San Diego's Undiscovered Maker Space

The best part about 3D printing and laser engraving at the Central Library is it's free. 

I'm writing this in the Main Reading Room of the San Diego Central Library after touring their new Maker space. This library opened about two and a half years ago with commanding views of the Coronado Bay; and they've already outgrown their original Maker space consisting of a few 3D printers and electronic sewing machines. Now, they're ready for more Maker mentoring in their new location on the third floor.

Uyen Tran showing off wearable technology 

The library has recently procured additional Maker hardware including an Epilog Helix laser cutter and engraver. With 50 watts of lasing power, library patrons can cut and engrave most anything from cork and wood to plastic and glass. Through an agreement with the library, entrepreneurs can sell their wares on e-commerce sites like Etsy.com.

But, innovation is not so much about the technology as it is about the people who make it happen. And, at the Central Library, that honor goes to San Diego's Emerging Technologies Librarian, Uyen Tran. She's worked at the San Diego Public Library for nearly15 years and her passion about about technology and its roles in libraries is contagious.

Bridging: The Art of Persuasion

What's the key to persuading people in public speaking and marketing pitches?

Start with the Facts

It's much easier to convince a friend, who knows you, than a group of strangers who have to evaluate you on multiple levels. When speaking publicly, each individual in a group will size you up based on many things, starting with the facts. Are your facts indisputable? Otherwise your audience will conclude your logic is non sequitur. Every single fact must be true to instill confidence in others.

"I like to tell stories and I think I'm good at it."

Do you see what I did, right there? I put forth two indisputable facts; and I did it without being overly passive. While I may be a bad storyteller, I put forth my opinion that I'm good at it. I stated an opinion that might seem like a fact to a casual observer; but if someone digs deeper into my facts, they'll realize that my comments are actually opinions.

The more active your speech, the better. Twitter is a big help with active writing. Generally speaking, the fewer words you use, the more succinct your point. Consider these three statements, conveying the same idea, from most passive to most active:

"I think I am going to go to the store."
"I decided I am going to the store."
"I am going to the store."

Active writing and speaking demonstrate a clear understanding of ideas and concepts.

Bridging Facts to Opinions

A key physiological ingredient to memory recall is adrenaline which is why people remember exactly where they were on 9/11. This "suddenness" is closely related to an epiphany, which I call bridging when it's used to get people from here to there.

Bridging starts with stating points that are closely related to what you're trying to prove, convey, or convince. It's making a series of supporting statements that people don't realize are true. If you can convince someone to believe related facts they didn't know, then your opinions will carry more weight.

For example, if I said, "The earth spins 1,000 mph," would you believe me? Is that really true? Sure, it's true, but most people don't realize it. All I need to do is help people think about it. The circumference of the earth is a bit under 25,000 miles. For easy mental math, let's say the circumference is 24,000 miles. Now, how many basic time zones are there in the world? Answer: 24, since there are 24 hours in a day. Crossing a time zone means adding or subtracting an hour. Simply divide 24,000 miles by 24 hours (24,000 miles / 24 hours) and you get 1,000 mph. Another way to think about this is each time zone is about 1,000 miles wide at the equator (time zones converge at the poles). The United States is about 3,000 miles wide; therefore, flying from NY to LA crosses three time zones and it requires adjusting our watches by three hours.

Following good scientific method principles, I provided two examples to support my statement that the earth rotates at a thousand miles per hour. I gave you a fact which required a little convincing. And then I provided the supporting proof. From here, we move into asserting our opinions, predictions, or forecasts.

Makers vs. Marketers

Die hard makers (people who make products, like engineers) tend to be poor marketers and they will focus on a product's features instead of its benefits. Keep in mind there are many ways to say the same thing without being deceptive or misleading.

Steve Jobs was great at highlighting benefits over features. Had the original iPod been marketed by another company, it might have been pitched as a 6.5 ounce MP3 music player that measured 4"  x  2.4"  x  3/4" and had 5 GB of storage. Even with an engineering background, I'd have a hard time figuring out how much music fits into 5 GB. That's why Apple pitched the iPod as "1,000 songs in your pocket." New concepts are easier to understand if you put them in a familiar context.

But, does this technique, which works on products, also work on people? Sure, but keep your message short when pitching to people and focus on the positive, not the negative.

For example, you call a plumber who completes a job for you and tells you, "That will be $75. But, if you don't pay me within ten days then I'm raising the price to $100."

Now, compare that with, "This will cost you $100, but I'll give you a $25 discount if I receive your payment within ten days."

That's the key to marketing. State a relevant, indisputable, fact that people don't realize. Then simply explain how it's true, followed by your opinion piece with a positive call to action.

Apple TV Remote

I like the new Apple TV remote. 

