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Returning to an analog watch

April 10, 2023 /

Starting in around third or fourth grade, I wore a watch every day. I always had more than one option, and they ranged, over the years, from various Casio gadget watches to Swatch Skin designs, from a Movado (bar mitzvah) to a Breitling (engagement), from $15 fake Rolexes on Fifth Avenue to the M&Co 10-One-4. I always had more than one, and I’d match them to the occasion and even to the color of my shoes.

Then I got an Apple Watch. The Series 0, first one out the gate, in stainless steel so I could wear it with a suit (back when such things mattered). I wasn’t a heavy user, but I loved the basic functionality—never miss a text, never miss a call, tap-tap reminders of meetings, easy use while driving or carrying things. It became my daily wear. I had two recurrent thoughts: What will I do with my old watches now that I’ve converted to a smart watch? And what will the watch manufacturers do to keep up?

The second answer is a continually evolving business essay, but the first answer was, for a long time, “not much.” I stuck my three non-Apple watches in a drawer and left them there. I missed them, for various reasons, but I got hooked on the Apple Watch’s functionality, just as so many people did when upgrading to smartphones.

Then the pandemic hit.

For the first time in decades, I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I didn’t have a regular place to work. I found myself moving around a house in the suburbs all day—desk, bed, couch, kitchen table—always with my Macbook Air, never at a proper keyboard. I discovered very quickly that my watch band was getting in the way. Ten hours a day clacking the Apple Watch clasp into the corner of the laptop became frustrating. At the same time, its functionality was losing its appeal: no longer commuting and moving around, my phone was on my desk most of the day, and I never missed an alert.

And for the first time in nearly 40 years, I stopped wearing a watch.

I started by removing it for heavy typing, then realized I was fine not wearing it at all, and that was that. After a while, I didn’t miss the smartwatch at all. It didn’t hurt that my watch was aging; but instead of pining for the latest version, I just stopped wanting one entirely. Switching to an entirely remote company for work sealed my Apple Watch’s fate.

As the world came out of the pandemic, I realized that my wardrobe was missing something. All those years wearing watches are hard to ignore; I like having something on my wrist (I wore bracelets on and off for years, on the opposite arm) and the return to socializing and occasional in-office days had me staring at everyone else’s timepieces. My arm felt naked.

So I pulled out my beloved Nixon 51-30, and after months of meandering repairs (the battery was dead; I got a new battery installed, and the now-brittle rubber strap immediately snapped in two; I convinced Nixon to send me a replacement strap, but the screws holding the strap were stuck; I sent the watch back to Nixon, who discovered the case was dented and needed replacing) I actually have a mostly new watch on my wrist.

I’m wearing my watch as I type this, laptop bumping be damned. And now, when I next go to the office or out to dinner, I’ll feel just a little bit more whole.

iPhone cases and me

April 4, 2023 /

John Gruber posted a nice write-up of iPhone cases (or not) and personal preference. I can tell you mine: case, always, and rarely Apple’s. Everyone is unique, but in the interest of sharing, here’s why I do as I do.

I use a case because I dropped my first-gen iPhone the first weekend I owned it. Just a scuff, but a lesson learned: iPhones are slippery, shaped inorganically, and in cadet-sized hands also dealing with children and pets, they can and do go flying. And, frankly, cases work: in all the years I’ve owned an iPhone, I’ve only broken the glass once—when my phone fell out of a broken case that I was preparing to replace.

I’ve generally bought third-party cases because they’re slimmer than Apple’s. As long as they have a lip around the front edge, to protect the screen, they’ve done me well. There are downsides, though: the fit can be off, and they tend to break down more rapidly. I go through a plastic Case-Mate Barely There every six months or so on my current 12 mini. Meanwhile, the Apple-issued case I have on my 2017 iPhone 7 (which I still use for audio and games) is still hanging in there.

