it’s All Around Podcast 002: The Big Box, a response
This is a response to The Diary of a Cartoonist Episode 144, in which Scott Johnson muses on the common controversy surrounding WalMart. I recommend you listen to his podcast (~10 minutes long) before you listen to this response.
For me, the issue isn't about the free market vs. regulation or capitalism vs socialism, it's about human behavior. The rise of WalMart is perhaps the clearest example of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time.
The presence of WalMart, especially in already underprivileged areas, extracts wealth out of communities and destroys all sorts of jobs while offering only sub living wage, short term labor.
Ultimately, people are driven to act against their best interests because they are either lack education or aren't paying attention.
In the end WalMart is here to stay, along with many other monopolistic victors of capitalism. But, as individuals, we shouldn't justify their existence on this fact alone.
Let me know what you think
Relaxing with some fonts
Hey everyone. I'm on vacation in FL, it's night time, I sat down for some aimless websurfing / massaging the rough edges of some of my projects. After getting a couple of timely things done, I followed the path of least resistance and found myself surfing for typesets and fonts. I like to think of myself as an all around web guy who is strongly skewed toward the tech angle, but my little experience in design has lead to me a tremendous respect and fascination with those who can pull off what is impossible for me with seeming ease and grace. Fonts and typesets are dead center on this. I have a special love for exploring the vast landscapes of typesets and reading what font bloggers have to say about them because they are a tool I don't know how to use. Their examples are like walking into a woodshop and watching the carpenter use a dove-tail guide for the first time. Here are a bunch of fonts that look nice but kind of similar. Apply this one the the heading in this size, this one to the body text at this opacity and BAM. Emminently readable and beautiful prose.
I found the most interesting personality here: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
He works part time for typekit (http://typekit.com/), which seems to be a great typesetting product. One line of code on your pages allows you to use a dashboard to control your fonts. The actual fonts themselves are stored on Typekit's servers, for which they guarantee 100% uptime.
Ethics and action in an open community
The community of open software and design is an amazing thing. I am frequently awed by it. It makes my way of life possible. I find a beauty in engaging it and a special kind of joy in giving back to it.
The thing that's striking me at the moment is that it is an example of an economic system that works. It is a model where everyone involved can get more than they can give. No, this doesn't violate the precepts of thermodynamics. This is a case where the product created by one person or group can be distributed to thousands or millions with no fee for mutual benefit. (There is an economic thesis here, but that is for another day.)
At face value, it looks like the community is 99% pirates and trolls and 1% geniuses. Actually, the ratio is even more extreme, when you do the math of software uploads, updates, etc... vs downloads. I, personally, have downloaded far more then I've ever given back. This is not for lack of trying, however. I've been active in forums, tried briefly at participating in developer communities and even tried to launch my own open source project.
Sometimes I feel like a draw on the system. Then I come across another resource that shows how the entire model only exists because of people like myself. Today, that site was this:
http://www.mac-developer-network.com/category/columns/artoftheproduct/
Talk about Txting
The census numbers are in. The results are staggering and disturbing. People are... sending text messages.
It is always entertaining to watch a behavior such as text messaging develop over years, firmly embed itself in culture then all the sudden bust into the media. Recently, we've had a one-two punch of no-texting-while-driving legislation and census figures. Pundits have gone mad with opinion and analysis.
As with most new trends, the general feel that's being cultivated around the media's latest insight into humanity is one of apprehension and fear. I understand where this protectionist mindset comes from, because I feel it to. But I think it's rather dumb because it doesn't comprehend that this is a new form of communication that is evolving as people use it. It hasn't played itself out yet.
I, for one, am more excited to see a decade down the road what we're going to be doing with texting and other new forms of communication than I am afraid of what it is doing to us.
Streamlining the Renewable Energy Sales Process
The complexity of the economic and technical factors, and the difficulty to model then present them to clients, is the greatest limiting factor to the adoption of renewable energy solutions by new customers. There are three steps that a renewable energy sales and installation company can take to significantly increase their efficiency in this area and close more projects:
- Develop a project model that encompasses all economic factors (such as the cost of materials, labor and incentive packages) and technical factors (design and installation factors from the engineering side).
- Employ a software solution that allows you to analyze models based on specific project details and run bounded linear analyses to maximize and/or minimize factors that are important for that client.
- Incorporate that modeling software into your proposal generation and client management workflow.
Economics and Technology and the Sales Process
A variety of economic factors including rebates, incentives, costs savings and inflation protection are the driving force in the vast majority of successful renewable energy projects. The ability to quickly develop and adjust economic and technical models is the key to showing a client the specific factors that make them an ideal candidate and the broader scope of a proposed investment. In order to do this, engineering and sales departments must work together to develop a two way model that will allow salespeople to adjust models without significant reengineering.
Selling renewable energy should be as simple as saying, “installing solution x will cost you this today, allow you to claim tax-rebate y, and produce $z of power each year, so…” Unfortunately, it’s seldom clear upfront which economic factors will be most appealing to a client. One client may be more interested in a quick ROI, while another may be looking for a maximized return over thirty years. One may be extremely motivated by non-economic pressures while another may be more patient and want to wait for a specific incentive to reappear. Some may be interested in maximizing the resale value of their installation while others may be interested selling back to the grid and focus on cost per kWh.
Each customer requires reforming the project model to maximize or minimize particular factors while setting constraints on others. For example, “what’s the best ROI you can offer for a system that outputs at least 500 kW on a given rooftop that has to begin during the next six months?” Without a coherent model that incorporates all of the technical and economic factors, this process can be extremely time consuming and costly. Meanwhile, the client may be speaking to other companies or allocating their funds to other areas of their budget.
