This only sucks literally. Otherwise, it's very cool.

Cheryl, my domestic goddess, has gotten herself a fun little indulgence (as much as anything that involves housecleaning can be called an indulgence):

It's a "SweepEze," and basically it wakes up and starts sucking everytime a broom comes near. Or my foot, if I'm not careful. I think my dear partner felt a little silly for blowing $40-odd bucks on it -- nowhere near as much as, say, a Roomba.

I'm sure we'll be buying a new vacuum soon, after treating our former vac like a ShopVac when we put in the new floor. The belts keep breaking and it's just not well. Maybe we'll get a Dyson this time. But those cost a heck of a lot more than $40.


Or maybe by the time we're ready, these will actually be available to buy ....

Yes, those are vacuum shoes. Now you know what the good folks in Electrolux R&D have been up to:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/17/electrolux-unveils-vacuum-shoe-concept/

Maybe it's my cheerfulness!

How pathetic that my first post in days is about having a cold. Or, more accurately, not having a cold.

Thanks, Boing Boing, for this fabulous news:

Good moods prevent colds?
A new scientific study suggests that people who have a positive outlook are less likely to catch colds. Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University exposed more than 300 healthy adults to a cold virus and interviewed them about their emotional state. Those with "generally positive outlooks... reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams." From Science News:
"We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk," Cohen says. Those who displayed generally positive outlooks, including feelings of liveliness, cheerfulness, and being at ease, were least likely to develop cold symptoms. Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams. The new study, which appears in the November/December Psychosomatic Medicine, replicates those results and rules out the possibility that psychological traits related to a positive emotional style, rather than the emotions themselves, guard against cold symptoms. Those traits include high self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and a feeling of mastery over one's life. Link

Clutter is a good thing?

I greeted this news with a mix of relief and fear: relief that I'm not somehow messing up my life (or that of my kids) by having a messy house, and fear that the news will somehow derail any sort of organizational effort that Dear Partner and I have had going.

From the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/garden/21mess.html):

January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose 4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association estimates will be calling for its members’ services just after the new year.
But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
“It’s chasing an illusion to think that any organization — be it a family unit or a corporation — can be completely rid of disorder on any consistent basis,” said Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., whose work involves helping people tolerate the inherent disorder in their lives. “And if it could, should it be? Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life. I live in a world of total clutter, advising on cases where you’d think from all the paper it’s the F.B.I. files on the Unabomber,” when, in fact, he said, it’s only “a person with a stiff neck.”

Actually, it confirms what I've pretty much believed all along. It's nice to be as organized as you can. But I also know well what pathological clutter is, having cleared out my Dad's storage unit, and having avoided his house for months. I feel bad about that sometimes, but when I go to the place formerly known as home, it presses all kinds of buttons, especially the one that says: "Throw this shit away!" So I instead invite Dad to visit me, and leave him to his many old newspapers and, my favorite, issues of Catholic Digest from the '70s (we're not Catholic). Somewhere in all that mess are some things that are precious to me. I just hope I have the stamina and the patience to power through the crap someday when Dad's not around to stop me (and for the record, I do not want that day to be anytime soon).

The Long Tail meets journalism

At the Big Internet retailer where I work, after having walked away from journalism, The Long Tail is one of the fundamental texts (you know, it's not about the First Amendment, so we gotta embrace what we can):

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/12/what_would_radi_1.html

Anyway, I was interested to see this intersection of my past life and current principles:

(These are from Chris Anderson)
Six tactics of transparent media:

1) Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal "about" pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren't on it. While we're at it, how about a real org chart, revealing the second dimension that's purposely obscured in the linear ranking on a traditional masthead?
Upside: Readers know who to contact. The organization is revealed as a collection of diverse individuals, not just a brand, an editor and some writers.
Risk: Competitors know who to poach; PR people spam us even more than usual.
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2) Show what we're working on. We already have internal wikis that are common scratch pads for teams working on projects. And most writers have their own thread-gathering processes, often online. Why no open them to all? Who knows, perhaps other people will have good ideas, too.
Upside: Tap the wisdom of crowds
Risk: Tip off competitors (although I'd argue that this would just as likely freeze them; after all the prior art would be obvious to all); Risks "scooping ourselves", robbing the final product of freshness.
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3) "Process as Content"*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India? (This may sound ridiculous, but it's exactly what wire services such as the AP have long done--they update their stories with each new fragment of information). After you've woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it? (We did it here, and it worked great). And while you're at it, let them write the headlines and subheads, not just for the site but also the punchier ones for the RSS feed and the one that has to work with the art for the magazine.
Upside: Open participation can make stories better--better researched, better thought through and deeper. It also can crowdsource some of the work of the copy desk and editors. And once the story is done and published, the participants have a sense of collective ownership that encourages them to spread the word.
Risk: Curating the process can quickly hit diminishing returns. Writers end up feeling like a cruise director, constantly trying to get people to participate. And all the other risks of the item above.
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4) Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they're commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they're submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best? We could promise to publish the top five each month, whether we like them or not: "Harness our tools of production! Make us print your words! Voting is Power!"
Upside: Maximizes participation.
Risk: If we don't deploy voting tools or (sigh) a login system, trolls may rule.
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5) Let readers decide what's best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment? Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page?
Upside: A front page that reflects reader interest better.
Risk: A more predictable and lowbrow front page.
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6) Wikifiy everything. The realities of publishing is that at some point you push the publish button. In the traditional world, that's the end of the story. It is a snapshot in time, as good as we could make it but inevitably imperfect. The errors (and all articles have them) are a mix of commission and omission--we hope for the best yet brace ourselves for the worst. But what if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself? The original story would be the foundation of what could eventually become a version expanded and updated by readers (our Fortune 500 blogging wiki was an experiment in this). If you want to see the original version, just push the "original" button, or see any changes in-between by looking at the version history.
Upside: Stories live and grow, remaining relevant long after their original publication (at no cost to us!)
Risk: Stories get progressively less coherent as many cooks mess with them. Whatever brand authority the Wired name brings is diminished over time as the stories become less and less our own work.

Being an action figure

It's been possible to get "personalized" action figures for a while now. All it took was enough money, or enough sculpey and skill, and you could be immortalized in all your miniature glory. But through the magic of the Internets, it's possible to get a made-to-order action figure for something less than the $600 or so charged by the schmancy places (www.highlyflammabletoys.com).

The schmancy places are cool, of course, but cooler still is self indulgence at a fraction of the price -- http://www.herobuilders.com/ondemand/. The only downside is you have somewhat limited options (all boys). And it's got a hip-hop/urban assault vibe. But it's still cool.

If only I had the self-discipline to stick with my original plan -- sculpt myself to match action figures like Trinity and Wonder Woman .... I'll be honest: An action figure of a soft suburbanite just isn't ... explosive enough.

Having a hard time with gifts?

So, dear partner Cheryl and I have very different gift-buying experiences .... She seems to stress a great deal about what she's getting me. I generally don't stress as much. I get a couple of things I'm confident about and kinda color in the details.

Which is why I thought of her when I saw this, from a Journal of Consumer Research news release (via Boing Boing):
"Our results suggest that familiarity caused [people] to put an overly heavy weight on pre-stored information. The pre-stored information that people possess about their partner is extensive. This elaborate knowledge makes predictors overly confident, such that they do not even attend to product-specific attitude feedback.”

Boing Boing's spin is that this is why it's so hard to pick out a gift for a loved one, i.e., one is overwhelmed by their certainty that their dear partner or family member is more like them than they really are. But I read this with the concern you might expect from someone who recognizes her own overconfidence (on a good day). Yeah, I know Cheryl and I have different tastes. But do I REALLY use that knowledge when I shop, or am I buying her things that are all too colored with my own desires/taste?

I actually like getting gifts that are as much or more a reflection of my loved one's tastes than mine, when I like their taste (as I do with Cheryl). In a way, it's like seeing myself through another person's eyes. Sometimes, it's seeing myself perhaps as the other person would like me to be.

OK, back at it .... Chuck E. Cheese, Pirates, Percocet and more

Wow, is it really Dec. 14? Yes. It is. The month has flown by, and I've gone from 3x to 3x. You'll have to fill in the second digit yourself. Once I hit 40, my new motto will be "fuck it," but in the meantime, I will embrace denial.

Oddly, snow, Christmas lights, putting up a tree and various decking of the halls, etc. were all November things, though fodder for December enjoyment.

So here is what December has included: A flat tire. A wild Percocet ride (not for me -- Cheryl's back went out, and the pain alleviation process did the same thing to her mind). Several visits with Santa (again, not for me). Several birthday parties for small children. I decided not to have my party at Chuck E. Cheese this year, since Aidan stole my thunder.

Chuck E.'s reminded me of my family. We went there a number of times for my brother, and when I was was in college I owned and actually wore a sweatshirt with a Chuck E. Cheese character (something purple whose name escapes me). Is it any wonder I didn't get much action? Chuck E.'s now is a much brighter place with more child-protecting rules enacted. You can't leave with a kid unless you have matching hand stamps, which are applied at entry. Of course, someone at the party pointed out that bad people could perhaps find a way to do something untoward INSIDE the building, but I looked all over, and I didn't see a place where one could achieve something resembling privacy (or peace, for that matter).

But that's not what Chuck E.'s is for. It was actually kind of fun, but I'm glad our boys want to have their birthday at their cousin Delsa's gym.