For my new, plus-size work phone, I got Apple’s case, and it’s really nice. I love its tactile qualities. It doesn’t seem much larger than my Case-Mate, either. I may get a second Apple case when I upgrade my mini. (I’m also eyeing some of the makers Gruber links to.) Whatever I buy, though, I’ll have a case on it promptly.

L

March 29, 2023 /

I turn 50 today. Fifty! I absolutely hate it.

I’ve been in a wretched mood for the past week or so. Milestone birthdays are not my thing. When I was turning 40, my wife asked me what I wanted, and I said, “To go on vacation and pretend I’m 36,” so she and I spent a week in the south of France. That was a good idea.

This time around I’m just crabby. The family has leaned into celebrating, on the assumption that they can happy me through it: multiple balloon assemblages, three birthday cards (one handmade), thoughtful gifts, dinner at the unquestionable Gramercy Tavern this evening. It’s all quite lovely and I love them for it.

If I’m not chipper today, at least I’m consistent.

The blogging quarter-century

March 14, 2023 /

Jason Kottke’s kottke.org blog turns 25 today. Twenty-five years is a long time to do something. In Jason’s case, he has made a career out of blogging, and has been truly, wonderfully great at it for many years. I’ve been a regular reader of his blog for the entirety of his run and wish him many more years of success.

Kottke’s milestone is important around these parts because his blog prompted the creation of mine. Ideapad launched on November 1, 1998, eight months after kottke.org, heavily inspired by Jason’s successful start; my first blog post even thanks him for the font. I’d had my own website since 1996 but this is when I committed to writing online. (I copied Jason a second time with the Year in Cities, which he dropped some time ago but I have enjoyed maintaining.)

I’ve been thinking about the Ideapad’s approaching 25th a lot lately—I’m approaching the point where I’ll have been blogging for half my life. Keeping up with a hobby for so long is also something to celebrate.

Jason, cheers and congrats for reaching a quarter century, and thanks for getting me going, too.

In praise of the ebike share

March 9, 2023 /

I am a longtime bike commuter and a general fan of bicycling around New York. I liked to ride to work twice a week in fair weather, a practice I continued right up to the start of the pandemic, when commuting got turned on its head.

Since the start of the pandemic, like many others, I no longer have a regular commute. Which means I don’t get to bike to work—but I don’t take mass transit to work, either. After 20 years of near-daily trips downtown, I suddenly had no need for an unlimited-ride Metrocard. I’m a longtime fan and supporter of the subway system, but my use cases dwindled, and along with it, my enthusiasm for going underground.

Enter Citibike. For all my cycling around the city, I’ve always struggled with where to leave my bike when I get to where I’m going; bikeshare eliminates that problem, with docks every couple of blocks. Hopping on a bike meant fresh air, exercise, and not dealing with the transit system. And then there’s the ebike.

Riding the Citibike ebikes are an adult equivalent of what kid cyclists feel when their parents give them a push. Step on the pedal, and a light mechanical whir provides an instant boost. It makes slow rides fast and flattens out hills. This morning, I rode a standard Citibike (sigh) and traveled 1.5 miles in 15 minutes; this afternoon, for the return trip, I went 2.2 miles on an ebike in just 12 minutes.

That time, by the way, turns out to be an 11 mph clip. New York’s subways average a paltry 17 mph these days, and buses in Manhattan just 6 mph. Grabbing an ebike means I get to my destination in half the time of a bus, and not much longer than a train—and that’s without factoring in wait times, delays, or going out of my way to a station.

In fact, it can be quicker. My recent rides, for example, were to 11th Avenue in the west 50s, not exactly a great place to find the MTA, and home from east midtown to the Upper West Side, which usually involves three different subway lines. For the latter, I cut my travel time nearly in half. Going to Zabar’s takes 15-20 minutes by bus or train, but on an ebike it’s barely a five minute ride.

