My Shop Vac

Now that I have a manly garage, with a manly workbench, I was delighted to receive for Christmas a Shop Vac. It's a magical device that sucks up all sorts of debris, even liquid. It has attachments for everything. I think one attachment is for haircuts, but I haven't tried it yet. The Shop Vac is gray and black and reminds me of R2D2 so much that I expect it to jack into my breaker panels and reprogram my DVR.

My point is that my Shop Vac is totally awesome. That is, unless I try to move it. It has wheels, but at the first sign of movement, the Shop Vac starts squirming and tossing off attachments like a balloonist heading into a volcano. The hose becomes like a spastic elephant trunk. It will find all of the loose objects in your garage and fling them one-by-one into oil spills and darkened spider nests. If you focus your attention on the flailing vacuum hose, the power cord will wrap itself around your legs and try to trip you into the pyramid of old paint cans. And the screaming. Good lord, the little wheels scream on the concrete floor. It's Shop Vac language for "LEAVE ME ALONE! DO NOT MOVE ME! I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY TENTACLE!"

The worst of it, if I can pick just one thing, is that the situation totally ruins my manly vibe. I live in fear that Shelly will come into the garage and see me losing a cage match to R2D2. That would totally suck, ironically.

Anyway, I've developed a truce with my Shop Vac. Now I sweep the debris from wherever it falls all the way to where the Shop Vac lives, and directly under its waiting nostril. I gingerly press the ON button along a direct vertical line so I don't awaken the tentacle of death. I still plan to use the Shop Vac for haircuts, but I'll have to put the kids on towels on their backs and slowly drag them towards the Shop Vac's waiting hose and hope for the best.

I searched the Internet for what I imagined would be the obvious set of third-party add-ons for the Shop Vac, but found none. What I want is some sort of pole attachment from the top of the Shop Vac upon which I can drape the power cord and hose while moving the Shop Vac against its will. Sort of like an IV drip scenario, but with a power cord and vacuum hose. Would one of you go invent that and get back to me?

 

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Knowledge That Matters

I wonder if the most valuable knowledge you can have is the knowledge of what you're good at. For example, I doubt you are working at the very best job for your aptitude. We tend to drift into our careers. It's more luck than plan. But imagine if you were born knowing you had the natural aptitude to be the world's best brain surgeon, or guitar player, or graphic designer. On the flip side, maybe you thought you had more talent in some field than you do, and wasted a lot of time preparing for the wrong profession.

Any assessment of your own abilities is necessarily polluted by your optimism, your pessimism, your passion, and your everyday delusions. On top of that, you are influenced by other people's opinions of your abilities, and other people are just as clueless as you.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous cartoonist. I assume now that it was more wishful thinking than premonition. But my self-assessment at the time was that I didn't have the necessary talent. I thought I might someday be a pretty good lawyer, or a banker. So I became an economics major. I got lucky in the sense that I poked around at the wrong professions, trying this and that, including cartooning, until finally something worked. And even as my cartooning career was taking off, the majority of experts were pretty sure I didn't have the talent to make an impact. All but one syndication company rejected my original submission for Dilbert. And for the first several years, 90% of all newspaper editors didn't see any potential in it. I was sustained through those years by a handful of insightful people at United Media who thought Dilbert could someday be big.

In summary, the two opinions about your abilities that you should never trust are your own opinions, and the majority's opinions. But if a handful of people who have a good track record of identifying talent think you have something, you just might.

 

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Knowledge That Matters

I wonder if the most valuable knowledge you can have is the knowledge of what you're good at. For example, I doubt you are working at the very best job for your aptitude. We tend to drift into our careers. It's more luck than plan. But imagine if you were born knowing you had the natural aptitude to be the world's best brain surgeon, or guitar player, or graphic designer. On the flip side, maybe you thought you had more talent in some field than you do, and wasted a lot of time preparing for the wrong profession.

Any assessment of your own abilities is necessarily polluted by your optimism, your pessimism, your passion, and your everyday delusions. On top of that, you are influenced by other people's opinions of your abilities, and other people are just as clueless as you.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous cartoonist. I assume now that it was more wishful thinking than premonition. But my self-assessment at the time was that I didn't have the necessary talent. I thought I might someday be a pretty good lawyer, or a banker. So I became an economics major. I got lucky in the sense that I poked around at the wrong professions, trying this and that, including cartooning, until finally something worked. And even as my cartooning career was taking off, the majority of experts were pretty sure I didn't have the talent to make an impact. All but one syndication company rejected my original submission for Dilbert. And for the first several years, 90% of all newspaper editors didn't see any potential in it. I was sustained through those years by a handful of insightful people at United Media who thought Dilbert could someday be big.

In summary, the two opinions about your abilities that you should never trust are your own opinions, and the majority's opinions. But if a handful of people who have a good track record of identifying talent think you have something, you just might.

