I’ve written the new site from the ground up using Tom Preston-Werner’s awesome jekyll and a bunch of other brilliant frameworks and tools (if you’re interested, there’s a colophon).

I’ve done all of the design and styling myself and it’s the first time I’ve used HTML5 in anger, so it might be a bit – er – semantically challenged. Please let me know what you think, or if you encounter any code or styling related bogosity.

I might even start posting more regularly. Well, you never know.

Anyhow, the new address is dlimiter.net and if you’d like to subscribe, there’s a new blog feed as well.

Hope to see you there.

Dave

1. It was a lot harder to program four hours of music than I thought.
2. While it’s not strictly necessary to turn off the channel audio on the second CD. player when cueing a track, it can be a good idea if you don’t want to play two CDs to air at the same time.
3. Even when you stuff things up and feel a bit stupid, radio is fun.

Across 110th - Street Bobby Womak
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) – Nancy Sinatra
The Crook, The Cloak And The Maiden – The Spoils
The Saddest Sound – The Devastations
Glory Box – Portishead
Buffalo – Mountain Man
The Flowers – Regina Spektor
Bend To Squares – Death Cab For Cutie
New Slang - The Shins
King Of Carrot Flowers Part 2 – Neutral Milk Hotel
Alarmist Pacific – UV
Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean – Explosions In The Sky
L’Arena - Ennio Morricone
Flutter – Dirty Three
All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
Doesn’t Matter Much – Blood Red Shoes
Sharps – Autumn Giants
Wish Fulfillment – Sonic Youth
In The Family – Amanda Palmer
Ill – The Indelicates
Tiger Heart - The Frowning Clouds
Life On Mars - David Bowie
Astronaut: A Short History Of Nearly Nothing – Amanda Palmer
Charles In Charge – Smudge
Luka – Lemonheads
Ordinary World – Something For Kate
Fake Plastic Trees – Amanda Palmer
Ceremony – New Order
Nantes – Beirut
After The Storm – Mumford And Sons
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 - The Flaming Lips
Shame of the Nation - New Order
That Certain Female – Charlie Feathers
(I Know A Girl Called) Jonny - Rowland S Howard
Caught By The Fuzz - Supergrass
Here Comes Your Man – The Pixies
Stars – Flat Stanley
Lunar Eclipse - Bridezilla
Red Version – Ghostwood
Transmission – Joy Division
Babe I’m Gonna Leave You – Led Zeppelin
Strange Fruit – Billie Holliday
Don’t Fool With Me – Screamin Jay Hawkins
The Legend Of Pai Mei - David Carradine
Lonesome Organist Rapes Page Turner – The Dresden Dolls
I Can’t Wait – The White Stripes
Brat – Magic Dirt
The Weeping Song – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
A Satisfied Mind - Johnny Cash
The Hardest Part – Washington
The Other Side Of The Pillow - The Triangles
Maybe You Can Owe Me – Architecture In Helsinki
Come Down - Spoils
I Thought You Were God – Clare Bowditch And The Feeding Set

Anyhow, a couple of years ago I noticed these weird scratchpads you could buy at pet stores that were basically plastic bases with strips of cardboard rolled into them. At the time our cat wasn’t really into the more expensive upright scratch pad we’d gotten for her so I thought it might be worth trying something similar. The one I’m constructing in the images below is the third one she’d been through – they tend to last a while, though it will be in direct proportion to the quality/hardness of the cardboard you use.

Stuff I used

• Old cardboard boxes (Something that’s just going to be thrown out or recycled anyway)
• Ruler
• Sharpie (For marking)
• Roll of cheap packing tape
• Decoration (I used wrapping paper and clear contact)
• Cat (Strictly speaking not mandatory, but why bother otherwise?)