In addition, Citibike ebikes are, simply stated, fun. It’s a great rush to feel a bicycle zip along without strain; one feels in control but also along for the ride. The next generation ebikes are especially satisfying, as they are sturdier and heavier, making the experience feel like a cross between a standard bicycle and a motorized scooter. An ebike ride provides a little cardio, too, because it’s still a bike that needs to be pedaled. So the trip is active instead of passive, yet relaxed enough to avoid breaking a sweat on the way to a meeting.

I have an annual Citibike membership (thanks Citibank!) so my ebike rides delightfully affordable. That ride from midtown cost $2.48. Which, now that I lack that 30-day Metrocard, compares favorably to the $2.75 cost for a single ride with the MTA. Fresh air, light exercise, and spare change back in my pocket? I’ll take that trade every time.

So I’ve become an ebike regular: to appointments without a direct subway route, to business lunches, to meet friends after work, to save time going crosstown. If my route sends me into Central Park, so much the better. Because what better way to do New York than with high-speed, point-to-point, cost-efficient personal transport?

Until the End of the Internet

February 8, 2023 /

It’s a catchy prase, “until the end of the internet,” isn’t it? The folks at what was then 37 Signals coined it back in 2015, as “a promise to our customers: we’re dedicated to supporting our products forever.”

This matters to me because, for the past four and a half years, I’ve been a beneficiary of this policy. I use Highrise, the onetime CRM counterpart to the Basecamp project management system. I’ve been on it since my agency business development days, and I’m still on it today.

When I first got a Highrise account, I was looking for a dirt-simple relationship management program. Highrise checked all the boxes (easy to understand, inexpensive, shared a billing account and login with an app we already used in the office) and was straightforward to integrate into my processes. I didn’t need it for much, and for what I did—centralized contacts, emailed reminders, bcc-enabled conversation tracking—it did the trick.

I kept using Highrise when I switched agencies, and when I left the business development cycle, I hung onto my account, as it contained many of my contacts. I spooled up an individual plan and discovered it was great for personal CRM, too. I began keeping reminders for staying in touch with colleagues and classmates.

My trusty Highrise account proved invaluable when I had to look for work: I had a repository of everyone I knew, when we last spoke or emailed, and my plans for future outreach. It kept me organized and kept me honest. It may be the only software for which I pay a recurring fee, and I’ve never questioned its value.

So when Highrise went end of life in 2018, I was grateful for the Basecamp team’s approach to longevity. Sure enough, the app still works great, despite going into maintenance mode back when Shohei Ohtani was a rookie. I’m in the app regularly, and its reminders are in my email all the time. I have a few changes I’d like to see, but they’re not major, and after 11 years I’ve gotten very comfortable with the UI. In an industry known for its ephemeral nature, a service you can trust to stick around is a revelation.

“Until the end of the internet” sounds coy, but it means something to the people it impacts. I’m grateful for it, and for as long as Basecamp keeps its promise, they’ll have me as a customer.

Blogging is back

February 6, 2023 /

And the Ideapad is proof positive. (Sample size of one, I know.) I posted four times in January—the most since December 2016—and I have more thoughts percolating and writing drafted.

We’ll see how long this keeps up, but for now, I’m enjoying it, and I hope you are too.

A redesign

January 18, 2023 /

Well, that didn’t take long:

If inspiration strikes again, I may find a whole new template for the blog, too.

So now the Ideapad has a new, modern template, albeit still a work in progress. I seem to have gotten all the elements in place, cleaned up the font displays, and added a few more images to the header.

On some level, not much has changed, but mobile rendering should be nicer now, and I’ve lost the odd gray sidebars on desktop that never served much purpose.

There’s a bunch of work to be done as time permits—lots of extraneous horizontal lines, some odd elements from the template that I will continue to edit or excise (why is my blockquote gray and not indented?)—but in the meantime, we’re fresh and clean around here, and ready for the next decade of publishing.

Virtual office apps and the idea of space

January 17, 2023 /

I’m working with a client this winter that is a client of Roam. Still in beta, Roam’s premise is “to bring a whole distributed company together,” which means combining text, voice, video and conferencing functions in one place, with an added UI layer that creates a sense of space.