With a solid model and a software package to calculate it, a sales team could confidently answer this in a few moments. Further, clients are often reluctant to give salespeople the full picture upfront, which means that a series of proposals, each designed to take into account a newly disclosed factor, are often required to close a single project.
Attaining and Keeping the Competitive Advantage
The ability to quickly issue and reissue proposals that directly address the specific wants and needs of your clients will give you the upper hand competitively and allow your team to reach out to more potential clients.
The first step is to create a sound operating model that describes your sales and installation process. Sounds simple, but as with all things that should be easy, there are countless complexities. A company’s model is shaped by everything from its relationships with vendors, to the geological and political landscape of the area to the skills and personalities of the team. The real work in creating this model is the work of developing a clear, systematic and comprehensive understanding of your business. The model should be organized into constants that will affect all projects, such as material and labor costs, and variable factors such as kWh, ROI and incentive packages. You may also want to create different models for various customer types, such as commercial, residential, preferred, etc…
The second step is to implement a software modeling solution that will allow you to quickly analyze scenarios and produce client proposals. At the outset of a potential project, the sales and engineering teams can use the tool as a central repository for all the information for the project. For example, the sales team enters the max budget and other factors. The engineering team inspects the site and determines that they have this much workable area and can support the following hardware options. Once these baseline factors are entered, various scenarios can be run for the initial proposed project. The sales team can then proceed to work with the client to refine the plan, providing multiple scenarios with complete projections with very little effort. In situations where the engineering team would have to verify that a scenario is indeed doable, the information is clearly presented there for them to sign off upon.
The final step is to integrate the software solution into the proposal generating and client management workflow. Clients react best to professional, branded proposals, that both clearly lay out the information in a simple narrative form and contain detailed appendices providing enough information to satisfy their diligence. Your model should include many individual values with units as well as detailed tables that project production and economic factors out over the life of the system. Copying and pasting these variables from a model generator into an office document is both time consuming and error prone. Integration with you client management workflow will likewise save much time and prevent error for sales teams dealing with large lists of leads.
David Erwin
Partner, Powersimple LLC
Honorary Board Member, Solairo Energy
December, 2009
Lua Basics
I was asked by a colleague to research the Lua programming language. We are creating interactive television apps and will be using it if/when we develop for Verizon Fios.
Lua is a meta language. It does little but call apps and code from other languages. It is extremely small, fast and extensible, allowing developers a lot of flexibility in creating precise structures to model concepts.
It's only reason for existing is to allow developers to work within systems such as cable boxes, games, other apps. For example, Verizon's Widgets are 'written in Lua'. In actuality, none of the actual functionality in the set top boxes is in Lua (looks like it is EBIF). Lua is used as a layer to access the EBIF functions, routines, etc... So what you get is a Lua toolkit that allows verizon to expose any functionality they want developers to have while not allowing any access to lower level box functions. Since Lua is open source, this also boils down to Verizon allowing developers to work on their ebif platform (which, as we know is closed and hard to get in to) using a widely available and open scripting language.
Bubble Timer
If you do anything that involves time, such as living, and have ever had the inclination to 'spend time' more wisely, etc..., check out Bubble Timer. The concept is simple, by tracking how much time you spend on things, you can analyze your habits as data and find concrete, practical ways to improve your use of your time going forward. Then, you can see how you've improved and improve your improvment, ad infinitum.
"Wait," you say (you being me), "there's no way I'll use it. The very factors that undermine my foundation will just undermine my efforts to track it." Not so hasty. That you said this is a sign that Bubble Timer is for you. The happy folks at Bubble Timer have made a very slickapp that makes tracking time as fun as poking at bubbles. So, from the depths of your darkest hours of blocked workage and frustrated communication, you can emerge as your child-self and poke at a few bubbles and revive the rational side of yourself with the joyful knowledge that you just gave your future self the ability to look back at this depraved moment with a scientific eye, one that may just prevent it from recurring quite so often. In short, it brings a glimmer of hope to despair and a framework for practical self-reflection to generally unproductive and self-perpetuating nagging, gnawing moments of self-doubt.
They also have an iPhone app, if you're into that kind of thing.
If you still not convinced, then check out the company's stance on privacy of data collected. Sean Johnson speaks out against RescueTime's (another time isv) tendencies toward usage of time tracking as a managerial tool as opposed to a tool for personal improvement. The discussion that ensues in the comments between Sean and a voice from RescueTime is THE best discourse on privacy-spyware implications in the office that I have read to date. If not that, the Heideggerian reference that is the title of his blog "Being and Time" should assure you that you're in good hands.
Stack Overflow
The link of the day is Stack Overflow. It is a forward looking democratization of the forum concept, populated by some of the more exceptional programmers and tech mangers out there and driven by one of the more sticky and innovative initiative systems out there. Aside from the valuable information and the catharsis of grokking with the old piers, users can gain extra cred through earning 'badges' based on participation and the community's reaction to that participation. This is a great crossover from the gaming world, challenging participants to explore dimensions of community that they may otherwise overlook or not engage by enticing them to achieve quantifiable performance goals. Love it.
Grok
"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man."
- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a strange land.
I got this from wikipedia, then copied the main definition here for vanity's sake:
"To grok (pronounced /ˈɡrɒk/) is to share the same semiosphere or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed. From the novel:
"... quote above ..."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." Other forms of the word include "groks" (present third person singular), "grokked" (past participle) and "grokking" (present participle).
In an ideological context, a grokked concept becomes part of the person who contributes to its evolution by improving the doctrine, perpetuating the myth, espousing the belief, adding detail to the social plan, refining the idea or proofing the theory."
"To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier... That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."
- Derek Sivers