Scott Bush

Who would have thought a pro­hi­bi­tion on brown M&Ms could be a safety measure?

In the open­ing of this weekend’s episode of This Amer­i­can Life, host ira Glass dis­cussed a line from rock group Van Halen’s con­cert rider. The line, requir­ing that a bowl of M&Ms be avail­able back­stage with all the brown can­dies removed, is infa­mous for typ­i­fy­ing rock stars’ demand­ing needs. Ira’s talk with another, less flam­boy­ant rock star reveals that the color-specific M&M require­ment is less about Van Halen’s finicky taste in candy and more about safety. In short, it’s a great exam­ple of design mov­ing beyond form and becom­ing func­tional. In this case, it ensures the venue’s man­age­ment has read and fol­lowed the band’s strin­gent require­ments for its exten­sive gear, light­ing, and speak­ers for their show. (Lis­ten to the open­ing sequence for the rest of the story.)

It’s the design of the rider that strikes me as most inge­nious. By work­ing in a per­sonal request deep among the para­graphs of con­cert spec­i­fi­ca­tions, the band would know instantly whether the rig­or­ous safety require­ments  in the rider had been paid atten­tion to. Brown M&Ms in the bowl = unread rider; a candy-coated canary in the coalmine. Sim­ple, ele­gant, and effec­tive. Now that’s good design. If you like, you can read the whole rider.

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If you’ve not seen the “JK Wed­ding Entrance Dance” video that’s been mak­ing the rounds on teh intar­webs lately, you should go watch it now at YouTube. (I’d embed it here, but it’s been dis­al­lowed so it has to be watched over at YouTube.). Seri­ously, it’ll be the best time you’ve spent on the web since the I Like Tur­tles kid.

I don’t have much to say other than “wow!” What an entrance! It’s just so ener­getic and happy: what a wed­ding should be. I love the hand-held cam­era, the guests who clearly weren’t expect­ing such a treat but start clap­ping along imme­di­ately, and the sum­m­er­sault the groom takes on the way in. But what I really found amaz­ing about it, and what it said to me, was these peo­ple are ecsta­tic to be get­ting mar­ried. To get your friends and fam­ily to dance down the aisle (and clearly, some folks aren’t the best dancers—I’m look­ing at you, 1920s-pugilist-punch-the-air-move-guy) is a tes­ta­ment to the couple’s infec­tious joy. I was smil­ing the whole time. Good for them to have a unique wed­ding and to share it with the world: the video’s got over 11 mil­lion views so far!

I can only imag­ine what their recep­tion was like…

“Inchy power.” If I could chose only one topic from the Feed­ing Crane kung fu sem­i­nar I attended in early June, it would have to be “inchy power.” Not only do I smile every time I think of Sifu Liu Change say­ing that phrase, I am still amazed by what it rep­re­sents: strikes of explo­sive power gen­er­ated with essen­tially no “wind up,” or chambering.

First, a lit­tle back­ground. For about a year now, I’ve been train­ing in the tra­di­tional Oki­nawan karate style called goju-ryu; “goju” means hard-soft and describes the phi­los­o­phy of the art. Our goju sen­sei, Rakesh Malik, stud­ies Feed­ing Crane kung fu as well and has been incor­po­rat­ing many of the exer­cises (and a kata, Angle Fist) into our train­ing. As we per­formed the series of exer­cises, Sen­sei often told us how Sifu Chang could strike with incred­i­ble power—not just with his fist, but with elbow and shoul­ders, too, thanks to these exer­cises. The thought of learn­ing to hit with even a frac­tion of that power made the burn­ing in my shoul­ders and traps a lit­tle more bearable.

So ear­lier this spring we were excited to learn that Sifu Chang him­self would visit North­west Mar­tial Arts to hold a sem­i­nar June 6 and 7. It was a very intense two days! Each day we met at 9 a.m. and trained until 5 p.m. Luck­ily, much of that was watch­ing and lis­ten­ing; there’s no way I could get through a full day of prac­tice at the inten­sity level of our usual Sun­day classes.

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Alumna is not a mis­spelling. Who knew?

My wife has a sweat­shirt from the col­lege she attended, an all-women’s school in Min­nesota. Embla­zoned across the front below the school’s name is the word “ALUMNA.”

That word always bugged me; I thought it was a mis­spelling of the word “alum­nae,” which I believed was the cor­rect term for a sin­gle female uni­ver­sity or col­lege grad­u­ate. Work­ing in a registrar’s office, terms for grad­u­ates comes up fairly often and one day I men­tioned this sweat­shirt and the annoy­ance it caused me.

“You’d think an all-women’s col­lege would know bet­ter,” I said, wrap­ping up my tale. Instead of the expected vit­riol against the heavy cot­ton offender, I got a strange look. “They do know bet­ter… ‘alumna’ is correct.”

