But it helps

March 17, 2014

Wednesday’s newsletter was a bit wonky, I want to apologize for that. It’s probably going to happen again. And even though I tend to blame myself for everything that goes wrong, in this case I want to point to the computer and curse. Because it’s there and because there is nothing it can do about it. Yet. Once it can, we’re all fucked.

1.0 Motivate!

I really don’t understand motivational quotes or posters. Yet everybody else seems to love them. There is a company that prints them for startups. There are many different people who post them on Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter.
I don’t get it. Does it really help people when a lossy JPG or a crummy print-to-order poster tells them to keep going? I can’t for the love of whatever deity one might chose to believe in understand the thought process that is going on in that moment.

Oh, the expense report that I just filed had a typo in it, so my boss yelled at me. But here is that picture of a kitten in boxing gloves that says ‘Keep fighting’ so all is well!

Really?
The only thing that works for me is people who tell me once in a while that I am not such a terrible person. And do it convincingly enough that I believe them. Luckily I have some of those, so thanks for that.
But a JPG with a garish color gradient that tells me that tomorrow is another day?
Oh, fuck off.

2.0 Vanished

For what it’s worth, my two sources for news about the vanished Malaysia Airlines flight are this (long!) MeFi thread and this blog.

3.0 Monday

Have a good start into the week and take care, everyone.

Who am I?

March 12, 2014

Don’t expect this to happen at regular intervals. The name might have been a hint. Basically I will write this whenever I feel like it. (Or when someone sends me a bucket of gold to do so. Honestly, I’ve always been willing to sell out.

1.0 Delivered/Read

Most modern messaging clients tell the sender of a message if the recipient recieved and actually read the sent message. Some, like WhatsApp, even show the last time people used the software.
That is literally hell for people with an unhealthy dose of social anxiety. Most people might not read too much into it, but it’s a whole new layer on how and what to communicate.
And disabling those features – as it is possible on some clients – sends a whole other message, because even that is usually visible for other people.

And the fact is that those technologies are still pretty young and we haven’t quite figured out what the proper etiquette around them are.

We have learned that requiring read receipts in emails is something that only Outlook users know about and only people with sociopathic and controllic tendencies would do. (There is a surprising overlap in those two groups.) Most of us have also learned to keep emails short and sweet. (The irony of mentioning that in a rambling newsletter is not lost on me.) We do know that calling people in the middle of the night is really quite rude.
Most of us might even think that calling unannounced at every point of the day is pretty rude. Who is using phones for calling people anymore, anyway?

Rude.

This matches well with the Ox and Moron section of the last newsletter. People – and by people I mean me – tend to have different standards on how to understand their own and other people’s behavior around these issues. While it’s perfectly fine to just ignore a message for now when I do it, I do feel slightly miffed when I see that someone has received and read my message and does not respond right away.
I might even be forced to call them.

2.0 This is the wurst! Or not.

Last sunday I have figured out an ingenious way to judge German towns.
If I manage to find a nice bratwurst in a bun on a Sunday afternoon in town without having to take a car, the town gets the thumbs up.

I am sad to say that Lörrach didn’t make it.

3.0 A brief moment of panic

Last night, Twitter was down for a short while.
Last week, I was unable to use Instagram for a couple of days.
Both events scared me more than they should. Crisis of identity. Who am I if not @dominik?
Now that I am back living in my home town, I seem to be “The young Mr Schwind” to most people which freaks me out even more.
—
This should do it for now. Thanks again for reading, it is rather nice of you to do so.
If you have anything at all to say, you can just use the reply function. Tinyletter says that I get those and I do take their word for it.
Dominik

Floating Particles

March 10, 2014

1.0 Hi!

After I posted the link to this newsletter on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and WeChat, a whole bunch of you signed up – thanks a lot! You’re all wonderful people! And I am pretty sure I can even say this without lying, which is even nicer.

2.0 $$$

Yesterday I skipped a podcast commercial for the first time.

I usually don’t do this. And even though I am one of the many people who feel that their lovely internet of yore got taken over by the evils of commercialism, I tend to not mind well-made advertisement in my media. And by well-made I mostly mean: relevant without giving me the feeling that they were creepily targeted towards exactly me.
Podcast ads more or less work for me in that way – I have bought goods and services because they paid for air time on a podcast. Given that I doubt that anyone tracks me and inserts the right audio ad in a podcast, it does not feel creepy, even though it is targeted right at the market segment that I chose to belong to.