Adding Siri to the remote flattens the navigation hierarchy.
Simple voice commands like "Play jazz," "Rewind 20 seconds," "Turn on closed captioning," and "Play episode 3 of season 1 of Mad Men" make for a superb user experience. The remote has its own firmware and its powered by a sealed battery that's rechargeable through a Lightning connector.

One thing I was wondering was why the remote has both infrared and Bluetooth since it seems only the latter is needed to communicate with the Apple TV. Then I tried raising the volume when the remote wasn’t pointed at the TV. The Apple TV LED flickered, indicating it had received the signal from the remote, but my TV volume didn’t change until I pointed the remote at it.

I'm speculating that it seems that HDTV volume isn’t commanded by the Apple TV remote, as I originally thought, rather it’s controlled by a standardized IR remote signal beamed from the remote.

Update: Here's my Twitter conversation to prove that I may not know exactly what's going on.

Hacks and Tricks of the Trade at Facebook

Software engineers love hacks that become tricks of the trade.

A hack is regarded as something that gets the job done in a clever way, but it's usually brittle. It's an inelegant, but effective, solution to a computing problem, sometimes referred to as a kludge or jury rig.

Any software engineer who's coded on a daily basis has written a hack. Every so often, a hack rises to the level of innovative breakthrough and is recognized by a prominent person in the industry.

As I've said before, innovation is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money. The best hacks are the ones that already use the current infrastructure in an innovative way.

Until a decade ago, most every time a website served up a webpage it would go to the database to refetch data. For example, an e-commerce store would look up the products that are on sale each time a user requested that page. The problem was that many pages were served up at the same time, with redundant hits to the database. After all, the list of items on sale isn't going to change from one minute to the next.

About ten years ago, as servers needed to handle more load, there was a rise in open source caching technologies to minimize the number of trips to a database. This was a big gain for read only data, which doesn't change often. Storing data in memory (as a cache does) reduces the overhead of interacting with a database. A database's job is to ensure data reliability by running many checks, formally know as ACID properties. But many of these checks are unnecessary if the data doesn't change very often. So, rather than make a trip to the database, the data is simply stored in memory so it's retrieved much faster.

Facebook Tricks

I recently heard about a brilliantly simple trick that Facebook uses to speed up their site. When a Facebook user logs into their account, their data is fetched from the database. While fetching the data, the user has to wait. The amount of wait time could be imperceptible to the user, or it could be a noticeably long time if the website is under a heavy load. "Heavy load" is a relative term, but Facebook services more than one billion users per day, so saving any amount of time makes a noticeable difference.

Wouldn't it be great if Facebook's servers knew what data a user needed before the user formally requested it? Well, that's effectively what Facebook's done with their little trick that simply involves sending an encrypted UDP (datagram) ahead of the formal TCP/IP request. UDP requests are fire-and-forget, meaning there's a small chance they might not arrive at their destination. TCP/IP, on the other hand, guarantees delivery (or notice of a failed delivery). TCP/IP is the reason that webpages render perfectly compared to the BBS's of the 1980s that used unreliable dial-up modems where static and interference would be misinterpreted as data and displayed as garbage text.

So, the UDP datagram arrives well ahead of the TCP/IP request which enables Facebook's servers to pre-fetch the data and load it in its cache before the formal TCP/IP request arrives. A simple yet elegant way to optimize a website for speed.

Ethernet vs. WiFi: Why WiFi is Way Zippier

Speedtest: 94 Mb/s on LAN vs. 314 Mb/s on WiFi

This week, I bought a new TV and hooked it up at home. The key differences between this model and the previous ones are changes to the remote control and the new tvOS App Store. I figured hardwiring it, on my LAN, would be better than WiFi. My thinking was two fold. First, I expected less of a chance of interference on a LAN connection, than wireless, and more importantly, I also thought the LAN connection would be faster.

I was half right. Of course there's less of a chance of RF interference, since wired is better than wireless. But my TV sits less than six inches away from my wireless router. Interference is unlikely.

I was also half wrong. Surprisingly, the new TV's LAN connection is Fast Ethernet, not Gigabit Ethernet. That means the LAN connection to the TV tops out at 100 Mb/s. But the Internet pipe into my living room is several times zippier than Fast Ethernet.

As I said nearly two years ago, Common Sense Can Be Misleading. Even simple theories need to be tested.

12/25/2015 Update from an Apple senior software engineer who contributed to the AppleTV:
The WiFi chipsets implement more of the protocol stack than ethernet chipsets (this isn't unique to the ATV by a long shot). Thus, using WiFi consumes *less* of the main CPU than ethernet, which is counter intuitive in that a wire is more reliable and requires fewer re-transmits. This also means that a wifi only device will idle sleep using less power than a wired device (if power management is of great concern).