Step 1 – Get boxes

I used the recyclables from a local shop as the cardboard tends to be fairly big and sturdy but any old stuff will do:

Step 2 – Cut boxes into strips. Lots of strips

This is the painful part. I unfolded all of the boxes and cut a 10cm template out of the first one which I then used to mark out the rest. I’m fairly accurate with free hand cutting so I cut the strips out with a stanley knife. You can use scissors if you really want to, but after the first box you probably wont :)

Step 3 – Roll strips

So next I start rolling the strips and securing with them cheap packing tape. I used the shorter strips first, and used a fair bit of tape for stability. I fount that the thicker cardboard was a lot easier to work with if I softened it up first by pre-bending the strips before attaching them:

Step 4: Keep rolling. And rolling

And rolling. And rolling. Run out of cardboard. Curse. Return to step 2 and repeat until you have the desired size.  From my previous experience, a bigger pad is better – your cat will want to stretch out to scratch and they’ll like it better if they can get both their front feet and back feet on the pad a the same time:

Step 5: Make it pretty

Here I’ve gone for a bit of a circus platform look with some IKEA wrapping paper (and clear contact to protect it and keep it dry ) but this is the bit where you get to be creative, so have fun with it. I think I might hand paint a design on the next one…

Step 5: Insert cat

And that’s it. Bask vicariously in the glow of your well scratched cat.

Situated at the base of Donkey Wheel House at 673 Bourke St in the Melbourne CBD, the Kinfolk Cafe is based around the idea of ethical consumption:

…whereby consumers purchase goods that have been ethically sourced and maintain a responsible relationship to the supply chain.

In other words, the food is sourced from ethical & sustainable producers and profits contributed to a variety of partner charity projects. It’s a nice warm comfortable place with good coffee and well worth a look if you’re in the area.

Free wireless is in progress, but even without it, this would make a great venue for casual co-working and meetups – a niche that is unfortunately quite empty at the western end of the CBD.

If you’re interested in more information, volunteering or becoming a partner organisation drop by their website for more details.

You see, as far as personal computing is concerned I think that we’ve been in a dark hole for a long time now. Computers started out as a very niche tool with a very narrow set of use cases. This limited the user base to a fairly narrow set of people with the specific knowledge and expertise required to execute. Over the last couple of decades however, the technology has evolved into an incredibly generic and flexible platform with a corresponding increase in the breadth of spectrum of users, ranging from programmers to content producers to people who use it to look up pictures of cats and “put them on the email”.

Over the course of this evolution, as users we have learned, through bitter experience, a certain acceptance of computers as being Complicated and that Things Will Go Wrong. This acceptance is very interesting in that is completely out of alignment with the expectations we have for just about any other form of consumer electronics. We wouldn’t put up with a washing machine that performed increasingly erratically the longer it was running without being turned off and on again, and yet every day thousands of business and personal computer users wrestle with Windows Vista. Oh, the humanity.

What has happened is that in an attempt to provide Choice (which is good), computers have become so flexible that the corresponding complexity of the systems produced often makes them unreliable and difficult to use and maintain (which is bad). This is especially the case for the non-technical users who are now the real growth area in the market. In contrast to this, the 20/80 rule that tells us that the biggest percentage of effects in a system will generally be dependent on a small number of variables – that in the general case, the bulk of computer usage actually results from a relatively small number of features and options. Good design should put effort into engineering for the common case. Handling for the exception should only come after that has been done right.

So where does my shiny new laptop fit into this? Well, one of the most common gripes with Apple computers and devices is that they are too closed, with less customisability and hackable options, which alienates the kind of users who enjoy this level of control (regardless of whether these people ever actually use it). To be fair, this is absolutely true. To be honest, I don’t really care all that much, because in the trade-off between flexibility and simplicity of user experience Apple’s OSX has found a balance that provides basic customisability while being consistent with good design principles of Affordance and Progressive Disclosure – the common case natural, easy and consistent to a degree that I have not seen before, with any underlying complexity generally hidden from the user. And to be perfectly honest, the hardware is just so damn pretty.

Mac isn’t perfect. The usability and simplicity of user experience comes at the expense of more complex configuration options either being hidden away or removed all together, and as a programmer and designer this can be a problem. But while Window’s wasn’t necessarily Bad For Me or anything, in general I cry a lot less and smile a lot more now that it’s gone.

