stuff that isn’t the actual race just promotes the idea that the spectators are not really part of what is going on, that the race is not for them. This display doesn’t even give the poor viewer any real information. The teal boat is in front, the black boat is next, and the red after that. How much space is between them? How big is the time difference between them? If you were a fan you could tell that these boats represent Telefonica, PUMA, and Camper—but if you’re new to the sport, or just flipping channels and happen to see it, there’s nothing there to draw you in.
Now, compare that to the work that Stan Honey is doing with his LiveLine system.
LiveLine is way more live than Live Eye. Here we’ve got an incredible augmented reality display on top of live race video from a helicopter. We can see the distance between the leaders, which leg of the race it is, the track each boat has been following. We can see national flag for each team, and the team’s name. We can see the (yellow) lay lines, and the rounding gates. Very importantly, we can see the approach circles around the gates (the rules change slightly inside those circles). We see the (red) course boundaries. It’s phenomenal.
As one boat is overtaking another you can watch the distance counter wind down—100m, 90m, 80m, …—and you get excited wondering if he’ll really pass. You can get all jingoistic watching your country’s flag overtake some other country’s flag. If you’re a racing sailor you have so much info that you can really geek out on watching the fine details of a race the same way a baseball junkie tracks the game stats. More importantly, you see the real boats. You also see spectator boats right there against the coarse boundaries. In a lot of the footage you can see actual human spectators going nuts on shore—a shoreline that is just a few hundred meters away, and not three miles offshore like the last America’s Cup was. Seeing this presents the event as a spectator sport. It makes for interesting TV.
Also, as a software developer myself, I have immense respect for the LiveLine team for the ridiculous amount of 21st century technology they have in their system. That is some seriously hard work. Meanwhile, Live Eye is on par with what video games about boats were doing over a decade ago. (screenshot from Sid Meier’s Pirates!)
I always try to buy meat in bulk, you get way better pricing that way. Storage can be quite a problem though. Normally I vacuum seal portions for a full meal using a FoodSaver sealer. It’s a bit time consuming though since the film comes in long rolls and you first have to seal one end to make a bag, then vacuum and seal the other end. It takes a good 2 minutes or so for each portion. It’s a great product though, and I love it. The heavy film last forever in the freezer and it really does the best job of all the home sealers I’ve tried.
But, you know, sometimes you just want to do one little bit really quickly. I got really excited when I saw that Ziploc came out with their own vacuum freezer system. They have a special line of their freezer bags that have a one-way valve in the corner. I got the starter kit (which includes the pump and three quart-sized bags) and tried it out tonight on a chicken breast. The whole process was about five seconds. I’m thrilled.
It now suddenly makes sense to quickly vacuum seal left-overs, or a partially-eaten piece of fruit, or lunches that you’re packing, etc. Heck, I can even see using it to seal up small toiletries and such so that they’re not banging around in bags when out for the day.
I give this product a definite thumbs-up.
If you are foolish enough to watch the new show Terra Nova, you may be interested in this drinking game I’ve invented. It will likely make the show more enjoyable.
If you see a scene that is a direct rip-off of Blade Runner, Earth 2, Jurassic Park, 12 Monkeys, Stargate, the Riddick cycle, The Lost Boys, Gattica, or any British dystopian sci-fi show of the last 40 years: Drink.
If you find characters directly ripped off from same: Drink.
If that character has the same name as the one they’re ripping off: Drink twice.
If that character is played by the same actor as the one they’re ripping off: Drink thrice.
Any time a child exhibits science/technology skills far beyond their years: Drink.
Any time the ratio of injured/killed brown to injured/killed white people exceeds 2.0: Drink.
Any time an episode breaks for commercial, or ends with a character-developing or foreshadowing one-off line: Drink.
Any time a vehicle is outside the gates at night (when the deadly creatures are most active) but doesn’t have doors to protect the passengers: Drink.
Any time a character hints that they know a secret: Drink.
Any time they show bogus survival skills (such as a spark igniting a whole-log camp fire): Drink and weep.
You can really just pick 2-3 of these categories and get good and schnockered. Play with the full set of rules and you will likely have to take the following two days off work.
The America’s Cup World Series concluded its racing in Plymouth, England this morning with a fleet race win by Oracle 4′s Jimmy Spithill.
The wind all morning was in the high 20s, gusting over 30—tough conditions for the AC45 catamarans. One sail racing website described this race as “plenty of high drama and antics“. The official race commentator dubbed today “Survival Sunday”. Collisions and capsizes before the start, more collisions and capsizes during the race. Artemis Racing’s bowman, Andy Feathers, fell through the wing sail of their boat on their final capsize. Mayhem!
And what did winning skipper, Jimmy Spithill, have to say about the day?
“We had a bit of San Francisco conditions.”
The extreme racing conditions they saw in Plymouth are kind of what people expect from races in San Francisco bay. We had identical conditions for 4 days during the Rolex Big Boat Series regatta which marked the end of our fleet’s racing season. Compare the recap above with this montage from our end-of-season regatta.
Different kind of boats involved, but everything else looks pretty much the same—mayhem. I can’t wait for next season.
Back in March I wrote about how important it is to have a good narrator for an audiobook. I’m here to tell you that it still matters.
I recently got sucked into George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I saw the HBO series based on the first book and liked the characters so I decided to get the books to find out how it all ends up. Per usual, I got audiobooks. I throw them on my iPhone and play them at 2x speed and listen while I’m going to/from work, or doing chores, or whatever.
The narrator for the first three books in the series is Roy Dotrice. The man is a great voice actor. This series has a ridiculous number of characters spread out over many lands. He did a fabulous job of giving each region an accent, and giving each character a distinct voice. Absolutely fantastic. Not that it matters, but the guy also looks the part!
For reasons unknown the producers switched to a different voice actor for book four, “A Feast of Crows”. This narrator is John Lee. He is terrible! The guy has one delivery for everything. Everyone sounds the same. When there are scenes with a lot of rapid back-and-forth dialog I can’t tell who’s talking. It’s driving me nuts. To make it worse, this recording is 31 hours long.
I constantly wonder why it is that producers make choices like this. If you read the reviews of this recording you find that it is universally hated by everyone. The whole fan base who got the audiobook is begging for it to be re-released with Roy Dotrice narrating. Ugh.
Fortunately Roy returns as the narrator for book five (and hopefully any future books).
p.s. In my first post on narrators I mentioned that the absolute best narration of all time was Rob Inglis’ reading of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Silmarillion”. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was when I got a comment from someone who had been one of the proofers for Recorded Books who worked on those editions. Wow. I really wish I could have seen one of his one-man stage performances of the books.
“The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.”
—General Sir William F. Butler, “Charles Gordon”, MacMillan, 1889
Old Tongue
by Jackie Kay
Life Mask, Bloodaxe Books, 2005
When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit
stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!
My own vowels started to stretch like my bones
and I turned my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared in the dead of night,
new words marched in: ghastly, awful,
quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go —
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try and call it back
like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
swallowed them whole, knocked them back.
Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil.
I cried one day with the wrong sound in my mouth.
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Singsongy. I wanted to gie it laldie.