Unboxing

My apologies. This is a rant.

When did unboxing become an important part of purchasing something? It started with gadgets, but seems to be spreading to more and more items. Lots of reviews now begin with a person’s experience as they take it out of the box for the first time. Why is something that amounts to less than .01% of the time you spend with something actually matter. I can understand the importance of first impressions, that whole Blink response, but I would think that applies to the first time you use it. I could appreciate a review that powers a device on for the first time. How much configuration is required, how long does it take you to get to the good stuff? If anything, the time spent capturing the unboxing experience is reducing the objects desirability, because it lengthens how long it takes you to actually be able to use it.

Moreover, I’m concerned that design efforts to improve the unboxing experience result in greater waste of packing materials. When designing for consumer products. Price is very important, because that’s the psychological barrier people have to get past to own the product. If the price is too high, people don’t buy.

That being said, someone once told me that the price will only be remembered for the first week, but the quality will be remembered forever. Please take the money you spend to maximize your product’s unboxing experience and put that toward improving the product’s quality.

I like that Samsung has a similar appreciation for the exaggerated importance of unboxing. It’s an older video, but here is their unboxing experience for the Omnia:

The war on paper, part 3

I’ve scanned up through our 2006 finances. It’s interesting to watch the trends in our organization emerge, dissolve, re-emerge, etc.

In the beginning, we kept separate folders for phone bills, utility bills, etc. We also separated our financial records between my accounts and Julie’s accounts. That lasted about a year. By end end of ‘05 everything went into the same folder.

We also worked to make the paper system work. When writing a check to pay a particular bill, we’d pull the carbon copy out of the check book and staple it to the bill for easy reference in case we ever had to look it up. We would also staple deposit receipts with the paystubs to reference we when deposited income. It was an awesome system. The problem, of course, is that we never actually needed to go back to look up any of that information. We meticulously documented stuff that just didn’t matter.

I still believe that record retention is important, that’s why I’m scanning it all in. I also believe that the integrity of your organization should correspond to the frequency with which you will need to access that data. Yes, it will take a few minutes longer to find a phone bill, assuming I ever need to find it, which I probably won’t.

Word to the wise. If you foresee yourself ever going paperless, avoid staples. Or, at the very least, get a staple remover.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• While I appreciate that American express uses smaller pages for their statements to reduce paper consumption, it means they have to be scanned separately from most of the other documents.
• That said, the most common document thus far to cause a paper jam is a Capital One statement. They use pages that 8.5” wide but 33% longer, and for some reason that increases their likelihood to cause a paper jam.
• I really do like this scanner. It’s not taken me so long to get through 2005 and 2006 documents because it’s a long and arduous process. It actually only took me a couple of hours.

The war on paper, part 2

I must say: At first blush, this duplexing scanner is awesome. No more loading one page at a time on a flatbed scanner, flipping to get the other side. I load in 10-20 pages at a time, hit the button, and put a basket underneath the catch the spoils. Paper jams are surprisingly far between for something that is entry level for its category. I’ve not investigated the character recognition, so I don’t know how well it indexes all of the financial statements, but as long as I can search by a month and year, I should be able to get close enough to hone in on what I’m looking for.

One lesson that’s held true is the importance of having a reasonable filing system. One that gets you close quickly, without being overly specific. We used to have different folders for different kinds of bills. One for gas, one for phones, one student loan payments. We’ve since consolidated to a folder that holds all of the finance documents for a given year. Specificity is directly related to the frequency one must access the data. Don’t have a file folder to distinguish between gas bills and electric bills if you’re going to have to look back at them once or twice a year.

But folders are still needed! I feel it is important to spell that out for my own sake, mostly because of the engineering product lifecycle management software we’re getting at work. It pushes in the opposite direction, with minimal folders and an emphasis on searching for what you need by indexing documents through their metadata (information that’s not immediately in the document, but attached to it as relevant upon putting the document inside the database). Admittedly, that’s where the future appears to be headed, with refined search technologies and greater indexing capabilities to automate document parsing and knowledge retrieval. Call me old fashioned, but I like folders.