My name is Dave, and I am a Mac.

I’ve just come across another very interesting TED video with Tim Brown, the CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO discussing the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play, and it’s gotten me thinking about how this translates to a software development context. In his talk, Brown discusses three behaviours of play that translate into creative work practice:

1. Experimentation

Experimentation is what prevents us from stopping at “good enough”. It’s all about trying out ideas and seeing where they lead without restricting creative flow with self editing and artificial barriers. It may be a little counter intuitive for an engineering mindset, but it’s more about quantity than quality – unfettered stream of consciousness that opens the creative process to produce possibilities that are not restricted by established norms, opinions and rules.

As we get older our sense of exploration is counteracted by various forms of self editing, such as fear of judgement by our peers. Even the desire to be original can be from of editing, creating an environment where experimentation with similar or derivative works is seen as uncreative or suspect.

2. Construction

This is where we actually start knocking things together to make (quasi) functional examples of the desired product. Construction allows the designer to use a relatively small amount of effort to incorporate simple pre-existing and found components into a potential solution. The act of doing (and just as importantly the act of failing at doing) gentles the designer’s learning curve, can reveal considerations that are not obvious from a conceptual design, and may reframe the problem in such a way that new possibilities are presented. In software development this is generally referred to as prototyping.

From the other side, a prototype can also provide something tangible that a client can interact with. This offers a context that can facilitate the often difficult articulation of the client’s requirements, as well as a providing a source of feedback early in the creative process where it is most productive (and cheaper!) to make fundamental changes.

3. Role-play

Role-play is a from of play that puts the designer in the place of the user, thereby facilitating the production of less tangible outcomes (such as services and interactions) by fostering empathy and allowing a designer to, in a sense, prototype experience. Role-play doesn’t necessarily lead to a fully contextual model of usage (for instance the recent fall out from privacy issues with Google Buzz that were not apparent from in house usage and testing), but like any form of testing, something is usually better than nothing, and it can be leveraged early in the development processes providing potential lead time (and corresponding cost benefit) on fundamental issues and changes.

The underlying theme of these behaviours is that people who feel secure in a safe and trusted environment are more likely to feel free to play and take creative risks. In the design industry, there is an expectation of creative/disruptive behaviours and the interesting and playful environments and practices in successful design firms tend to reflect this. Conversely, the bulk of the software and professional services industry (with several notable and thoroughly over exposed exceptions like Google) has a tendency to treat play as unprofessional and counterproductive.

I suspect that this comes down to issues of expectation and perception – software development is simply not seen as a creative endeavour, and a client paying $X/hr for a software engineer is more likely to see them as a “resource” for which they want (and expect) to get their money’s worth. While this reasonable and fair in principle, it has long recognised in the industry that productivity in software design and engineering cannot be measured in lines of code or by how busy a programmer looks. The very best software engineers are frequently the ones who spend the least amount of time coding (and write the smallest amounts of code) because they think about problems to arrive at a good solution, rather than just any solution.

So how do you convince the customer that creativity in software development is not only acceptable, but desirable? Well, I have a couple of ideas:

• Firstly, software engineering companies themselves need to recognise the creative value of play as part of development and design practice.
• Sell client engagements based on short iterative cycles, where each iteration delivers some value.
• Deliver.

In the end, you aren’t selling clients a perception of business – you’re selling outcomes. Lines of code and hours worked are just metrics that the client uses to measure progress and reduce their perceived risk. Reducing feedback cycles can have the same effect by delivering actual measurable value early and frequently, thereby building trust in your ability to deliver the outcome.

And when you have trust, there is freedom to play.

Extrinsic Motivation

Traditional motivational models are based largely around extrinsic motivators, which come from outside the person and/or the task. They can be positive (such as the offer of a reward) or negative (such as the threat of punishment). Extrinsic motivation seems to work well for tasks that are repetitive or procedural (such as following well-defined instructions to construct a model), but when used with tasks requiring creativity or initiative they actually tend to lead to a decrease in productivity (in terms of both time to execute and the quality of the outcome).

