The art of art
the glory of expression
and the
sunshine of the light of letters
is simplicity
I like reading history – particularly personal history and biography. So it was wonderful to meet J. Gordon Mumford a couple of weeks ago during a family trip to Burnaby Village Museum.
Mumford served in the British Merchant Marine during WWII. Joining up at age 17, he was shipwrecked twice: once by torpedo, once by mine. The Black Pit … and Beyond is his painfully honest story of those first few years.
The “black pit” was that swatch of ocean in which convoys could not be protected by aerial reconnaissance from either Iceland or the UK … and was therefore the playground of the U-boats and the most dangerous part of the voyage from Canada or the US to Great Britain.
When I met Gordon, I had to think of that proverb that when an old person dies, a library is destroyed – he’s definitely getting on, and signed the book in the spidery scrawl that people resort to when their fine motor skills are abandoning them. But at least in Gordon’s case, this and his four other autobiographical books will ensure that the library lives on.
Moshe Safdie spoke at TED in 2002, saying a few words about a number of his compositions, and concluding with some words on beauty and truth. It’s worth 15 minutes of your time to watch:
The thing that strikes me most as I watched was how big he dreamed. Science centre not connected to nature? Route the river around it, and make an island! Memorial building too big for mountain? Cut right through the mountain, and embed the architecture into the earth!
Amazing and wonderful.
I’ve come to believe that marketing is easy.
This perhaps somewhat astonishing idea came to me as I was leafing through some personal archives as I search for just the right items to place on my new portfolio site. Some of my company’s old brochures are in the box, and I remember the struggle we went through at times to find the right words, present the right image, frame the right message.
All of that could have been so such simpler … if we had just built our product with more compelling points of differentiation.
Products with compelling points of differentiation sell themselves. Not that you don’t have to do the marketing, create awareness, sell the idea, and all that. But they write their own story.
A good example is the iPhone. If you’ve seen any of the ads, you know the deal. An iPhone ad never says buy me, or iPhone is better than X phone, or heaven forbid, the either of the words “solution” or “device.” All an iPhone ad does is show you capabilities and possibilities. The rest of the pitch happens inside your own head.
The marketing, in other words, ought to be embedded in the product.
I love my iPhone, but it is not without its warts.
One of them, unfortunately, is an extremely annoying “hanging email” issue: you want to check your email, the Mail app checks for mail … and never, ever finds any, or stops.
This was happening for the past week, so I decided to delete my email accounts (easy enough and unproblematic when they’re IMAP) and re-create them. No lunch.
Finally today I found this article on FreeIphoner.com, where an improbably-named “Fred Bloggs” posted this:
go into the email app, watch it sit there ‘checking for mail’ and just hold down the main/home button for 6 seconds.
shuts the app down. problem solved.
I had the same issue
I knew how to shut down misbehaving apps, but never connected the never-connecting email with a hung app … particularly after a number of recharge and sleep cycles.
I finally put up a portfolio and resume site: JohnKoetsier.com:
It’s one of the most elementary elements of personal SEO, and while I’ve had the domain for some time now, I’ve only now filled in a personal resume and started loading up a portfolio.
The page is far too basic at the moment, but at least the content is there. Style will come.
Complaints are too easy – I like to blog raves as well as rants.
I’ve just received excellent, above-and-beyond, unexpected great services from two class organizations: Blurb, and the Nielsen Norman Group.
Blurb recently printed the book I did for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. A number of books arrived with scratches. I emailed them, they asked for a photo, I emailed a photo back, and they immediately shipped out new copies.
Nielsen Norman Group publishes usability studies, among other things. I ordered a downloadable product from them, not realizing it was only part of a study and not terribly useful on its own. Upon getting and reading through the study – and realizing that it was not what I needed – I emailed customer service. They immediately refunded my money, and asked me to delete the PDF from my computer, which I did.
Simple, fast, helpful.
In both cases: wow and thanks. You exceeded my expectations.
We went to my sister’s place yesterday where we were having a family party for my nephew Jacob, who was turning 14. The place was lousy with iPhones.
Naturally, since I’m the technical one in the family, I was immediately pressed into duty helping everyone figure out everything they wanted to know about how to use their iPhone. But it was fun.
You know something is going mainstream when suddenly your entire family starts buying it …
I’m sitting outside my Bellingham office for lunch, wondering if summer is starting to end …
The wind is intense today, and some leaves are starting to fall.
Here’s one that I captured with my iPhone’s camera before it touched down.
I just let the kids watch Gever Tulley’s video 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kid Do. One of them is driving your car.
Immediately Aidan, our 5 year old, asked if he could drive my car tomorrow. I said no, maybe on Saturday, though. Right away he went off to Teresa and told her that Daddy had said that he could drive the car on Saturday.
When that statement was greeted with a somewhat strained silence, he added with great assurance: “it’s perfectly illegal!”
Here’s the video. Enjoy!
[ update August 21 ]
So I did it – I let Aidan (5) and Ethan (8) drive my Mini. Kind of gave my heart a good workout.
I found a nice parking lot, let them sit in the driver’s seat (I actually had to sit behind them) and drive the car. Ethan freaked me out when he pushed the gas pedal hard, but fortunately we were still in Park. Of course, they loved it, and maybe we’ll try it again sometime … in a decade or so.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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