 

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Name as Destiny

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Earthquake Insurance

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Creativity by Combination

A lot of what passes as creativity is just combining things that aren't normally combined. For example, my parents are in town this week, at the same time the iPad was launched, which made me think a lot about the physical form that products take. And because of the iPad launch, there's a lot of talk about the iPhone too. At 6:30 AM, all of those ideas combined in my head, somewhat automatically, and I drew a comic in which Dilbert invents a cell phone in the form factor of an old man's head. You'll see it on March 23^rd.

Comic characters work best when they have well-known mental flaws. Dilbert's flaw is that he sees the world in terms of function while being somewhat oblivious to things such as beauty and social convention. To Dilbert, a phone that looks like an old man's head has no obvious downside. Once I had the idea of a phone that looked like an old man's head, I imagined how each of the Dilbert characters would react to it, and I laughed to myself when I thought that Dilbert wouldn't see anything wrong with the idea. Creativity is the combining of wrong things. Art is recognizing the physical sensation that the wrong combination gives you. In this case, my own physical response to the idea told me it was a keeper. Your mileage might vary for this particular comic, as is always the case, but if I keep to the system, I'll get you sooner or later.

Someone asked me in a recent comment on this blog if I come up with the titles for my posts before I write them. Usually I do. If I can't capture the essence of my idea in a few words, it probably isn't worth writing. A title is a good first test of an idea's worthiness. (And more broadly, anything that can't be described briefly is probably a bad idea.)

But I often change my working title after I write a post. For example, my recent post titled "Like a Night Watchman" was originally titled "Into the Well." My first take at describing what it feels like to be a writer involved a well metaphor. I lower myself into the well, deeper and deeper, until all outside stimulation is gone. That's the best description of what it actually feels like to shut out the world. But the night watchman metaphor was more visual and seemed friendlier. Falling into a well is scary. I thought it would distract from the point. A big part of writing is removing distractions.

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iPad

I think you can predict acceptance of a new product by what people will compare it to. For example, the iPod was compared to all of the other ways you could organize and carry your music around, and the iPod was just plain better.

Then Apple introduced the iPhone. It was compared to other phones, and in that comparison it won easily, unless you expected to do a lot of e-mail.

Yesterday, Apple introduced the iPad. What do you compare it to?

The iPad borrows a little from phones, and a little from laptops, and a little from their own iPod and iTouch, and a little from the Kindle. It's better in some ways than all of those things, but less portable than its smaller cousins, less functional than a laptop, and more expensive than a Kindle. There's no comparison that is a clean win.

I think the human brain will automatically compare the iPad to a laptop, mostly because of the size. And I think most people will come to the conclusion that since an iPad won't replace your laptop, and it's too expensive for a toy, it has no place.

Betting against Steve Jobs is a fool's game. But the iPad doesn't feel like a genius creation. I think Jobs was focused on his health when the iPad was conceived.  It looks like committee work to me.
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Complexity

I keep getting unexplained bankcard services fees on my business checking account, somehow related to selling some of my original art a few years ago. I contacted my bank to clear it up. My bank could find no record that I ever had a merchant account with them. Nor could they find any record that I have a current checking account with them. They did acknowledge billing me for the services they say I don't have.

Allow me to say that again: My bank can't find any record that I have a checking account with them, searching either by my name or my account number. As I write this, it still isn't cleared up.

In the end, it will turn out to be something simple. I probably called the Bankcard Merchant Services department instead of the Merchant Services Bankcard department, and they can only see certain types of accounts, or some such thing. I don't think my money actually disappeared. The real problem is that the world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.

I recently got a video switching device, professionally installed, that lets multiple televisions in the house display what is playing on, for example, a DVD player in another room. We just built our home, so we had the luxury of wiring it for that sort of function. It's a great idea, except that when I turn on the TV in one room it sometimes randomly turns on a TV in another. A team of very smart and experienced technicians have been trying to solve that bug for a week. In the end, I'll just live with it, or stop watching television, whichever is easier. Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible.

I went to upgrade a family member's cell phone the other day. I knew exactly what I wanted. The store even had it in stock. Still, the transaction took 90 minutes. It had something to do with using the upgrade of one family member for the phone of another, which ended up killing the wrong phone, hosing e-mail on my BlackBerry, and a host of other issue before we got it all working. Complexity made the simple nearly impossible.

Lately I've been trying to get all of my insurance issues sorted out. I need about seven different types of policies for various car risks, house risks, business risks, and personal risks. So I ask my insurance guy a question, and he passes the question to the carrier, and by the time I get the answer, I forgot what I asked. Worse yet, I have three more questions. Insurance documents keep piling up on my desk. Some want payment, some want inventories, some want data, some need review, and maybe signatures. I don't even know where to start. The complexity has overwhelmed me. So I just stare at the pile and hope a meteor doesn't strike the house.