Intrinsic Motivation

In contrast, intrinsic motivators stem from qualities that are inherent in the task or activity itself, such as the feeling of enjoyment or achievement you get from doing something interesting or important. Some commonly discussed intrinsic motivators are:

• Feeling like what you are doing is important – This may be important to the team, project, company or the world at large.
• Doing something you find challenging – We lean when we are pushed out of our comfort zone – it keeps us interested and increases our feeling of self-worth and value.
• Doing something you find interesting – A no brainer. All jobs will have aspects that people wont enjoy, but overall if people don’t find their jobs interesting then they will be unhappy, unproductive, have little investment in the outcome and be more likely to make mistakes.
• People Over Process – If you’ve gone to the trouble to find and hire smart and creative people, don’t micro manage them or provide overly prescriptive or restrictive processes or working constraints. You don’t have to go all the way of a Results Only Working Environment (ROWE), and you do have to keep abreast of progress, but if you put roadblocks in your people’s way you double your own work and stifle the very qualities that you hired them for in the first place.
• Trust and loyalty – Trust and loyalty are things you earn, and they are payed back in kind.
• Feeling appreciated, valued and recognised – Companies always seem to get this one wrong. It isn’t about having grandiose “Employee of the Month” type recognition programs, but rather about meaningful and honest displays of appreciation and recognition. People contribute to the enterprise in a hundred little different ways every day, and they should be recognised in the same way. Your demeanour as a leader can make someone feel valued and important (as it can also have the opposite effect). If someone works late to get over a deadline – buy them something to eat afterwards. If someone makes an improvement suggestion, make sure that their name is noticeably attached to the idea as it is passed further up the chain. If you’re waiting until some future point to make some big gesture then chances are it’s probably already too late – you’ve already lost them.

Intrinsic motivators do have a noticeable effect with productivity in creative tasks, and also add additional value in terms of job satisfaction, engagement and loyalty. It is also worth bearing in mind that the use of extrinsic motivators can actually have the effects of reducing intrinsic motivation in your people, by creating a mindset that selects and prioritizes based on the existence or value of a reward (or fear of a punishment).

The Myth of Salary

While we’re on the topic of motivators, let’s get the myth of the value of salary out of the way. Many companies treat salary as the beginning and end of the value discussion, but in my experience this is a red herring. The kind of people you really want to hire will seldom stay in a job they don’t enjoy because of the pay (though the ones you don’t often will). Being paid well is necessary, but not sufficient as a motivator – by which I mean that it is a box to tick when you decide to accept a job, but it is seldom cited as motivating factor (and dissatisfaction with salary can often actually be a de-motivating factor). Pay people the right amount and just get it the hell off the table.

Change is Hard

Now there is nothing new about these concepts, so why is it that many businesses still seem pathologically fixated on the used of the Carrot and the Stick? I very much doubt that there is a simple answer to this, but I suspect that a large part of the problem has to do with risk aversion and fear of change. Extrinsic motivation is determined and controlled by the enterprise and it’s a pretty big change for an organisation to invert this to put trust and control in the hands of the employees. In a lot of cases, this might even be justified, as by applying extrinsic motivators in the past, companies may have actually selected and supported people with the kinds of mindsets and behaviours that are not actually well suited or conditioned to an intrinsic model. Cultural momentum in an organisation is certainly not something to be taken lightly, and in times of financial hardship it can be hard to sell the expense of investing in a major cultural and organisational paradigm shift which may not immediately yield dramatic or easily quantifiable results.

So, the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation is certainly a challenge for business. It requires a total change in the way the enterprise approaches it’s remuneration, structure and culture; and it bears a not insignificant amount of risk.

Having said that, do it anyway.

Because the ultimate value of a business can be seen as the sum of the skills, efforts and dedication of the people who make it up. Happy, engaged, talented, creative people are rare – you can’t buy them, but if you create the right environment, maybe you can grow them yourself.

Disclaimer – I don’t usually cook to recipes, so any measurements in the following description are likely to be vague at best, and may in some cases be outright misleading.

