Several things happened this week to draw my life into sharp perspective. First, I realized I’ve been making tiny changes to the same eight documents for the last eight months; granted these documents make up a larger project and encompass several programming languages. But the damage was done before I could really rationalize my way out of it. This then lead me to the realization that my life’s work as of this moment fits comfortably onto a two-hundred fifty-six megabyte flash drive, a three quarter by two inch piece of plastic attached to my keyring.

Right now, I’m not managing anyone or anything. I write isolated (for now) code that one other designer–despite a good nature and eagerness to learn–invariably ruins when trying to use it. I find myself in meeting after meeting being asked to pantomime some measure of authority or involvement, only to be shown time and again that my only real function is as a pair of hands and a walking CSS reference.

Sometimes this makes me want to start a tomato farm or a pizza parlor. Coupled with my commute it’s all I can do to drag my carcass to the car every morning. It certainly doesn’t imbue me with much enthusiasm about my work, except for being home with my wife cooking and playing XBox 360.

So today I made a mix for my wife. The best code I’ve written in months is part of the package. Here’s to the things that keep us going.

I remember when I was little my sister took me to see Amadeus, a film I was probably too young to see or appreciate at the time. The final scenes of Mozart’s death, with “Sequentia: Rex Tremendae” underneath them, are indelibly marked onto my brain even now. Though it should have been far over my head I remember watching the entire movie intently, long after the row behind us (and my sister) had fallen asleep.

I’ve been doing a lot of music shopping lately, buying up tons of records most nights and stuffing them onto my iPod for my morning drive. Every six months or so I remember that life is pretty worthless without music and I do this. I’ve managed to find some good and worthwhile things to listen to, but none so incredible as a recording of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The provenance of the piece alone is amazing and eerie, but my favorite part is this from the Wikipedia entry:

The autograph of the Requiem was placed on display at the World’s Fair in 1958 in Brussels. At some point during the fair, someone was able to gain access to the manuscript, tearing off the bottom right-hand corner of the second to last page (folio 99r/45r), containing the words “Quam olim d: C:” (an instruction that the “Quam olim” fugue of the Domine Jesu was to be repeated “da capo”, at the end of the Hostias). To this day the perpetrator has not been identified and the fragment has not been recovered.

Ever since I read this passage I’ve been imaging a screenplay depicting the events leading up to the display of the score and the theft of the fragment of the page. Most fascinating of all may be the last part:

If the most common authorship theory is true, then “Quam olim d: C:” might very well be the last words Mozart wrote before he died. It is probable that whoever stole the fragment believed that to be the case.

Home inspection finally done today, and the inspector was friendly and super helpful. Also, a few pics of the house in its current state are here.

There’s new house news on the horizon.

There’s quite a disturbance in the force lately if you ask the tech blogging community, and it involves the latest release of Apple’s iLife suite of multimedia apps. This release offers complete overhauls of several important apps; and one, the new version of iMovie, is being met with some bad reviews. They stem from the fact that iMovie ‘08 has in many ways parted with the design specification set forth by the very first version: offer many of the same editing tools found in Final Cut Pro–timelines, transitions and multiple audio sources–but with a far lower learning curve and a rock bottom price (iLife ‘08 retails for $79.95).

But instead of focusing on the budding feature film director iMovie ‘08 is primarily concerned with helping you throw a movie together in “half an hour.” This means no timeline or multiple audio sources—in other words most of the things that made it so popular in the first place are gone. Apple does bill this as a complete recode of the old app, but it’s odd to shift the focus of an app so dramatically and maintain the name and versioning of all the previous incarnations. But really, I don’t care.

I’ve never made a movie in iMovie that I thought was all that great. Something happens to you after you see a Stanley Kubrick movie that makes it really difficult not to sweat the small stuff when you make a movie. When I shot those vlog posts a few weeks back I finally had to give up and give the camera to my wife to shoot me with, since I spent forty five minutes fidgeting around for good camera angles and lighting. Even when all the footage was in the can I had a terrible time editing myself, and a worse time color correcting each clip and making it ready to mix down. At one point I had actually dug up my old copy of Final Cut Pro and started editing there.

Yes, I was editing MiniDV footage from the three year old hand held camera with a $1300 editing system. Perhaps you see the level of perfectionism I’m dealing with here.

I guess my problem is that I’ve never been certain what the real goal of this much power on a consumer computer really is supposed to be. I understand the dream of the software: Apple’s demo movies always look so slick, like music videos would if anyone showed them anymore—all slash cut edits and triumphant choruses from Fallout Boy songs and daring 180’s off of powdery moguls. But every iMovie I’ve ever seen looks mostly the same, in the way that all those “iCompositions” that cropped up after GarageBand came out sounded mostly the same. Don’t get me wrong, I like that these things exist. I just never feel as if I’m using them as they were intended. I also have a good face for radio, much better suited to audio than video.

