Design / nerdTech / Personal stuff — 3 comments
02
Jan 12

Up Update

A couple of weeks ago, my second Jawbone UP failed. I’m bummed about it for a couple of reasons (and will go through the process to get a replacement for sure). The first reason I’m bummed is theoretical – I miss the data it collects, mostly because I think I’m going to want it some day, but also because it makes me a little more mindful of my activity throughout the day. The second reason is that I really, really love the vibrating alarm – it makes a huge difference in quality of life for me & Kathy not to have an alarm blaring on the days I need to get up early.

The Lark has a vibrating alarm, but bugs me at night. The Fitbit, by contrast, I think doesn’t have the alarm, and I forget to wear it pretty often.

The UP solves that set of problems for me, even though it’s got other deficiencies (reliability, obviously, but also no wireless data sync, weird software UI, no open data, etc). So I’m looking forward to getting a working model again soon…

Books — 1 comment
01
Jan 12

The Visible Man, by Chuck Klosterman

I read just about anything that Klosterman writes, and while I like his sports & culture writing much better, I also generally enjoy his fiction, too. Liked this one — it’s a novel that explores some about who we are when we’re alone and nobody is watching.

A lot of it felt like a Palahniuk novel to me — the earlier ones, not the more recent crummy ones (like Damned, which I’m about to finish and will write a very short post about.)

Liked it, read it pretty quickly over Thanksgiving weekend. Wasn’t blown away, but good.

Books — Comments Off
01
Jan 12

Mistborn Trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson

I like reading Sanderson’s fantasy/science fiction because he invents worlds with super interesting physics & systems — they’re not really like anything else I’ve ever read, so it’s very entertaining.

This trilogy was just about perfect for reading over a holiday, although a little long, at over 1,800 pages all in.

I skimmed a lot in Book 2, but really enjoyed the first & third books a lot, and the whole series overall.

Books — 2 comments
08
Dec 11

Boomerang, by Michael Lewis

This is a collection of essays on the financial state of several countries – I believe most of them have been published in some form previously, but this is the first time they’ve been collected like this. He starts with Iceland, which he profiled in Vanity Fair a while back, and goes through how they became a massively overleveraged nation several years ago before collapsing. Then goes through the recent histories and situations in Greece, Ireland, Germany and the United State.
I enjoyed the book, like all books by Lewis. I had some trouble with the overarching generalizations about each culture – I found them to be caricatures and borderline offensive – more useful for telling an interesting story than for real help in understanding what’s going on.
But understanding the basics of the financial situations in each country, in a comparative way, really helped me think about what’s happening in Europe overall right now, and to think about the implications in the United States as our state and local governments run out of money. (Lewis’ analysis, or at least implication, is that sooner or later, in spite of our Federal laws and the Fed itself, that we will start to see the sort of fiduciary divergence that Europe is seeing between Northern and Southern Europe – where California is our Greece and the other, more fiscally conservative states get tired of bailing it out.)

I don’t totally buy that point of view, but very useful in thinking through why it’s reasonable, why things here hold the way they do, and why one path for Europe is a more united polity. Nothing is ever apples-to-apples in something like this, but definitely worth reading and thinking about, and an enjoyable read like everything Lewis writes.

Design / nerdTech / Personal stuff — 1 comment
02
Dec 11

Wasting Data

As I wrote up yesterday, my new Jawbone Up bracelet died on me. I was bummed, but customer service did a great job, and got me a replacement in about a day.

But I was surprised about the feeling I had yesterday, which is the first day I hadn’t worn the Up in about 3 weeks: I felt like I was wasting data, since I didn’t have the bracelet on to collect it. Let me say that again: I felt kind of weird, because I was going to all this trouble (you know, by walking around, sleeping, etc) and none of the data I was generating was getting logged. I was just blasting it into the ether.

This is not totally how I expected to feel. So naturally I tweeted about it, and Chris Hogg, founder of 100plus, replied in a surprising way:

And when you think about it, of course this is correct, but my first reaction was: “This is kind of messed up — we need to get credit for living now?” Obviously not a perfect state of being for humans.

But I thought about it some more on my drive in this morning, and it seems to me that a couple of different things are happening. On “getting credit,” we’re talking about taking an intrinsic motivation (living well) and replacing it with an extrinsic motivation (someone giving you credit or status). Now, that happens all the time — it’s a lot of what happens in schools, weight loss programs, sports, etc. But I think it’s not the most durable kind of behavior change mechanism.

And, honestly, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what was happening with me. Because while I like to think that everyone cares about everything about me, it’s really tough to imagine that anyone reading this (except for maybe my mom – hi mom!) gives a damn about how much I walked yesterday. And it’s even tougher to imagine that I would care much about what you thought about how much I walked.

So for me in this particular case, I think it was my OCD nature kicking in. I didn’t really like imagining the graph (of whatever data it is that I may, some day in the future, create a graph from) having a void spot in it. I want things to be smooth lines, no drop outs. I think that can be a motivator for folks, too — completeness of the data report, but I think it’ll motivate a far smaller set of folks.

I think where you get to in the end is that there is something very important about tracking data, because it changes your relationship to the activities you’re measuring pretty fundamentally. (some ways good, others not good.)

And that collecting data about how you live, in particular, will always have holes in it — for lots of reasons.

Anyhow, was an interesting set of thoughts — some important things going on here.

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