That last bit is the differentiator, and it’s interesting to experience. The default Roam screen is a grid of employees. There are additional, smaller visual grids off to the side, representing “floors.” Several of them are organized by department, while one floor contains meeting rooms of various sizes and an auditorium.

Each person has an “office” with quick links to booking appointments and sending text messages. An office has two spots in it, one for the employee and one empty. Anyone can click on the empty spot and invite themselves into their coworker’s space. It comes complete with a knock-knock audio ping. If the knockee accepts, two people can then talk voice directly to one another. Text messaging is available everywhere.

The most important feature of this app is that Roam tries to place its users for the benefit of everyone else. If I go into a meeting room, for example, I no longer show as being in my “office”; it’s empty until I exit the other room. When coworkers are in conversation, their icons pulse lightly when they speak. And if a user switches to Roam’s mobile app, it disconnects the desktop app, and vice versa—a person can’t be in two places at once, after all.

The idea is that Roam is replicating in-person office culture. If we’re in a modern, pre-pandemic office, we most likely have open floor plans, low cubicle walls and glass-walled rooms. We know who’s in a meeting, we see who’s doing a 1:1 or a pull-up or even having an idle chat with one another. Wouldn’t it be nice, Roam asks, if we work remotely and still have that?

What’s interesting to me is this sense of place. Roam’s assertion is that what remote offices are missing is the being-there component: looking across the way, knowing your colleague is plugging away at a file, noticing that two peers are in conversation, that a few other folks seem to have stepped away: finding a new level of situational awareness. Being there, as it were.

My colleagues like the Roam app because it feels tangible: they can see the whole company (60-odd employees) at once, and they know who’s around and what’s going on. It’s obvious that they miss in-person office culture despite embracing full remote.

I appreciate the sentiment. I’m a big fan of the Huddle feature in Slack, which I’ve described more than once as the desktop equivalent of, “Hey, got a sec?” And I get why a company or leadership team would want this. It’s nice to know by looking, just like a live office, who’s around. Even if it’s a bit apocryphal—the app doesn’t know, for example, if a user going idle represents a lunch break or an hour deep in code—it feels good to have a pulse on the cadence of the org. The team is actively thinking of ways to leverage that knowledge to improve cross-team communication and camaraderie, which is great.

What remains to be seen is whether this is an advantage, or if it undermines some of the very things that make remote work pleasant. I’m curious to see how the app evolves, and where its founders (who are rapidly iterating, and devouring user feedback) take it.

A light visual refresh

January 16, 2023 /

Regular visitors of the Ideapad (hi, Mom) may notice something different: I’ve updated the font. Ideapad now renders in Avenir Next.

I have actually been using this font elsewhere for a number of years. Earlier today, though, I stopped by furbo.org, and the crispness and easy readability of his site literally stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t recognize it at first, so I popped Craig Hockenberry a note, and he kindly told me what font I was looking at. Of course! Avenir Next is gorgeous, and it’s preinstalled on Macs, too (which is why I’ve been able to use it in, say, my old desktop Microsoft apps).

Many years have passed since design was a focus of my work here—this WordPress template is called Twenty Eleven, if that’s any indication—but I’ve been bothered for awhile by the readability of Helvetica Neue, the previous default Ideapad font, which was too thin and narrow for longer form text, at least as your author’s eyes have aged. Upgrading user-friendliness and visual appeal is a win-win.

One thing I noticed upon updating is that Avenir Next has a rather aggressive boldface. I need to explore demibold fonts and relative font weights at some point, but in the meantime, I’ve turned off a lot of the bold on these pages, including the post titles (which, if you’re truly into these sorts of things, have morphed from 26px Helevetica Neue bold to 30px Avenir Next regular).

If inspiration strikes again, I may find a whole new template for the blog, too. But in the meantime, enjoy the font update.

Ideapad