So the fact that iMovie ‘08 is so drastically different should come as no shock. The goal was always to create a finished and shareable movie in the shortest possible time frame, and not necessarily to offer conventional non-linear editing tools for the achievement of that goal. In fact, if I know Apple, shattering that sacred paradigm was always in the cards. However, waiting so long to ship the “real” iMovie comes with some pain. No more pain than wanting Stanley Kubrick production values on a cable access budget, but pain nonetheless.

My iPhone sustained its first battle scar this morning, as it took a sickening dive to the pavement. My headphone cord caught the buckle on my computer bag, launching the iPhone out of its holster. It made a gut wrenching hollow noise as it hit the ground, but once I was sure the screen was alright (and it is 100% alright) I was regaled with the sound of music through the earbuds. So, this thing can take a spill. I will not be allowing it to do it again, however.

An inescapable fact of life in web development and product design is meetings. Frankly when I was first freelancing I thought the notion of the hours long info share was sort of a myth; as I began to work in teams later I realized they were not mythical, but rather nightmarish. Often, meetings would drag on for hours or even consume entire workdays. It seemed that no one was able to hold focus for much longer than an hour, but the meetings would continue anyway. In fact, these marathons stretched the meaning of the term meetings and veered dangerously toward seminars. Most of them had no real agendas, and almost everyone in the meeting was seeing new information for the first time.

I found myself yesterday in a planning session with a large group of people. We were asked to, among other things, talk a little bit about the stuff we’re asked to do too often in our office lives. Unsurprisingly almost every group mentioned meetings. So the object of this post is to share some ideas for making meetings—something I stress really are important in development—something more useful than they may be for you right now.

I. Meeting types
Meetings are not one-size-fits-all. In so many offices, meetings are held because it “seems like the right thing to do”; you want to build consensus for a project, or take the pulse of several team members about their status while on a project and a meeting with everyone involved seems like the best way. Instead, consider a ten minute standup meeting—all parties standing and looking directly at the features, code or colors in question. Another type of meeting that happens constantly is a document review, where a team might get together to go over a timeline or other shared document. The kiss of death in these meetings is twofold: letting them run over about half an hour, and not giving all attendees an opportunity to see the document beforehand. I can’t think of anything more frustrating than watching someone edit a spreadsheet on an overhead projector that I have either never seen before, or that I only occupy a couple of rows in.

In short, keep meeting relevant and short. When only three people need to talk, three people should talk. Avoid concepts and words, and seek concrete actions that you can dole out to everyone at the table. It may seem childish, obvious, or elementary at first to hear yourself saying, “Bob, crank this widget”—but when everyone leaves the room feeling like they have something real to do, they feel much better.

II. Handouts
In our office we’ve gotten as far as doing meeting agendas, and they really help. Agendas at least make participants feel like there’s a map out of the madness, and if all else fails it’s something you can point to to get back on track. One thing we don’t do is a pre-meeting info share of some kind. The pre-meet can be a short email sent to everyone invited that says:

“Hi all-

We’ll be meeting about Project X Wednesday @ 11am. The agenda is attached to this email. At this meeting the project planner, Bob, will expect the following from the team:

• Sue: Wireframes uploaded to Basecamp
• Erik: An answer from Google about the foo API
• Matt: Status update on the data import scripts from WordPress to Joomla

This gives you guys two more full days to bash these things out. You can expect another task from the list at the end of the meeting.

See you then!

-Bob”

The pre-meet puts everyone on the same page. It takes the meeting from the land of the abstract concept to the land of the concrete task check-in. We have to assume that no one is going to do meeting specific preparation, so substitute the actual work for the meeting related busy work and then talk about that.

It might also be a good idea to send along your meeting agenda, as suggested in the example. If it isn’t ready yet, try to send it along no more or less than one day before the meeting. More than two days no one remembers, and twenty∏ minutes before you might as well not bother.

III. Meeting math
If all else fails, and you literally cannot get a hold on meetings consider this formula.

E(Employees) x Pr(Pay rate) x Ml(Meeting length)

If the cost of the meeting in contrast to the profit or cost of your project makes you want to jump out of a window , someone may end up managing meetings for you.

Warning: This is a post about my job. If you think you may be offended by such a thing, now would be a good time to close this tab.

I have a friend who’s almost universally joshed for being the guy most likely to march into work early Monday morning and announce he hasn’t slept in days, because he’s been coding his way through some problem. For months I had no idea what he was talking about; I was able to turn work off if I wanted to once I walked through the door, so why couldn’t he? Slowly, given enough time pressure, almost any designer or developer can start doing the same thing. I realized this when I sat in front of my Mac Book Pro on Sunday and coded for fourteen straight hours—really only breaking for the bathroom and to eat. The reasons for this are myriad, and are the basis for an anecdote about deadlines and such.