Flying vs. Driving

Flight planning, flight planning, and more flight planning.

When I learned to fly, I thought it would be like boating. Sure, I knew maintenance would be expensive, but I imagined jumping into my plane, at a moment's notice, and heading off into the wild blue yonder.

It turns out, while driving and boating can be relaxing, flying is a bit more stressful on a complex level. For starters, when flying, I have to always be "on," meaning highly attentive, lest I make a catastrophic mistake. Even when cruising on autopilot, I have to continually monitor the instruments while talking to air traffic controllers; and they're not patient if you miss their calls more than once or twice. Driving tends to be very linear, in a single direction. A driver maneuvers based on what's directly ahead. Rarely does a driver worry about what's coming from the sides, never mind above or below as is the case when flying through three dimensions. What's more is that most of the flying I do is to keep my skills and plane from getting rusty. I'd love to fly for leisure, every day, but that's not realistic.

A couple months ago, I noticed the big difference between flying and driving on a trip to Cupertino for a speaking engagement on Apple's design and marketing philosophies. My intent was to fly myself into San Jose Airport. I did my usual planning, the night before, and drove out to the airport at noon. As soon as I got out of my car I noticed it was eerily quiet; like the calm in the eye of a hurricane. Something didn't seem right since the airport, which is usually a whirlwind of activity, was too still. After a minute or two I heard several F/A-18s flying fast, low, and loud. I pulled up a digital chart (map) of the airport and saw that it was under temporary flight restrictions (TFR). I hand't noticed the pending TFR, the night before, which seemed odd. I called the airport operations manager and he confirmed my concerns. The airport had suspended operations while the Blue Angels practiced for the next day's airshow. He also mentioned that the TFR was a moving target since the times kept changing leading up to when it went into effect. The TFR began about 30 minutes before I arrived at the airport and it would be in effect for nearly six hours.

Buttoned up since I was driving instead of flying.

I took a few minutes to do some mental math as I sat in my car listening to the silence, pierced by the roar of jet engines. Flying commercial, on short notice, was prohibitively expensive. My next option was to wait until 5 PM, pick up my flight clearance, and then depart, along with many other flights. That would probably get me to Silicon Valley around 9 PM. My final option was to hit the road and drive for eight hours. That would get me to my destination around 8 PM. I chose to drive.

As I headed up the 5, I couldn't help but notice my immediate mental shift from being outwardly focused on flying to being inwardly focused on me, myself, and I as I daydreamed through LA traffic.

How Not to Get Rich

It's almost needless to say that business pitches like "Get Rich Now!" or "Grow Your Business Revenue by 10x!" or "Earn $90,000 Working From Home!" should be avoided. It's not that these businesses don't want you to succeed, rather it's that their priority is to get you to buy their system or program, at any cost.

Then

Twenty years ago, I was browsing magazines at my local Borders bookstore. A forty-something-year-old man approached me and said, "I can tell, by the magazines you're looking at, that you're an interesting person." Flattery will get you everywhere. After a couple minutes of chit-chat he told me that he trusted me enough to give me a cassette tape with some business opportunities. It only cost me my phone number. I listened to his tape. It was a recording of a 15 minute group presentation about getting rich, living your dreams, having enough money, etc. As I listened, I kept wanting to know more. Specifically, how do I do it? How do I get rich? Then I realized what it was. When he inevitably called me, I asked, "How is this different than Amway?"

"We are Amway," he exclaimed.

Thanks, but no thanks. One of many problems with Amway is that they treat every person as if they can be turned into a hard-sell sales person. That's like assuming we can make every person a software engineer. To each their own. Engineers and sales people are wired differently.

Now

This past week, I attended a free presentation with headlines similar to those I mentioned above. I knew exactly what to expect, and reality was inline with my expectations. These pitches follow the tried and true "amway-ish" techniques. "Would you like to earn an extra $2,000/month?" Of course you would. Who wouldn't?

Here are the simple tell-tale signs:
1. Pump the benefits.
2. Hide the features.
3. Offer a single solution: Buy my money making system.

You'll see the same routine over and over again. These companies will push their benefits hard, with details, without explaining a single, actionable feature other than buying their system. The tripwire is something like, "I charge $500/hour, but I'll give you a free hour to see if you can be accepted into my sales program." Adding scarcity is another key selling point.

Generally, the benefits of their system will be explained, in detail. "I used to do this, but now I do this." This is an excellent story telling technique I learned from Joyce Maynard. "I used to work hard for six months to earn $2,400. Now, I only need to work for six days to earn $24,000. And my program can show you how to do it." While the benefits are plentiful, the features are scarce. The "How is it done?" details are no where to be found during the initial pitch. And, when you hear it, it's almost always a let down.

