Everything In Between

From the everything-you-say-can-and-will-be-used-against-you department:

• Computer scientists will almost always be able to de-anonymize “anonymous” data, in this case thanks to movie ratings,
• Google offers users another way to store personal data,
• and all of this is old news

I’ve been doing this for years, and my solution is pretty simple: no regrets.

As an aside, these days when you punch in “privacy concern” into Googlepedia, you get the Wikipedia entry for Facebook. I was kind of expecting the entry for “US Government,” but whatever.

I heard a crazy thing today.

There is an expectation of overtime in [the technology] industry. I don’t think anyone’s surprised by that.

Um, I’m surprised by that. That’s why they call it overtime. It’s over(what is expected)time. Otherwise it would just be called moretime or something that doesn’t imply the fact that a particular measurement has been exceeded.

Of course, I’m not really surprised by that. I have been facing this expectation ever since I began working at 16, and since then I have been working some “overtime” hours, most of them unpaid. Surprised? No. Incredulous? Yes.

It strikes me as particularly insane to let my lack of surprise for such a thing turn into complacency, as the vast majority of people I have always shared office space with have seemed to do. Some go so far as to volunteer overtime hours, which always leaves me with a puzzled look on my face.

One of the primary issues for me is to have some choice in the matter. Flexibility is freeing (even if it has to be legislated), and enhances productiveness by increasing a worker’s efficiency. An expectation of overtime (or anything) is accompanied with an implicit ultimatim: do X or else Y. This is even more evident when other people volunteer X and I don’t, and it creates an environment that culturally strengthens the expectation of X. There’s a phrase for this: it’s called peer pressure.

American workers are indoctrinated with a system of reward: “work hard—play hard.” This is not really so bad, it models the reality of many situations quite realistically (i.e., not everything is perfect or enjoyable all the time), and it’s generally a good if simplistic approach to a holistic life.

Until you realize that this work culture places more importance on work than on play. This is a Bad Thing. The reason this is so bad is because it informs every decision employers (and to my astonishment, many employees) make: that they should always sacrifice “play” in favor of “work” because the latter is percieved as more important.

Now, I realize to most of my colleagues and fellow white-collar Americans I am probably being written off as a lazy slob right about now, and I suppose there’s little avoiding that. However, if that is what you are doing I will challenge you to consider the following question: If work is so much more important than play, why the incredibly passionate concerns over quality of life, or fulfillment, or happiness, or personal satisfaction? Are you happy with your job? Does it provide for you these things you say you seek?

If so, I envy you, as do the massively overwhelming majority of other employed people. The sad truth is that for most people, many of whom don’t even know what it is they want (myself included to some degree), expectations of work being more important to me than, well, the rest of me, are absurd.

I am not saying that working jobs you don’t really want frees you of the comittments you made to tasks you have, if you have made such comittments. What I am saying is that the (ridiculous) expecation of work being more important doesn’t change those comittments. In other words, if I have a full-time job, I should be working whatever the definition of “full-time,” which in New York City is 40 hours per week. Working one minute over those 40 hours is, and should always be expected to be, optional.

Right now, that isn’t really the case, and it’s unfortunate because the rather arbitrary dogma of the 9-5 for every conceivable working environment set forth by Henry Ford in the early 1900′s is rapidly becoming ever more inappropriate to today’s working conditions. As the New Zealand Herald article I linked to above says:

“If employers were able to vary their working hours, and work more often from home, there would be real social, environmental as well as economic benefits,” Ms Kedgley said.

I sincerely believe this is true, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s such a foreign concept to most people. Even the people who talk about “work-life balance” often talk about it in a way that shows they clearly separate the idea of work from the idea of life. Instead, I think work should be viewed not as a “necessary evil” that just happens to be a part of life, but rather that people need to be enabled to find the ways that makes working, y’know, work for them.

Succeeding in that can only cause Good Things to happen for everyone.

Simplicity is a challenging goal for virtually every task you (or I) may have. Why is it a goal at all? Successfully reducing the presentation of complicated tasks into simple components is a goal because it is typically a required part for the success of the task.

Possibly the best example of this phenomenon in action is Wikipedia, which hosts several different versions of its pages. The version everyone knows about is the supremely academic one, the one Wikipedia presents by default. Here’s an excerpt of one such page’s introduction, the Wikipedia entry for the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles that make up all matter. It is a quantum field theory developed between 1970 and 1973 which is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests of the three forces described by the Standard Model have agreed with its predictions. However, the Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, primarily because of its lack of inclusion of gravity, the fourth known fundamental interaction, but also because of the large number of numerical parameters (such as masses and coupling constants) that must be put “by hand” into the theory (rather than being derived from first principles).