Since I’m not one to argue with my boss—especially when that boss stud­ied medieval Eng­lish, Greek and Lating—I paid atten­tion. After my school­ing, here’s how it breaks down:

Sure, it’s got that good ol’ sex­ist tra­di­tional method of default­ing to the male group term in any mixed group (99 female grad­u­ates and one male would still be called “alumni”), but hey—if peo­ple today use the term “guys” to refer to mixed group (or even an all-female one), we can’t get to upset over Latin traditions.

Per­haps soon we’ll just all wear sweaters with “ALUM” across the front and be done with it?

A real (ugly) sign.

On a walk this evening I noticed this gem of a sign. While I am a pro­po­nent of gun– and drug-free schools, I dis­ap­prove of ugly, poorly-designed signs. This sign is a card-carrying mem­ber of that group.

The first thing I noticed was the red Ghostbuster-style cir­cle indi­cat­ing that this dis­trict is firmly against the ter­ri­ble “drug gun.”

Putting both words in the same cir­cle really con­fuses the mes­sage. There’s room to put two smaller cir­cles with one word each, which would then show each word struck through with a red line, rather than this odd­ity. And shouldn’t those be plural? “Drugs” and “guns” are not allowed.

Look­ing fur­ther down it (kind of) makes sense. It’s a drug– and gun-free zone! Oh, that does make sense… but the sign doesn’t con­vey that mes­sage well. The large “free zone” at the bot­tom feels too sep­a­rated from the words “drug” and “gun” that mod­ify “free zone.” And if you do read the sign as it’s drawn, you’d have some­thing like “a no gun or drug”-free zone… a bit of a dou­ble neg­a­tive there.

Okay, so I’m push­ing this a bit far. It’s unlikely any­one would really be con­fused as to the intent of this sign. But it cer­tainly isn’t grace­ful or well designed when it eas­ily could have been (start­ing with uni­fy­ing the type­face and size, but I won’t go there).

I love Face­book because it lets me read what my friends are doing, see pic­tures, share parts of my own life with friends, and play an occa­sional game. I would not do any of these things if it cost me money (well, prob­a­bly; I hope I’m never asked to pay). But I’m not an idiot, either, so I under­stand they need to gen­er­ate rev­enue some­how. That means ads, and I’m okay with that.
You may have heard that adver­tis­ers aren’t lov­ing their returns from FB ads. “Mon­e­tiz­ing” the social media plat­form is chal­leng­ing because peo­ple are there to inter­act with their friends, not adver­tis­ers. Well, that may be true. It does seem more inva­sive that ads are tar­geted to you more pre­cisely based on your pro­file infor­ma­tion, but hey, FB needs to make money some­how, right? TechCrunch posted some leaked info on FB’s finan­cial sit­u­a­tion that doesn’t look too pos­i­tive. Right now, ads are the only way to gen­er­ate income from this sort of site.

They *almost* had it right… not.

But adver­tis­ers aren’t doing a good job, at least those whose ads FB thinks are tar­geted at my demo­graphic. I saw an ad to “Tat­too my wife’s name on my pro­file.” Hmmm… not sure why I’d be inclined to do such a thing. But yeah, maybe Jen deserves to see her name in dig­i­tal lights on my FB pro­file. Oh wait—my wife’s name isn’t Jen, as this FB adver­tiser should know. I’ve Pho­to­shopped the ad next with my sta­tus box so you can see the mis­take. If that ad had read “Crys­tal” instead of “Jen,” I may have been inclined to click through and see what it’s about. (What­ever it was, I doubt it’s really free as they claim.)

I can think of a cou­ple rea­sons this might not been possible:

1. Pri­vacy — FB doesn’t share that level of details from user’s pro­files with adver­tis­ers. Mean­ing, they tar­get me to the level of “male, mar­ried” but not “male, mar­ried, wife: ‘Crystal’.”
2. Tech­ni­cal — The adver­tiser didn’t want to fig­ure a way to dynamically-generate ad images based on the name.

If it’s due to rea­son 1, that’s good; it’s nice to know there are some things FB won’t sell out about me. If it’s #2, then that’s really a missed oppor­tu­nity for the adver­tiser who took the easy way out. Sure, it’d be tricky to do: you’d have to query the user’s pro­file info, ren­der that spouse’s name after address­ing issues of name length (it’s no mis­take they chose a three-letter name), and deliver the image for the ad. It’s a lot of work com­pared to serv­ing up a sin­gle image, but it might be worth it. As it is, the ad came across as half-baked and kept me from click­ing it (though it did get me to write a blog post!).

Am I being too crit­i­cal? Per­haps. But adver­tis­ers need to step it up on FB and other social media plat­forms that offer more ways to tar­get users. Adver­tis­ers need personalization—but done well—to get through to savvy users. This ad missed the mark.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find out who this Jen woman is…