My guard was down when I was in Borders, flipping through magazines. And cheap sales talk is designed to catch the attention of the unguarded. And, as I mentioned, you'll hear little to no details on the features of the system. In other words, "What do I need to do to achieve success?" or "How does it work?" is missing. That requires signing up for the program.

So, why do people continue to fall for it? PT Barnum is credited with answering that question.

Imagining the Invisible

In the 1990s, I read Information Anxiety. It's written by Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of the TED talks and the Access travel guides. Wurman wrote about how to manage information. The anxiety he speaks of stems from the explosion of information; the fact that an issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England would have encountered in a lifetime.

Wurman suggested ways of coping with the overload of information by visualizing the invisible, such as size or distance and compare them to tangible things. For example, an inch is the diameter of an American quarter coin, six inches is the length of a U.S. dollar bill, an acre is roughly the size of a football field, without the end zones.

Road Trip

A common analogy I frequently make and forget (which is my primary purpose of this blog post) is explaining how far San Diego is from San Francisco. In raw distance terms, it's about 500 miles. That's the same as driving from Washington, D.C. to Kittery, Maine, which is at the southwest tip of that state. That's a long distance, but it pales in comparison to the 830 mile trek from the southeast tip of Texas (Brownsville), due north, to that state's most northeastern point in Follett.

Telling a Great Story

My Silas Wood 6th grade teacher, Ms. Cooke, speaking about South Huntington Schools Hall of Fame inductee and Bank of America executive, Kieth Cockrell. 

What's the secret to telling a great story? It depends on a lot of things. Mostly, though, it's important to know your audience. The topic of your story doesn't even have to be interesting, rather, how you tell a story is key. A little levity and drama is helpful, when appropriate. Great storytellers have a way to pull in their audience without shutting them out; and the latter part is key – think about great mysteries with surprise endings.

A few years ago, I began writing fiction. I simply sat down at my computer and wrote a few short stories. And I made some classic mistakes, such as beginning a story with weather and writing the cliche story about a divorced woman and a sick dog.

I had no idea if my storytelling was good, so I went to a professional, Joyce Maynard. Joyce's biography always begins with the fact that she wrote her first book while living with the author of The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. What adds to the allure of this tale is that, at the time, Joyce was 19 years old and Salinger was 53. But it was truly the high quality of her writing that got the attention of Salinger when, at 18, her article, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life" was the cover story of The New York Times Magazine in 1972. A key thing I learned from Joyce is that the story behind the story can be more interesting than the story, itself, since it's more exciting to show people what's going on behind the curtain.

The Cooke's In

Even more important is the storytelling technique of summarization that I learned from my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Cooke.

Last weekend, I had a chance to spend a couple days with Ms. Cooke – something I hadn't done for five years – and it was highly enthralling.

I, along with several other 6th grade classmates, still connect with Ms. Cooke because she had (and still has) a strong presence in our lives. She cared about us as students and she was a great storyteller. She's a smart, independent person who neither tolerates fools nor stupidity. As a teacher, she wanted to teach her students not only book smarts, but also key lessons in life. The quintessential "teach a person to fish" by showing us critical thinking skills.

After more than 30 years in the classroom she retired and opened The Cooke's In restaurant for more than a dozen years. Shortly after retiring from her restaurant, in 2009, I spent a couple days at her house scanning school photos covering three decades, followed by a mini 6th grade reunion where we got to hear more of her stories.

Ms. Cooke preparing her spectacular jerk chicken.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, the night before my 30th high school reunion, when about half a dozen of us from my 6th grade class descended on a classmate's house in Amagansett, NY, in the Hamptons, for a couple days of reminiscing. Of course, Ms. Cooke joined us and prepared her spectacular jerk chicken.

While listening to her speak, I learned another key storytelling secret: keep your story short and to the point. As we hung out in the kitchen and spoke about how good her food was Ms. Cooke said, "You know that the secret is to running a restaurant? Expediting."

Do you see what she did there? She summarized her entire story – a story she had yet to tell – in a single word that drew us all in.

"What do you mean?" we asked.

She told us that running a restaurant is about coming up with a recipe and being able to make it the exact same way, every time, and to do that quickly. She told us the obvious, but it carries more weight when spoken by the voice of experience. She told us just enough to pull in our attention and then she answered our question without waste of time or words. We speak about "active writing," but active talking is equally important since it's a key essence of storytelling, regardless if it's fact, fiction or marketing.

Guy Kawasaki: Lessons of Steve Jobs

Lessons of Steve Jobs keynote

Posted by Guy Kawasaki on Wednesday, October 28, 2015