Author Archives: kevin

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High Noon

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Recently I watched High Noon, the 1952 classic about the sheriff who stands alone against four bad guys who want to kill him when the town is too afraid to stand up. The lesson is supposed to be to stay true to your principles and stand up for what you think is right, even if you might die in the process.

The sheriff is supposed to be a hero. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great movie. But what I see instead when I watch the movie is someone who does not understand group dynamics, and makes his task much more difficult by failing to recruit anyone to his cause. The sheriff thinks that he’s got lots of allies in the town, and from the opening wedding scene, it appears that he does. But when he asks for help, he discovers they are not true allies. High noon is a bad time to find that out.

The sheriff also fails to win the PR war between himself and the bad guy he locked up 5 years ago. The bad guy hasn’t spoken a word to anyone in the town in over 5 years, he’s coming back to town to kill the sheriff, and the sheriff still can’t convince people to help him fight this guy.

The sheriff goes (alone) to the bar, the church etc. and pleads for help. Well when you are one person in a crowd of 50 who all say no, it is easy to say no. This is a good way to *not* recruit people to your cause.

The sheriff needs people to help. But people are unwilling to help if they think they are the only one helping, and rightly so, as the risk decreases with the number of additional people on your side.

Instead the sheriff should act and behave as though he has 3 or 4 other people ready to help. The people he asks rightfully feel guilty about leaving him to face the bad guys alone, but he absolves their guilt instead of exploiting it. He should approach his most likely allies individually and secure their support. Then once he has their support, he can go to the larger community with those allies behind him.

The sheriff also fails to strategically plan for the long term. He’s positioned himself as an outcast, a loner, without support from the group, who believe that he’s going to die. Even if he kills all the bad guys, he will not be welcomed back into the community with open arms.

It’s true that our heroes need to have lots of courage, and they often face a solitary road. But they don’t often screw up such an easy opportunity to recruit allies.

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Email etiquette

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This is a lesson that’s probably for an audience of people who would not be reading this post, but on the off chance they read it, here goes:

1. Never use all capital letters. Especially in the email title.

2. If you’re going to send out images to 1200 people, figure out how to upload them to a server, then embed HTML code linking to your image in the body of your email, instead of sending them as attachments. When you add them as an attachment, the size of your email becomes massive, and you’re creating 1200 copies of the same file that sit in everyone’s inbox. Plus attachments can’t be read on a mobile phone.

3. You have roughly 80 characters for the message preview in most email clients. Try to communicate everything I’d need to know about your email in that space. If your email is short enough consider sending the entire message content in the subject line.

4. Never use more than one exclamation point.

5. Do not say your email is “High Importance” when it isn’t.

6. Double check your email for typos and factual content before you send it. Send a test email to yourself first. If you catch a mistake do everything in your power to avoid sending a second email. Followup “correction” emails are only appropriate if the recipient is Jack Bauer and the subject of the correction is the location of a nuclear bomb.

6b. Double check to make sure the recipient is correct. Be careful when the Reply-To email address differs from the From address. Do not ever confuse Reply and Reply All.

7. Try as hard as you can to limit your email to the appropriate audience; send to a class-specific listserv for example instead of the entire school.

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links for 2011-03-04

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Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

links for 2011-03-03

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  • Broke Town, U.S.A. - NYTimes.com
  • The top 1%
    Those 200 resumes you got from Craigslist? Those consist of the one guy who happened to be good, but he's only applying for a job because his wife wants to be nearer to her family, and the usual floating population of 199 people who apply for every single job and are qualified for none. And now you think you're being "super selective" but you're not, it's just a statistical fallacy.

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links for 2011-03-02

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  • ROTTEN TOMATOES: Five Favorite Films with Stephen Merchant
    You know, I actually have to say that I think modern technology is really [stymieing] screenwriters nowadays. I mean, mobile phones, the internet, wifi, all those things, they don't work for a screenwriter. How many times did you ever see an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer has to lose his phone, or break his phone, or there's no signal? Because it's just such a godsend; it's like a teleporter, you know? It's too useful, a mobile phone.
  • Apple
    Check out the menu bar effect when you increase/decrease the text size. Really cool
  • Anatomy of long sales letter
    Long sales letters work - piss off designers who want fewer letters. Key is to write really good copy

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links for 2011-03-01

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  • Hacker News | Linus Torvalds: Pearls before swine
    I've done stuff that normal people would consider ubercool - doing illegal raves, run one of the hottest bars in Ibiza, throwing parties for the jetset. When seen from the outside it looks amazing - you get to talk to models, you get free booze, get in for free at all the clubs and have sex with models. The thing that nobody tells you is that it's hard work. Most of the actors that go to the oscars aren't there to get drunk or laid, for them it's a chance to talk shop with their colleauges. When James Cameron is talking to Natalie Portman he isn't chatting her up, he's trying to get her to star in his new movie. A friend of mine just came back from a tour with a known rock-band. They worked hard from nine in the morning until after midnight six days a week. The last day of the week they just wanted to get home to their families. No screwing around with models, no getting drunk and no clubbing. Just hard work. The rockstar life is mostly something the media makes up.

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Upcoming talks

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I will be on a panel Wednesday night, March 2, about “Breaking into the Silicon Valley Job Market” with 3 other seniors. The panel will be at 7pm in Bauer Founders Room at CMC.

I will also be speaking Thursday night, March 3, at the CMC Athenaeum about “Why Everything You Learned In Finance Class is Bullshit.” The dinner is sold out, but you can attend the talk, which begins at 6:45. I’ll post slides and notes as the date gets closer.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

links for 2011-02-27

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Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Usability in common objects

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One thing you pick up when you start having to design things on your own is a keen sense for details - all of the tiny parts of an object that make it pretty, and easy to use. A good test for this is to pick up your iPhone, open it to any screen and try to observe all of the gradients, drop shadows, bevels, fonts, and rounded corners that make up the pixels on the 640 by 480 screen. If you tried to design something with the exact same shapes but without the subtle effects, you would probably wonder why the Apple one looks so much better. And the effects are hard to get right - it's easy to go overboard on effects and end up with something hideous. Take, for instance, a basketball jersey, which is a pretty simple object - it's a shirt, with letters, numbers, and a color. But there are a surprising number of rules about a jersey that make it a more usable object. At a very basic level, everyone on the same team wears the same color jersey, so it's easy to identify which players are on your team. Traditionally, the home team wears white, and the road team wears a dark color. Why? In the old days, the road team might not have a chance to wash their jerseys between games of a road trip, so wearing dark jerseys would help hide the stains. Another feature of jerseys is that a team's dark jersey will usually feature the name of the city or university the team represents, whereas the home, or white, jersey, will feature the team's nickname. This is because the team wears the white jersey inside their own gym (where everyone knows the university or city name), but for the road team, the more relevant piece of information is the city or university name. A third principle revolves around numbering, where each sport has different rules based on how numbers are used. In high school and college basketball, players' numbers can have at most two digits, and each digit has to be between 0 and 5. This is so referees can use their hands to report a player's number when she commits a foul. In soccer, the players on the field traditionally wore numbers 1 through 11, where the number indicated the position of the player on the field, with 1 being the goalkeeper, 2 and 3 for the outside fullbacks, and so on. (Fortunately, rugby still follows this tradition). And of course, the numbers should be as big as possible, so people can read them. So even in a pretty simple object like a jersey, you can see a complex set of rules develop to make things easy for people that use them. If you were asked to design a jersey from scratch, it's unlikely that you would have covered all of these use cases, which is why it's important to prototype, test things on real users, and then iterate.

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