I'd like to have an iPod. It would be great for working out. But I know that heading down that road would be disaster and heartache. Sure, it would be a simple task if it were just me. But the kids have iPods, and share an account, and there are gift cards, and limitations on porting to different devices, and a computer that only works half the time, and lord knows what other problems are lurking. The one thing I know for sure is that I'm not going to plug an iPod into the computer and happily download music with a few keystrokes. It would be more complicated than the Normandy Invasion. Instead, I just live without music. And exercise. So I suppose complexity is actually killing me now.

It was never a fair fight.

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Like a Night Watchman

When you lack a particular skill, you are often curious what it would feel like to have it. For example, I marvel at people who can sing in key, or even recognize the right key when they hear it.  I suppose it's more about feeling the music than thinking it. So I wonder what that feeling is like.

My little window of talent involves selecting the right words to make things sound either funny or compelling. I'll get to that in a minute.

My job also involves drawing, but that's not so much a talent (obviously) as it is a simple skill that I developed through practice. If I have any talent in that area, it involves knowing how to make the drawings fit the way I write. I could draw in a lot of different styles, albeit just as poorly as the one I use now, but my current style might be the only one that fits my writing.

Let's forget about the drawing part of my job and talk about word selection. In that area, I can actually feel a sensation that is like no other in my life. And I wonder if it is what musically inclined people feel when they write the perfect melody, or what athletes feel when they are in the zone.

I can literally feel words. And I wonder if it is a mild form of synesthesia, a condition where people have a form of crosstalk in their senses. A person with synesthesia might perceive certain words or numbers to have colors. Or they might perceive a particular month or a year as having something like a personality or a location.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

My relationship with words is that I can feel them more deeply than most people. At least that is what I think is happening. To me, the word aura feels beautiful, but when I see osso bucco on a menu, I feel as if I have been slapped by a crabby skunk.

By the way, I experience the words "osso bucco" the same way I experience the words "crabby skunk." The words and their meanings are completely different, yet the feeling I get from them is the same. I probably store those words in the same parts of my brain.

I'm reading Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open. I assume it is ghost written, since Andre is barely educated, he says. My first reaction to the writing style was that it is heavy handed, and it bothered me. In time, I realized the writing style evoked the same feeling in me that Agassi evokes as a public persona. It was a perfect match. I assume Agassi's publisher hooked him up with a world-class ghost writer, and it shows. The writer found a style that fits the subject, probably leaving a lot of writer's ego at the curb. It's brilliant work. The book is fascinating.

People often ask how I get into the writing frame of mind. To me, it feels like being the night watchman in a museum. My job is to make sure all the doors are locked, and the blinds are pulled, and the lights are out. As a writer, you need to shut out all of the distractions from your other senses. I make sure I'm not hungry, tired, uncomfortable, or listening to anything. Then, like the night watchman, I go room by room with my flashlight until something scares me, surprises me, or makes me laugh. I have to feel something. And when I do, that's the part I keep. Then I wrap up the inspiring words in ordinary words, to form sentences. That part is more craft than art.

Writers tend to work early in the morning, or late at night, when brains are naturally able to focus deeply on one thought. In the middle of the day, distractions are unavoidable. I wonder if anything worthwhile has ever been written in the afternoon.

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Bad Interfaces

The other day I tried to change my address through a company's web site and it wouldn't accept my new address because I "already have a phone number." WTF??? I tried various workarounds including no phone number, and a fake phone number, but it insisted that once you have a phone number, and the system knows it, you can never change your address. So I asked myself, am I the first person who ever owned a phone and wanted to change his address?

On a daily basis I am astonished by the bad design of things. In my last home, the switch for the garbage disposal was on a panel with a light switch, and looked just like it. Approximately 50% of the time I turned on the light when I wanted to dispose of something, and vice versa. I tried to memorize which switch was which, but I always got confused by my own memory tricks. Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick.

So now we have a button on the countertop for the disposal. It's obviously not a light switch, which is good. But when you press it with your inevitably food-dirty fingers, I imagine debris falling into its little well hole until someday the button just decides not to work. I wonder how that meeting went when someone suggested putting the button where it would be guaranteed the most slime. Did no one raise a hand to suggest that might be a bad idea?

Our new light switches have light indicators to tell you when a switch is turned off. That's right: The "on" light indicates that the switch is off. At least that's how my brain has interpreted it nine hundred times in a row. I understand that they want to make it easy to find the switch in the dark. But did they ever test how people use these things? And while I know the off indicator light uses almost no power at all, I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day.

Perhaps my biggest interface pet peeve is alarm clocks in hotels. I stare at the controls for about ten minutes, give up, unplug it, and use my BlackBerry as my alarm clock. I have to unplug it because the last guy might have accidentally set it for 3 AM.

What is your biggest interface peeve?

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