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For almost 3 years, I didn’t sleep on a bed. I slept on the floor. Why? Obviously, I didn’t have a bed. And beds, in case you haven’t noticed, are expensive. There is really no use buying a 100-dollar bed from IKEA and breaking it from vigorous… nocturnal activities. And mattresses, don’t get me on them – they’re expensive, and the minimum quality mattress I was going to go for was way above my willingness-to-pay.

So, I slept on the floor. Until today. From today on, I shall be sleeping on corrugated cardboard.

Behold:

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As many of my readers know (that is, 5 out of 5 who read this blog), I’m actively involved in the startup space – our startup is Pressyo, and we have a couple of projects sitting on the launchpad, some with ignition already. My startup team is a very good team. We’ve went through multiple projects, failing most of the time (and the occasional success we’ve had rapidly degenerated into failures), and undoubtedly, we will fail many times to come in the future. For every failure we make, we dissect the failure, and find pain points, and fix them with tools. We argue a lot over why we failed, but the important thing is that we learn. This article is >2300 words long. If you want, you may jump to the TL;DR of Polish, Passivity, Privacy, Pressyo instead.

Polish, or the Cool Cam

One of the things we recently argued about is with regards to polish – as in, a product must look polished in terms of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). One of the things we agreed upon early in the inception of the company is the unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. And it was my argument that polish was not part of the philosophy. I argued vis-à-vis project success, that polish was not necessary. Google was just a simple HTML text box with a button* Google will of course later be hyper obsessive-compulsive about everything ; Reddit still looks terrible, but accounts for a majority of web traffic users; Facebook looked terrible when it first began… and so on and so forth. The counter argument was Apple. iPhones were terrible. They did not have all the features of contemporary phones (and still don’t, really, if you really want to compare). But they did one thing really well: user experience. If they did another thing really well, it was marketing.

My father, ever the gadget lover, used a smartphone before the phrase “smartphone” existed. Remember the O2 XDA? He had one of those. He went on from smartphone to smartphone, from O2 XDA to a HTC Touch to a HTC  Diamond 2, which was last stolen in Dubai. Then he switched to an iPhone. Despite the lack of features, he had still found it a better phone, simply because the iPhone does what it is supposed to do very well. The user experience for the iPhone  surpasses anything my dad had ever used.

I too, had been using smartphones from the time they were called PDA phones. My first was a HP h2210 hacked together with a CF-based GSM receiver. I then moved on to other phones, and finally settling on a HTC Desire. If I ever upgrade any time soon (damn you Telstra and your restrictive contracts), I would probably upgrade to a similar Android device. Because to me, Android phones do one thing really well: flexibility. Heck, I once pulled data off a csv off my work email and wrote a regression analysis while en route on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane on my phone.

The difference between the iPhone 3Gs and my HTC Desire? They cater to different people.  The chrome of the polish shows differently to different people. I like to tinker * and while doing that I sacrifice artifacts with stuff. I am tolerant of terrible user experiences – the worst of my smartphone experiences comes from dropped calls and terrible hacking of my HP h2210 (I literally took a program* PocketPC and Windows mobile programs were called “programs” not “apps” apart, figured out what was wrong with it and tried to recompile it to no success) – even my Symbian experiences with Nokia, whilst traumatic, wasn’t as bad. My HTC Desire has been a far cry from all that. Were I to present the modern day Android phone to someone of my father’s caliber, he would, I guess instantly like it, but probably not as much as the iPhone. Likewise, while I like the iPhone, I find it frustrating at times given that I can’t hack around to make it do things the way I want it to.

So you see, polish is not a single facet (as my prose may have led you to think). Androids are polished on their flexibility end. iPhones on the other hand, are polished on the UX end. If I were mean, I’d say the UX of the iPhone is the sizzle that sells the slightly-overcooked steak; while the Android is a perfectly cooked steak but because it was cooked _sous-vide_* which for the record, in my opinion is the best way to cook steak , has no sizzle.

Despite this, I agreed thoroughly with the counter-argument. The crux of the argument is that polish is necessary, and whilst I don’t agree that the polish on the UX is as necessary as the polish and chrome on the actual features, I have come to learn that UX can more often than not, act as the cool cam.  I don’t think I will ever place as much of an importance of the external polish factor as Steve Jobs put, but I’ve thought through this myself long and hard, and concluded that UX (and other external polish like cool interface etc) are required, even at bare minimum. I think of it exactly like the situation as described in the Daily WTF, except, instead of board members, executives or investors that you’re thowing the product at, the people who judge you are your users of your product. Give them a cool cam, and they will shut up for a bit while they learn the ropes of your system.