Contrast the above with this excerpt for the same page, the Standard Model of particle physics, taken from the simple English version of Wikipedia:

The Standard Model of physics is the best idea to say how fundamental forces and elementary particles work. It uses quantum mechanics and special relativity. In physics there are many different particles and forces, the Standard Model says that all particles and forces are only two different types: fermions and bosons.

Okay, now that’s a lot easier to understand. In this example, the simple English version is a lot shorter, and at first glance that might strike you as its major distinguishing factor. However, if you read closer, you’ll notice many things specific to the language that was used that serve to give the simple English version much more accessibility than the academic one. Some of these things include:

• Simpler, more familiar vocabulary. Instead of using surgically-precise words that may not be familiar to an uninformed reader, plainer words (and no less accuracy) are used to describe concepts.
• Dense sentences are broken up into smaller chunks. When accessibility or successful communication is the primary concern, longer sentences that deliver more information in one punch may be counter-productive. Instead, it’s often better to chop up larger concepts and deliver them in smaller-sized chunks that are easier to digest.
• Specifics are introduced one at a time, and defined at each instance. Possibly the most common error writers (especially technical writers) make is introducing lots of interdependent ideas at once or without proper prior context. Rather than work your way from a complicated idea to a simple conclusion, work instead from a simple foundation to a complicated idea, building vocabulary as you go (see point the first about vocabulary).

Of course, this is always easier said than done, and it is also why simplicity is intuitively understood by lots of people to be a hard thing to create. Presenting things simply is a challenge because it requires more knowledge than simply understanding the thing; it requires understanding the thing and understanding what pieces of the thing your audience does not (yet) understand. The value of simple lies in being able to fill those gaps.

If you are wondering why it seems that everyone today is so defensive, you need look no further than your own television set, or newspaper. Bruce Schneier says it best: stop the war on different. And, going hand-in-hand with that slogan: refuse to be terrorized.

Huzzah! Google (finally) updated GMail for free IMAP support. However, their setup instructions for Apple Mail stop short of actually completeing the configuration in a way that makes using GMail’s IMAP service feel seamless. Sure, everything will work fine, but how do you archive a message?

The answer is tricky: you have to drag the message into your “[GMail]/All Mail” folder way down hidden inside the nested list of IMAP mailboxes on the left-hand side of the Mail Viewer window. That’s hardly as easy as pushing GMail’s “Archive” button. So, if you really want to get the most of your GMail over IMAP in Apple Mail experience, you have to do all of the following:

1. First, of course enable IMAP for your account.
2. Second, follow all of Google’s instructions on their own configuration for Apple Mail page.
3. Next, set your account’s Mailbox Preferences in Mail to never delete email automatically and to store all messages of all types on GMail’s servers, as shown in the screenshot below:
   

   When this is done, close the Preferences window and save your changes.

4. Finally, these last few steps involve telling Apple Mail which GMail folders should be used for which purpose, such as your drafting folder, your sent mail folder, and so on. This is how you will map Apple Mail-native commands like “Delete” to GMail-native commands like “Archive.” To complete this process, perform the following steps:
   • Expand your GMail IMAP account in the list of mailboxes and also expand your “[GMail]” folder. You’ll see a third list of folders that include “All Mail,” “Drafts,” “Sent Mail,” “Spam,” “Starred,” and “Trash.”
   • Select the “Drafts” folder, and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Drafts from the menu bar.
   • Select the “Sent Mail” folder and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Sent from the menu bar.
   • Select the “Spam” folder and then choose Mailbox → Use This Mailbox For → Junk from the menu bar.
   • You’ve now mapped Drafts, Sent, and Junk to the proper GMail mailboxes, but still have Apple’s notion of the Trash mailbox. You can map this in one of two ways. Either you can map it to the “Trash” folder in which case you when you delete a message in Apple Mail you will also delete it from GMail, or you can map it to the “All Mail” folder in which case when you a delete a message in Apple Mail you will archive it in GMail. The choice is up to you.

That’s all. Now you have a much more Apple-like GMail over IMAP experience.

Update: Google have now added a support article in their GMail help that documents Google’s recommended GMail client settings for best performance. These are helpful supplemental tips for getting the most out of your Apple Mail-as-GMail-IMAP client.