And yes, I do see the irony in that last statement given that I’m in the process of digitizing old paper to get rid of it and better embrace the future.

We’ve thus far won many of the battles, but the war is not over. The master strategy has not fully matured. This is the not beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning!! (Thanks Churchill)

The war on paper

It began with the coffee table. For the past 3 years we have lived in a 3 bedroom house. For more than two years of that, it was just the two of us. One might think that 3 bedrooms is more than enough to house just two people. That’s what we thought when we bought it. We wanted room to grow our family. But after two years we found the house seemed to be shrinking. What was once spacious had become crowded. No matter how many shelves we setup, no matter how many plastic tubs we put into the attic, the house was getting progressively crowded. What’s worse, we were plagued with clutter. No amount effort was sufficient to eliminate the clutter from our home. Many weekends were lost in the effort to clean up and organize the home better. There simply was not enough space to house all that we had accumulated.

Credit to the source of our solution comes from my sister’s boyfriend. We visited them one evening and both of us could not help but notice how clean his apartment was. Granted, he had no child to muss things up, but our problems predated the birth of our son. His toys only added to the mountain of clutter. On the trip up we’d talked about the feasibility of finding a larger home. Neither one of us liked the idea. We like our home, we like our neighbors, and the market means we’d have to sell at a loss, which would not position us well to buy into a larger home.

But, back to the apartment. Very open, very clean. The drive home was a different conversation. That’s when I realized it: Surfaces! Kevin has a distinct lack of surfaces. Surfaces obviously afford a place to put things down, but unless you maintain vigilance, they will gather rather than forcing you to tend to them. Lacking surfaces, there was no place for clutter to really gather. He had to deal with the mail when it arrived, rather than putting in a pile to grow. He had to deal with the empty grocery bags, rather than throwing them on top of the coffee table.

It took some work, but we finally got rid of our coffee table. The impact was immediate. The living room doubled in size, and was inherently cleaner. My wife looked at me and said, “What else can we get rid of?”

We posted items on ebay, craigslist, and freecycle. We donated what would not sell or people asked for. We threw away what the  donation’s people would not take. We hemorrhaged clothes we’d never wear and books we’d never read again.  Finally we came to the latest project, which is the filing cabinet. I’ve had this cabinet since college. It’s survived 5 moves (including one down the street on top of a rolling trash can in the snow), it weighs a ton, and it’s big and an eyesore. Julie never cared for it, but we needed a place to keep all of our files. The irony, is that the solution to get rid of the filing cabinet weighs about `1 lb and is the size of  a brick. It’s a duplexing scanner. We are going paperless.

Posting and sleeping

This blog was originally created so give myself an outlet when I was having trouble sleeping. With a new child, trouble falling asleep is pretty much at the bottom of the issues list. It also means not a lot of time to post. Good thing I don't have readers, otherwise people might actually be upset! :)
Besides, no philosophical discussions of late. Conversations seemed preoccupied with the weather, what with June in Boston setting a record for rain or some such thing. Good to know I'm part of history by being able to say, "I was there for the wettest June on record!"