Chive, Onion and Parmesan Damper

• 400g Self Raising Flour
• 100g Softened Butter (or butter like substitute – and you can add more or less depending on your taste)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup Milk (any kind of cow or soy milk is fine)
• 1 small onion (I use spanish onion because it’s a bit more subtle, but brown would be fine)
• A nice whack of grated Parmesan (fresh is best, nice and fine with a micro-plane grater or similar)
• 1 Bunch of chives, chopped

Pre-heat a hot(ish) oven (around 190-200 is usually good – if it’s too low the damper will be dry and crumbly). Chop the onion finely (halved and sliced in either direction) and fry gently over a moderate heat in a bit of olive oil. When soft  (but not brown) take off he heat and put aside to cool.

Sift the flour into a mixing bowl along with the salt. Add the butter and gently rub the flour and butter together with your finger tips, much like you would if making scones. Mix in the chives, cheese and onion (generally good to work with fingers to make sure the onion isn’t all clumped).

Pour in all of the milk and fold gently into a dough. Try not to over work the dough – there is no yeast so it will toughen and make a heavy, dense bread if worked too much). If it’s a bit wet, pour it onto a floured bench, and gently flour and knead it a couple of times.

Once you have the dough, shape it however you like. You can flatten and cut like scones for individual dampers, but  I usually flatten it into two rough rounds of about a 1 inch in hight and pre-score with a knife into segments (no need to be fancy, the rougher the shape the more interesting and crusty they’ll come out when cooked).

Cook in the oven until sufficiently crusty/browned (it should make a hollow sound when knocked). Like bread, give it a bit of time to settle (so that the dough doesn’t just go mushy when you cut it) and enjoy with lots of butter while hot.

If you have ever worked for a large-ish company then chances are you’ve probably been subjected to the phenomenon of the weekly/monthly team meeting. The purpose of these meetings is for a large group of employees to cram into an uncomfortable and poorly ventilated space where management attempt to kill them with PowerPoint slides and advanced interest deprivation techniques.

Well not really, but you might be forgiven for thinking so. So just what are these meetings for? And why do they suck?

Well, if you ask the organizer of such a meeting, you’ll probably be told something like “knowledge sharing” or “to touch base” which is on the face of it quite reasonable. This unfortunately, is also the problem, because there generally is very little sharing or touching (well the good kind anyway) involved. More commonly these meetings are a one sided waste of time, with leadership talking at a bunch of employees who aren’t listening anyway.

So why are team meetings so hard? I think that the root of the problem is that companies don’t take these meetings seriously – they are often treated as the answer to the “we want better communication from leadership” (which they aren’t) or some kind of recurring catchall for information that doesn’t fit in anywhere else (which they shouldn’t be). Either way, these meetings tend to end up a one sided affair, with a broad set of information being broadcast to an equally broad audience demographic, resulting in a whole bunch of people getting a while lot of noise that they’re not really interested in, creating a blocker to engagement, general discussion and feedback.

For an organisational team meeting to be successful, I think there are a couple of things that should be considered:

The same rules apply as with any other kind of business meeting

Some meeting rules are universal and no matter how formal or informal your implementation, can make the difference between a successful outcome and a complete waste of time:

• Clear and well-defined purpose
• Someone has to take control, lead and keep the meeting on track
• Attendance limited to stakeholders (In this case we have a predefined set of attendees, but it can be flipped around to say that the topics should be limited to content that will be of interest to everyone who is expected to attend. If you have information for a more specific audience, then have a more specific meeting, don’t try to shoe-horn content in just because you have everyone together.
• Engagement – Like any good meeting the communication needs to be two-way. If you’re just doing exposition then you might as well make a video and let people view it in their own time.

The Venue

My department at work has monthly team meetings – an update on the status of current projects and upcoming work, an opportunity to interact with the leadership about less day-to-day topics, and usually a short keynote presentation about something interesting. These meetings have historically been held in one of the big training rooms at our home office and have been characterized by some of the problems outlined above.

