Do it again!

U2’s Mission to Save Music!

For the second time in the band's history, U2 is on the cover of TIME magazine. The September 29, 2014, issue features a black-and-white photo of the band with the headline: The New U2 - The Veteran Rock Band Faces The Future.

Apple and U2 are giving the new album Songs of Innocence to over 500 million iTunes customers worldwide. Never before have so many people owned one album, let alone on the day of its release.

U2 was also on TIME's cover in 1987 when the magazine called the band Rock's Hottest Ticket. And Bono got the cover in 2002 and 2005.

Programming takes time!

One thing people who don't do development don't easily understand is that the time spent doing something repetitively is how you figure out how it works. So when users ask for features that are needed early in the life of a product, for example, where fotodesignarri is now, while I recognize there's a need to simplify and automate the design process for end users, for me as a designer, the repetition of redoing the programming is how I figure out how to address the issue of user enabled web design.

I can't tell you how many times I've programmed quick fixes in the last 30 years, and then had to live with those foolish decisions for years afterwards. Two years later when people ask why it works that foolish way, I have to say it's because I delivered too quickly. I'm now working again on something I've already done half a dozen times over the last two years. This time, I see how to organize it. The other 7 times I was fumbling around in the dark. How long did this take? In this case -- 3 years. But I did wait. So now I'm fairly confident I have the right answer.

Hold on...

Sitting outside a street cafe in Konstanz the other afternoon a street musician (from Budapest as it turned out) with just an accoustic guitar set up and sang a 10 minute version of this REM song even better than Andrea Corr here. An amazing five minute interlude in a busy street.

We all have things going on in our lives that try to drag us down, make us hurt, or tear us apart. But as Winston Churchill said, if you're going through Hell...keep going. To put it another way, the way out is through. Keep your heads up, your hopes high, and never give up no matter how rough the road looks ahead, you'll make it. You are not alone. 

1966, The Beatles final concert..

..was this evening 48 years ago.

Although they made an unannounced live appearance in January 1969 on the rooftop of the Apple building in London, The Beatles' final live concert took place on 29th August 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California.

The Park's capacity was 42,500, but only 25,000 tickets were sold, leaving large sections of unsold seats. Fans paid between $4.50 and $6.50 for tickets, and The Beatles' fee was around $90,000.

The compère was 'Emperor' Gene Nelson of KYA 1260 AM, and the support acts were, in order of appearance, The Remains, Bobby Hebb, The Cyrkle and The Ronettes.

The show began at 8pm. The Beatles took to the stage at 9.27pm, and performed 11 songs: Rock And Roll Music, She's A Woman, If I Needed Someone, Day Tripper, Baby's In Black, I Feel Fine, Yesterday, I Wanna Be Your Man, Nowhere Man, Paperback Writer and Long Tall Sally.

Of which my favourite today would be Nowhere Man (Here from Munich in 1966).

Steve's Birthday

Happy Birthday! Imagine a time when songs about angst, misunderstanding and broken relationships become obsolete in a world where people said the right things, kept their promises and happiness became so common that it would hardly be worth a song! (There would be one less thing to discuss however.)





And the hard part isn't merely thinking of ideas. Yes, it's hard to sit with a bunch of amateurs and discuss the script that took months to finish, and hard to get it made and hard to get the first one distributed.


But the truly hard part is, 15 years later, sticking with it long enough for it to actually work.

Field of Dreams

Fairy tales and hero stories follow similar patterns: the good win, the bad lose, and people who do the right thing get prizes. These rules are pleasant, easy to remember, and have been with us as long as we’ve had stories to tell.

Applied to business, the myth that goodness wins is best captured in the famous saying, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” It’s sometimes paraphrased as “If you build it, they will come,” the iconic phrase from the baseball film Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, the quote is a misattribution to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading 19th-century american intellectual.

What he actually said was probably, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, you will find a broad, hard beaten road to his house.” I’m not sure when you last sold pigs or grew corn, but Emerson had something other in mind than rallying would-be entrepreneurs to get in the innovation game. The phrase was meant to be poetic, not instructional, and he’d be disappointed at how many people have taken his words literally. The phrase has been used as the entrepreneur’s motto, misguiding millions into entertaining the notion that a sufficiently good idea will sell itself.

It’s not going to happen. These days, the best equivalent to the metaphoric mousetrap is “to build a better web site,” proven by the 30,000 software patents and 1 million web sites created annually. Certainly not all of these efforts are motivated by wealth or wishful thinking, but many programmers still hope that the “If you build it, they will come” sentiment is alive and strong.

And HTML5 and JavaScript are far from the best software development languages, yet they’re perhaps the most successful in history. Even today, right now, ideas of all kinds that experts criticize are gaining adoption.

Reminder to myself

What's it for and How will we know if it works?

Answer these two questions first, please. If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing the answers before you do it.

A hammer is for getting nails into wood, and it's pretty easy to tell if it does the job well. That's one reason why we have so many good hammers in the shops -real clarity about what it's for, and whether it works or not. Too often, we wait until we see what something does before we decide what we built it for.

(Examples: what's a receptionist for? Cat food? Life insurance?)