Now that I said that out loud, I am sure that someone is actively working on that idea. Cookies could work in podcast clients. Move the audio files with markers through a central ad-network server. Insert targeted audio ads.
Honestly, no. Do not do that. Please. Ever.

3.0 You’re an ox and a moron

A few days ago I saw an article in which the author was mad – really mad – that someone changed their opinion on a topic between in the timeframe between 2007 and 2014.
It is pretty amazing that we humans in general tend to grow, learn new facts, adapt to new realities, process new information and yet we are utterly confused when someone else does it.

Of course we don’t want people in positions of power to suddenly turn 180° on important topics – we would be right in being pretty mad at a politician who suddenly made policy that goes very much against what they promised during their election campaign.
Well, we probably would be mad but not all that surprised.

But we don’t even have to look at a timeframe of seven years – people contradict themselves and change their minds all the time. Going from “having a coffee would be a clever idea” to “drinking that coffee was not a clever idea” only needs the (apparently at this point surprising and new) information that it’s 10pm and one needs to get up early the next day.

4.0 Monday

Have a good start of the week, everybody. Stay healthy and awesome.
Dominik

Where it all begins

March 7, 2014

1.0 Hello

If there is one thing more old-school than a newsletter, it might be a fax machine. And while it is tempting to combine these two, it would probably break my budget to fax what I write to the three people who actually want to read it.
Given that I have not one, not two, but at least three blogs (And countless of half-forgotten zombie blogs that I started some day and forgot.) in which I don’t write anything, one might wonder why I would want to write a newsletter.
If you only know email newsletters the way corporate entities write them, you probably hate them. Usually written by the PR or marketing department, they include a wealth of useless information – unless you are looking for information about that entities’ good and services. But in the last couple of months I started to see some actually interesting newsletters come out, written by people who actually have something to say and/or the knack of finding interesting things to talk about and link to.
And then there is me, who is neither.

1.1 Interesting newsletters

At the moment I am subscribed to only a few of them:

  • NextDraft
    Probably the most well-known and most consistent of the bunch. If you need to know what is happening in the world and don’t have the time or nerves for getting the kind of watercooler news through social media, this is the newsletter to subscribe to. If you do have the time and nerves to do so, still read it – there are often a whole bunch of gems in there that didn’t get into my filter bubble in other ways.
  • Things That Have Caught My Attention
    A pretty recent subscription which I have found by chance. Very smart, very well written. I blatantly stole the numbering system from him.
  • The Quartz Morning Edition
    Unlike the other two entries, this is not written by a single person but seems to be semi-automated by their CMS. It’s probably the most grown-up of the three and is a nice concise way of catching up with world news first thing in the morning.

How about you? Any interesting newsletters you like to receive? I am always open to new sources for my strange addiction to good internet content.
See what I did there? That’s Social Media skills. Driving reader engagement through open questions.

2.0 The curious case of a strange “security” feature

Playing around with newsletters I discovered a strange feature of the mail system at my current workplace. For some reason that is not clear to me, a sub-system of the mail server – and I do suspect the spam filter – follows every url in an email. This of course wreaks havoc with double-opt-in mails and even more havoc with one click unsubscribe links. Like the one below, in case I already bore you.
I can not think of any scenario where auto-following the links in an email would be a good idea.

3.0 App of the Week

This section is very much named this way because there is a section like this on The Frequency. I don’t think I will send out a newsletter weekly and I even less think I will talk about an app every time. Still.
The app of the week is Jawbone’s UP Coffee.
I have been toying with a coffee counter app since way before there were even apps. Or decent smart phones. I have a web app prototype for one (completely with a domain and everything) since at least 2002 – and the chances that I will ever finish and release it are slim to none. But despair not – the people behind the weird Jawbone UP fitness bracelet just release a free and very pretty app that does exactly that: you enter your coffee consumption and there will be a nice graph of your caffeine intake. They even try to guess if you’ll be able to sleep at night. The only thing missing is a data export.
Interestingly enough just while I was writing this newsletter, Dan Hon sent out a new Things That Have Caught My Attention where he talks about the same app in a way smarter way than I could do. So read it there, too.

4.0 Thanks

Thank you for reading. This will be back.
Dominik