As an experiment we’ve hosted the last three offsite at various bars around the CBD (such as the Toff In Town and Cherry Bar) and I think that the change in venue itself has had a pretty large impact on the experience. So just what has the change to an offsite venue given us?

• Breaks patterns – Disruption is good. Getting people out of their comfort zone promotes alertness, engagement and puts them in the right frame of mind to look at issues and opportunities from a different perspective.
• Investment – The time and effort attendees have invested in getting to the venue, combined with the a geographical separation from their workspace means that attendees have a personal investment in the value and success of the meeting, creating a psychological incentive to engage and participate.
• Forces a cap on the week – Another advantage of geographical separation is that it becomes difficult to go back to work afterwards, so people are less likely to spend the entire meeting waiting just for it to finish so that they can go back to work. It also means that everyone finishes their week at the same time – so staff are more likely to get into the spirit of the event and socialize.
• Team building – Travelling to the venue in small groups and drinks after the event provide an assortment of micro-platforms for people to interact outside the scope of their usual social or working group. By extending the meeting into a social event you can also get more informal discussion about topics raised during the meeting further fostering engagement.

Organisational team meetings don’t have to suck, but like any other kind of meeting if they are going to be successful they have to be taken seriously as an opportunity to achieve a specific outcome, rather than a chore.

My first experience with the Melbourne public transport system was about six years ago, when I came over to visit my future wife (who had herself only moved here the year before). She was completely in love with the city and she wanted to show me everything she had discovered since arriving – one of those things being a leisurely tram ride from North Fitzroy to St Kilda.

We grabbed some coffees on Brunswick Street hopped on a tram and, much to my surprise, spent most of the journey having an amiable chat with two ticket inspectors who got on the tram just after us. They were cheerful and friendly, they happily suggested that next time I might want to think about getting a different concession card (as strictly speaking they didn’t have to accept my Adelaide University ID Card) before getting down to the much more important business of suggesting some cool things I should see before I left.

Contrast this to the experience I had this morning, where I left a tram feeling embarrassed and angry, knowing that a crisp new Infringement notice would be winging it’s way to me within the month.

Now, I pay for all of my public transport, or rather my work does, supplying me with a yearly Metcard in lieu of a parking space. Things have been pretty hectic for the last month or so and to be honest I simply didn’t notice that my ticket was due to expire on the 16th. I generally only validate the ticket when travelling on the trains, and I’d stopped doing even that recently on the advice of a Connex gate guard after a machine ate my still valid card for no clearly apparent reason. He simply advised me to show the card when required, as the stock was getting old and the machines tended to react badly to very slight imperfections. So that is where I found myself this morning, surrounded by three contempo-casual “plain clothes” ticket inspectors on my morning tram to work, realizing that my yearly Metcard had expired a day ago. It was an especially horrible feeling in that it was so unexpected, because at no point in the transaction had I intended to do the wrong thing – if I’d known that the card was finished I would have happily payed for a ticket while I arranged a replacement from work. Regardless, I ended with my card confiscated, my details taken and a general feeling of shabiness and the guilt a child gets when caught doing something naughty by an adult.

Now I have to acknowledge that it was entirely my fault that this situation was able to occur, I’m not trying to wiggle out of that or deflect blame. But it does leave me wondering at what point a customer oriented business Jumps the Shark from Protecting Their Interests, to (to paraphrase Wil Wheaton) Being a Dick? At what point are rules so inflexible that they punish a legitimate user in unusual circumstances (be it a lost wallet, a yearly card left at home, ticket machines that aren’t operating, whatever) in the same way that they punish a willful infringer. And when do customers start to resent that the money and effort spent to collect additional revenue is not being matched with cleaner, safer and more reliable services?

This kind of approach probably has a huge short term return in revenue generation. And with the volume of commuters and lack of a viable mass alternative, the percentage of lost customers must by necessity remain relatively low. But in the long term, will making customers feel like criminals build the kind of relationship that the company and the industry really wants? Or is it just training a generation of users to feel less guilty about taking the system for a ride*?