Obligatory new dad commentary and update

It's true. It really is worth it. Watching Alex being born is nothing short of amazing. As much fun as it was to parade around a pregnant wife, it's going to be even more fun to parade around my wife and son. His head was shaped like an avocado when born, but that has since settled out. All fingers and toes accounted for.I got to be there for a lot of firsts. First cry, first sneeze, first poop, and first trip to the ICU. Alex had a trouble a couple of times getting enough air while feeding, so they put him under observation for 5 days. Apparently the veins going to lungs are pinched shut during pregnancy, and are supposed to open up once he's born. His did, but apparently not quite enough. Not all that uncommon, but they wanted to keep him under observation. Beth Israel is a fantastic hospital, one that's 1.5 hours away from our house. A single trip for birth isn't that bad, especially when you're doing 80 at 11:00 at night and there's no traffic. But commuting for 5 days was going to be hard. Fortunately, my sister stepped up and let us sleep at her condo in Somerville for the week. Much closer, though the commute still a bit of a hassle when the Red Sox were playing. All in all, it worked to our advantage. We got to spend time with nurses who really knew their stuff, and we only had to stay for 5 days. Most babies in the NICU are there for weeks, if not months. I caught glimpses of babies in other rooms who weighed around a pound. Sad stuff. I don't envy the parents, the babies, or the nurses.Now Alex is home and dictating to us his schedule. All efforts to adjust him to something we think would be a little more reasonable have met with unmitigated failure. I've gotten a crash course in how to hold a newborn, how to hand him off, how to change him, how to feed him, and I've played around with different ways to get him to fall asleep. I've learned how to suppress my swearing when I stub my toe on a bassinet in the dark for the 5th time while carrying him around at 2 am until he falls asleep. I've mostly learned to protect myself when changing him, as little boys apparently decide that's the perfect time to pee. I got to see one of his first smiles. It turned out later to be gas. I later got him to actually smile with a rattle. I can say that was the highlight of the week. It is exhausting, and I sometimes get cranky (ref. stubbing toe at 2 am), but I really can say I wouldn't trade it for anything else. Life reboot complete. God only knows what's going to happen now.

An Apple slam (now with more validation than ever!)

Back in early January I received my first Macbook Pro. It was for work, and they spent the money on a top of the line machine with a nice graphics card, processor, and memory. However, I work in 3D Cad design, for which all tools exist solely for linux or windows, so we installed boot camp and windows XP. "Don't worry," friends assured me. "Apple has the best hardware for windows" they stated with a grin.
I must say I am underwhelmed.
From power on to log in to being able to see the taskbar with no extraneous software installed, nearly 3 minutes. My 6 year old desktop with an excess of baggage from old installs and memory leaks requires 2 minutes to get to a useable desktop. This weekend I brought the macbook home to try and get some work done but forgot my charger. Booting twice, once to check email and once to do a 3 minute edit to a spreadsheet required 15 minutes and consumed a quarter of the battery. My wife's laptop, which is about a year old and runs vista requires less than a minute and 3% of the battery to boot, and Toshiba's are not known for having quality batteries. The macbook cost around $2.5K. The Toshiba? $800, plus I get one new battery free after two years.
The macbook has the new trackpad incorporating the capacitive technology used in the iPhone. All the non-readers will remember my tirade against that technology when it was first announced by Apple because it lacked any haptic response (not a term I used then, but one that has become popular since). Like the iPhone, it's a great idea until you use it. The entire touchpad depresses to serve as a button click. The only problem is that my finger tends to roll ever so slightly as I depress the button, causing the cursor to slide away from the link I am trying to click. On average it takes 5 tries to open a link. And right clicking? Forget about it! Ideally you use two fingers when you press down for it to register as a right click. Except that it only works half the time, and you're even more likely to miss the icon or link you're trying to get to.
Then there's heat. This thing gets hot. Painfully hot. Moreover, the trackpad has trouble detecting how many fingers are pressing down when it's normally running (I suspect due to heat) so many times a single click becomes a double click. Or a click occurs when my hands are nowhere near the trackpad.
Finally, this sucker is heavy, weighing in around 5-6 lbs, almost twice that of my wife's laptop. Sure, it''s machined out of a solid piece of aluminum, not that this helps with the heat situation. That, or I fear for anyone who used one of these before they got the thermals down to a mere 70C in the case.
The software I cannot speak for or against as I've not used it. I'm sure this is where Apple shines. I certainly hope so, as the hardware leaves something to be desired. Alas, there are no tools that I can use made to work for Apple. Thus, I'm going to try to get access to the floating license from home, and leave this boat anchor at my desk. I've got my redfly, which I'm using to write this. Instant-on, with an 8 hour battery, and weighing less than 2 lbs. What more does one really need?