I started out just putting a deck of slides together, keeping it to 20 and cramming as much information as I could in each slide. I did a run through and if a slide took too long, i’d shorten the amount of information on it until it took about the right amount of time. It was still a little frantic but I managed to say everything I wanted to say so I was happy.

Then yesterday, @faludi came by and I did a run through with an audience. From his feedback and suggestions I came to realize that although I was getting all the words I wanted into my deck, I was actually presenting a number of super complicated concepts without the time to provide them with the right context. So although I was finishing in time, I wasn’t being very effective and I was going to make people’s brains hurt.

There isn’t enough time with Pecha Kucha to tell a complicated story. We’re used to a slide having a lot of bullet points, but in fact with Pecha Kucha each slide should have one single, simple idea. The idea can be presented in a timed reveal to help you with pacing.

My new technique is to tell a very simply story with 10 slides instead of 20. Knowing myself and my tendency to cram as much as I can into a slide even when I consciously try not to, making only 10 slides gives me the wiggle room to expand upon each slide with 10 extra slides. Instead of feeling constrained by the format I found the 20 slide format liberating. I can concentrate on telling a simple story really well because there’s no room to do anything else. The power of limitations.

I’m going to echo Shawn’s prediction that this is the year of the no-laptop. Although the jesus phone has innumerable annoyances (how about letting me run more than one app at once without voiding my warranty?) the ushering in of the “real web” on mobile devices now makes using a mobile device the primary options not the fallback. There’s a shift from “oh you’re on your laptop? i’ll use my phone then” to “I’ll look it up using my phone even if there is a laptop around”. I’m having disorientating moments where I expect Safari on my laptop to auto complete a url when in fact I used my iPhone to look something up. I have a mental model that certain sites can only be visited with a laptop based browser but that’s all changing now.

I have a jesus phone. I wasn’t planning on it or anything but an unstoppable convergence of events led me to the kool-aid. My N95 was getting pretty beat up (a couple of the keys were permanently recessed) and i’ve been itching to give iPhone development a shot. Then, when Anna and I were at the Apple store to buy a DVI to S Video/Composite adapter (Otis A/V media system!!) she said “Why don’t I get you an iPhone?” And I didn’t really know why she shouldn’t get me an iPhone, so now I have an iPhone. Just like that.

I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks but I think it’s made me a little stupid. Like forgetting how to find a parking spot on the streets of Brooklyn after parking in a garage for a few months. The iPhone is making me lose my edge. I now have a hard time working with interfaces designed by engineers. Which I guess is a compliment to Apple, except that the iPhone is going to make me slow. Maybe there is an app I can buy to screw up the interface?

Overall I dig it but I am not enamored with it. The browser is super dope as is visual voicemail and the location services but I have the usual litany of complaints (Flash, MMS, video, cut and paste, etc.) Also WTF is with running one app at a time? Such a bad call. That’s what I really miss about Symbian.

Since I am on my phone a lot more than my macbook, the convergence of my mobile and desktop interfaces has made me feel like my laptop is a giant phone. The iPhone is the closest thing i’ve used to the computers I use every day. Not bad.

The phone keeps on correcting ‘ooh’ to ‘pooh’. I don’t say pooh.

My friend Claude pointed me to this interview with the Twitter developers regarding their Rails scaling issues. Not surprisingly, you can throw as many web instances at your site as you want but the real bottleneck ends up being the database. Then you end up having to deal with Squid, real time replication and read-only child databases. Suddenly you need an IT team.

“All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.”

Indeed. When I tail my development.log and look at the SQL being generated by Rails, it makes me cringe. I know i’ll have to one day do something about it but i’m putting it off as long as possible because i’d rather preserve the illusion of Rails (for now anyway) and not clutter my code with three table joins.

Also, check out this snarky response to the Rails developers.

With the loss of sight, we must rely on our other senses to tell the time. This new ‘time telling’ interaction should be no more stigmatizing than the previous interaction. An audible watch may draw attention as would a watch that emits an odor depending on the hour. It’s also important that the watch be something elegant, versus a “handi-watch”. It should be appealing enough that others will desire it and not something that visually impaired people have no choice but to wear while others would never want to. With this goal in mind, designing with constraints can push watch design for everyone instead of just creating a customized, small-run, overpriced watch that stigmatizes the visually impaired.

If hearing and smell are out of the picture we will consider touch and taste. Tactility is the most appealing solution but has a cognitive disconnect we need to overcome to make the watch functional. Taste is just weird but may have interesting applications. We should not confine ourselves to the senses and consider solutions that employ sense combinations or potentially something else entirely.