there are 7 posts from April 2008

April 30, 2008

pandering just doesn't describe it

I’m sure this is linked all over the place today, but the lede of Friedman’s column in the Times on the “gas tax vacation” is worth quoting at length.

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Dear lexipeople – I think we need a stronger word than “pandering” to describe what politicians do with absurd and ridiculously shortsighted proposals like this. I’m imagining something that combines themes of prostitution, crack addiction and, say, pant suits.

April 30, 2008

i miss my keyboard shortcuts

There’s very little motivation for Microsoft to do this, but oh how much would I love to have all the keyboard shortcuts for menu and dialog navigation be available in Excel 2008 for the Mac that were available in Office for Windows? Being forced to mouse around in Excel to do simple things like insert a row is absolutely infuriating, when in pre-switch times it would be a split second alt-I-R away. Not having these available is turning my trust swiss army knife of business computing into a dull, oversized butter knife.

(Oh, and have I told you lately that when I start a band it will be called Alabaster Whine? Wanna join? I’m looking for a bass player.)

April 25, 2008

chefs and kitchen design

Metropolis has a great piece where some of the country’s best chefs – including Alice Waters, Grant Achatz and Wylie Dufresne – talk about their kitchens. Here’s a snippet from Waters on Chez Panisse…

Architects really need to think about all the waste a restaurant creates. That relates completely to an important part of the restaurant – welcoming the suppliers into the kitchen. I’m obsessed with the fact that the back of the house has to be as beautiful as the front.

And Achatz on the process of designing the Alinea kitchen…

When I had the opportunity to build my own kitchen, I thought, Hey, let’s wipe our heads clean of conventional kitchen design. I’d worked at the French Laundry, Charlie Trotter’s, Trio, so of course I grew up in kitchens, and it shocked me that they were all kind of designed the same. Everyone followed each other.

I felt like nobody really looked at the food, which was a great irony of kitchen design. No one really looked at the style of cooking they were going to do and designed the kitchen around that. We were like, “Let’s really look at the food and decide, based on the style of cooking, what we need. What do we need as far as equipment? What do we need as far as space?”

April 22, 2008

context-free words...

…offered for no particular reason, other than they just crossed the transom of attention for some odd reason.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Forster, of course, from Howard’s End. Advice so powerful that it probably doesn’t even belong in the advice category but should instead be filed under “ignore at your own peril.”

April 17, 2008

upside down and backwards

A hallway at the San Francisco Tennis Club has a bunch of early photographs of San Francisco, including this one (snapped with my iPhone; apologies for the perspective and quality) of the west side of The Embarcadero in 1913.

Owl

What I love about this photo (and it’s probably hard to see here) is the billboard for Owl Cigars, with the reversed mirror image type. When you quickly walk by the photo of the billboard you do a double take, and I spent a few minutes confirming that this wasn’t some weird artifact of the photo itself. (The photo didn’t appear to be doctored at all.) The effect of this as a massive billboard must have been something. I’m no student of outdoor advertising, but while I can definitely remember plenty of instances of seeing trompe-l’oeil effects in billboards, I don’t think I’ve seen something as “simply stunning” in a long time.

My colleague Sean Williford pointed out that The Standard Hotels does something related with their logo, turning their simple typeface upside down.

Thestandard-hotel

I love both of these – simple twists that force the casual observer to stop, spend a bit more time processing what they’re seeing and become memorable because of their simplicity. That said, if everyone started flipping their type around, everyday life would be more than a bit annoying.

Who else has done this kind of thing well?

April 08, 2008

My coworkers have great toys

Combining the two huge passions of my childhood, Speed Racer and Legos. It’s like a little slice of heaven.

April 06, 2008

not quite genius but really nice and helpful

I had my first experience with the Apple really-nice-and-helpful-people bar last week, and while this is probably old news to those who have been through this before, I found a few things notable…

  1. The web component of the experience couldn’t have been easier. As I remember it, registration was optional, just pick a store, a desired time window and they return the options avaiable. And after I was through the post-experience satisfaction survey was under five questions long and took maybe 90 seconds to complete from email click to final submit. 
  2. Telling them what your problem was ahead of time was completely optional. No questions about what product or what year you bought it or what your problem was or whether you had tried the obvious things (like power cycling or resetting or restoring or whatever.)  In addition to the obvious customer-friendliness, this means that they’re not relying on their customers for any data capture about the problems that require trips to the bar. They must be capturing this data, though, which mean they’re pushing that to the people who can best characterize and report the problems – the bartenders themselves. (I still refuse to call them Geniuses.  I mean, c’mon.)
  3. They swapped my phone with a “replacement part” they had in stock. The touchscreen on my iPhone had fritzed (not completely dead, but still completely useless).  After a knowing “yeah, seen this a bunch,” they replaced it with a new device – not one in an original box, mind you, but one in a “phone only” box with a replacement part SKU number on it. Given the recent stories about iPhone inventory levels dropping to the point where a bunch of Apple stores don’t have them in stock, it very well could be a reconditioned phone. But it looks new (shiny!) and it works, so whatever.
  4. Look out line-waiters; your warranty expires soon. The iPhones have a year warranty on them, right?  It’ll be interesting to see what happens in similar circumstances in a few months when the folks who paid the early adopter tax have to take their devices in for service after the warranty’s up?  Those’ll be some interesting white whine blog posts, esp. if they’ve gone 3G by then. 

Oh, and for future reference, the guys behind the counter at the Apple store in Naples, FL are super nice. And yeah, I had a great vacation, even though it did include a trip to the really-nice-and-helpful-people bar. Thanks for asking!