Our company has a tendency to talk about things a lot. Given almost any project, we can find a way to have at least a dozen meetings just about how to get started. Once we’ve figured that out, we’ll have a dozen more to decide what the next steps are. The meetings we tend not to have are the ones about scope, requirements or audience. These things always seem to be someone else’s job. The head of the department I’m attached to has it far worse than me, however, as he gets pulled into essentially every meeting ever planned; it’s left to him to sit through them all offering advice and guidance where applicable, and making the hard choices about milestones and even some development issues. It’s fair to say that we have a ‘meeting culture’, and that we tend to manage by committee. This often leads to deadlines that are set by such committees.

What tends to happen when committees don’t know much about requirements or project scope is that boat docks get built in the desert; one hand is totally unaware of the difficulty (or triviality) of the tasks being performed by the other, unrealistic deadlines are set, and the end product is a mess. I found this out the hard way with my last product launch, which was governed by an arbitrary deadline that could only be met by means of several 90 hour work weeks in the dev room. The “extra time” needed to make things better after launch was almost exactly the amount of time the dev team asked for on the front end of the project. Score one for the immovable, immutable deadline. In the interest of fairness I do understand the business case for setting deadlines and/or milestones on major projects; in large organizations it’s often necessary to attach revenue to projects that haven’t happened just yet.

I guess the only advice I have for planning a project is this: understand that most of what you’ll be doing in the initial phases is really only a guess, and that you need to check your work frequently against your map to make sure you’re on track. You need to give your people the leeway to say “this map does not match this road”, and change the map. But I also understand why this is so hard to do. It’s very difficult, especially in an overcrowded and ever more cutthroat online market, to take the time to breathe through a milestone meeting where you hear things are slipping. It’s also difficult to trust that the project is worth the extra weeks of design and testing and coding and recoding; but if you show up for work everyday anyhow, then you must believe that at least a little, right?

Today when I sat in a meeting and heard all of those things happening—the deadline slipping, the map changing, the request for more time—I felt as though cooler heads had prevailed. I felt like the project managers were sticking their necks out for the dev team, and that my fourteen hour coding sprees might no longer be necessary. Even though I left the office tired of meetings I felt renewed to some degree, even if for a few minutes. Will we return to endless meetings and arbitrary deadlines? Of course we will, but for today we can pretend there is no phantom deadline. That’s worth a meeting or two for me.

Related update: I’ve just been directed to the WikiPedia entry for “Scrum“, a project management system that seems to have some really nice ideas. Your mileage may vary.

So this is what happens: you get married, you buy a house, you have babies. We are stuck on the middle part.

We’ve seen 15 properties in just a few short weeks, and we’re tired. The two offers we’ve made (hey, we’re picky) have come in short. So far, the whole process seems inelegant and labor intensive–and there aren’t many houses around here worth seeing. Only one has really caught my eye–the 1936 Sears Craftsman pictured here–but alas, our offer was low for this one too.

So it’s a work in progress, this home buying business. We’ll get there, and soon all my Apple crap will have a place to live and I’ll have an office to do freelance (lots of freelance) from. Until then, anyone know of any great Craftsman houses going cheap on this side of the swamp?

Instead of a complete rundown of the last few days with the iPhone, I thought I might post a few small observations. In short this thing really lives up to (most of) its hype, and is a really compelling and enjoyable device to use.

• Speaker volume. It’s just not loud enough. Neither is the ringer really, and it may shed a little light on just how Apple thinks of the iPhone: as an iPod first and all the other things in descending order from there. I say this because using the phone while you have the earbuds on is a perfect experience in terms of sound levels. When the iPhone is in the car seat next to you and the AC is blasting and NPR is on, though, keep an eye out for calls.
• The interface is even better than you think. Using your fingers to navigate through screens of data feels perfectly natural. I’ve not had one single person, regardless of age or experience level, be stumped about how things work. I do need to explain the home button a little, but after that they’re off to the races. I’m still marvelling over the little details, like the recent calls screen; there’s so much in just that one small screen that’s communicated so effectively, and all without clutter or having to tap into other screens.
• I am going to drop this thing. It’s just a matter of time. The bead blasted finish is just not enough to hold onto.
• Prepare to be mobbed. Everyone is writing about this right now, but be prepared to give spontaneous iPhone demos at Starbuck’s and the grocery store and the bar, or anywhere else you try and take a phone call.
• The camera is really pretty good. Don’t go ditching your Canon DSLR just yet, but it’s more than enough for the occasional snap in terms of color and sharpness. No dedicated shutter button on the device (only a “soft button”) is a pain, though.
• I have no idea what the “right” way is to carry this thing. My old phone, a Samsung A900, would have cost around $129 had it not been a gift from my lovely wife. You can see for yourself how much an iPhone will set you back. My point of course is that carrying the iPhone around with is sort of a scary affair, and there are some places I would just not be interested in taking it–like the beach or something. Maybe folks with Treos or Blackberrys feel similar?

All in all, good stuff. Where’s the 1.1 update? I want more stuff to tinker with.