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I watched In Time a couple of days ago and while I’ve been a huge fan of all four of Andrew Niccol’s big name movies (In ranking order: Gattaca, S1m0n3, Lord of War, Truman Show), I must admit that In Time let me down quite a bit, but also strangely I loved the rather nicely realized version of an economic model. The movie was fine – Cillian Murphy’s acting was top notch, but the same cannot be said about Justin Timberlake. I loved the premise of the story, I loved the setting of the story, and I am fine with the story being all over the place. They kept hinting at more (I personally was hoping for a Logan’s Run-esque payoff – i.e. something larger than themselves), but there was no satisfying payoff in the end, and I was fine with that. I give In Time a 6.5/10. The following will be an exploration of the economics in In Time. Needless to say, here is a spoiler alert

What really bugged me though, was the mechanics of the currency. The premise of the movie is as such: time is now a currency, and intrinsically linked to their lives, and the lower class of society has to fight for their lives. They live from day to day, working just enough to earn them one more day of living. Another premise is that at least nominal price inflation happens. At the beginning of the movie, we the audience are told, and shown with rather emotional consequences that the prices of things are rising. A third premise that I think is fairly important in considering the economics of In Time is that the currency is spent every living second of a person’s life. Let us not consider to whom first, and assume that the currency evaporates. It is on these premises the plot of the movie was built upon. Essentially what bugged me the most was this: Given the premises of the movie, why was there even inflation to begin with? I try to give reasons in this article.

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So, today's blog will be slightly off the norm. I had been working on a project for some time, and over the weekend, we had decided to port it over to the very excellent Twitter Bootstrap from JQueryUI. With a new framework, comes new learnings. You see, in JQueryUI Tabs, you could dynamically load your tab content with this: [Read More]

Last week, I tweeted that I was in Canberra. I was there to acquire some documentation required for my visa (and they better goddamn give me my visa – I’ve been waiting for about 2 years for it already, and my partner already has her permanent visa). And of course, this tweet about a commotion from the gallery of the House of Representatives would indicate I was in the Parliament at that time. Of course that was a delayed tweet since phones weren’t allowed in the gallery. The following tweet would then give clues to what I thought about the visit to Question Time.

Yes, I decided to make a visualization on Question Time. I sat through the entire session, and I thought it might be interesting to do a dataviz on what I saw. I went to the Parliament Hansard records site * The words “Hansard records” comes from the redundant department of redundancy , picked out the hansard for the day I went (September 13), and processed the Question Time transcript. The day I was there, I noted only two main topics of interest – Asylum Seekers (a.k.a the Malaysia Plan vs the Pacific Solution) and the Carbon Tax * As an economist, I must say the carbon tax is a brilliant idea . I also noticed that for the Carbon Tax/Climate Change questions were from government backbenchers, and that the opposition rarely asked questions (only ridiculous interjections). The Malaysia vs Nauru plan for refugees however, had brilliant responses from both sides * no actually, not really, both sides’ arguments are utter and total crap – I can see so much better solutions for both parties to join together and opt for. Seems like politicians don’t think out of the box . This to me indicated that there would be two ways to visualize Question Time.

So, without much ado, I present: the Carbon Tax/Climate Change visualization from parliament Question Time on 13th September 2011:

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The conversation went something like this:

Me: I’m bored, and I have a writer’s block – I have so many things to blog about and absolutely nothing to blog about.

Friend: You know what you should do? You should blog about work.

And here it is – my first work-related blog post. But first, let me treat you to an image, the result of preparing for this blog post:

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– rei – says: they just posted on reddit that they’re going to make an announcement whoever guesses the announcement gets a free t-shirt! LOL Chewxy says: … time to misuse time travel – rei – says: you have a time travel machine? Chewxy says: tardis! – rei – says: where did you get a TARDIS from Chewxy says: Gallifrey – rei – says: and you would know where Gallifrey is, how? [Read More]

My partner made a joke earlier when we went out for dinner. It was something along the lines of “do your duty for God, Queen and Country”, to which I replied, “but I don’t believe or endorse any of those concepts to be good concepts!”. Of course she knows that I am agnostic to all of these, and hence the joke.

The concept of fairness plays a bit part in my mind, and what I consider my values. Yes, despite the fact attitudes may be made up on the fly, I do think that I have some values and attitudes I hold on to – and I like to think I have carefully analyzed and reanalyzed those values I hold to. In short, I think I have reasoned myself into holding some values and chucking some other values. In fact if you had read this blog since its inception in 2004, you would have known I have blogged less, and appeared to be less opinionated on some things – it was partly due to having less time, and also partly due to a lot of re-evaluation of my values and knowledge (essentially there was a period in 2008-2011 when I thought I really didn’t know enough to comment on anything)

Part of why I disagree with the concept of “duty to”, “God”, “Queen” and “Country” is because of fairness, and in one of the cases, a very recent event has left some bitterness and hence triggered this post.

Onwards, shall we? 

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I have many things to do. But I am simply bored out of my mind. These are the things I want to do, and the excuses that I have for them: Work on [Codename: EY], [Codename OX], [Codename PY], [Codename CN] I am too lazy to open Eclipse – it means I’ve gotta get out of bed, go to my workstation in my home office, open Eclipse and write code. I’m feeling a bit too lazy for that Have sex The booty call(s) are unavailable due to multiple reasons. [Read More]

I had been watching Ten’s latest offering – Can of Worms, and one of today’s questions was “Is the burqa out of place in Australia?”.  And then I tweeted this:

the burqa is dehumanizing, and alienating – the burqa is immoral. But echoing Don Burke, I’d fight for the rights [for women] to wear it. #canofburqas

140 characters, unfortunately is not enough for anyone to expound their thoughts, or even qualify their statements, and so I thought I’d blog about it more.

First things first, let’s get the initial question out of the way – yes, I think the burqa is out of place in Australia, and pretty much any where else in the world, even in Afghanistan.  It is out of place both in Australia and anywhere in the world because what it stands for is immoral.

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