As an aside: the version of “Crossroads” I’m talking about is a live recording. As the band finishes, you hear applause and then somebody says “Eric Clapton [something] on vocals”. I’ve always wondered who says that? Bassist Jack Bruce, maybe?

“Crossroads” is track three on disc two (unquestionably the best of the four CDs). It’s followed by a mid-tempo Cream tune called “Badge”, which starts with a nice rolling baseline and some crunchy chords.

Every time I hear the end of “Crossroads”, I expect to hear the start of “Badge”. This is true even though I probably haven’t heard that particular combination of songs for ten or fifteen years. I’ve probably heard “Crossroads” followed by other songs at least 50 or 100 times since then. And yet I still have that aural expectation embedded in my brain. The pattern doesn’t seem to get broken. Odd, eh?

Another example is that my family’s LP of “Sticky Fingers” had a scratch on it, so I always expect to hear a little glitch or skip in the second chorus of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar”. I’m sure everybody has such formative listening patterns. What are yours?

Also, will the iTunes and MP3 generation–people under the age of, say, fourteen–be free from the Next Song Syndrome? They may never have bought a CD, so they may not acquire the same sort of listening patterns.

I tweeted about this clever idea, and the Twitter account Climate Smart pointed me to Carbonsync (yes, I am troubled by the inconsistent capitalization of their name on their site–let’s move on). They’re offering a similar delivery and pickup service to your home in and around Vancouver.

The Living Christmas Company doesn’t indicate pricing on their site (or, at least, I couldn’t find prices). Carbonsync offers their rental tree program for the princely sum of $125.99. It’s been a very long time since I bought a Christmas tree, but that seems pretty rich. How much does your average Christmas tree cost? $25? $40? Maybe $60 for a really fancy tree?

I’m usually happy to pay a green tax, but 100% feels a bit steep. If we assume that delivery and pickup cost $40 or $50, then I guess that’s in the ballpark. Still, that price point feels a little steep, doesn’t it?

Happily, we’re not really a tree-buying household, so I’ll remain $125.99 richer.

Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Autumn Brook Artists Gallery, 1545 West 4th Avenue (map, view from street)

We’ll do a brief talk at some point in the evening, followed by a short reading from the book. We’ll also be available to personally inscribe the many, many copies you’ll surely be purchasing to give out as Christmas gifts.

Sundry details:

• Appetizers will be served.
• Convenient cash bar.
• Autographed copies of our book will be available for purchase for $20.
• There’s lots of street parking around, or you may want to consider parking on Granville Island and walking up to the gallery. Otherwise, the location is served by many lovely bus routes.

If you’re local to Vancouver, feel free to stop by. Please either RSVP to the Facebook event or, if you’re not the Facebooky type, drop us a quick email at rsvp@capulet.com.

It’s a pretty fascinating article, and reveals some surprising (to me, at least) facts about the concert business. One is that TicketMaster and Live Nation have struggled, financially, and lose huge chunks of revenue due to scalping. Another is that, of course, many concert tickets are radically under-priced. From the article:

The phenomenon of below-market value tickets has inspired a cottage industry of economists seeking to explain seemingly illogical pricing in the rock-concert business. Alan Krueger…an economist…is one. “There is still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” Kruger told me. A ticket to a rock show, he said, bears elements of a “gift exchange,” in which intangible benefits accrue for the seller. Cheap tickets increase the possibility of a sellout, which augments merchandise and concession sales. Sellouts make the concert experience better for the musicians and audience alike. And, one might add, a cheap ticket is the price the music industry pays to preserve the illusion that the sixties never ended. “In some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity–if I’m doing my job right,” Springsteen once said, of his performances. At least, he helps people hold on to their savings.

That’s kind of a provocative idea, isn’t it? While we (myself included) complain about the high cost of concert tickets, they’re actually priced well below market value. This applies much more for the Springsteens and the Madonnas than local bands, obviously, but the former is where TicketMaster and Live Nation make all their money.

I don’t in any way mean to be an apologist for TicketMaster. Their business model is built on controlling the marketplace and delivering shockingly little added value to their customers. It’s only getting easier for venues to handle their own ticket sales. So, it’s my hope that TicketMaster may die off with the generation of rock and rollers they depended upon for their revenue.

I’ve never really been a guy who puts stickers on, well, anything. I’ve never had them on my car or binders in high school and never on a laptop, either. There’s nothing wrong with them–I’ve just never had the impulse.

I wanted to make a custom skin from a photo I’d taken. So I spent a while trolling through my Flickr account and settled on this one (click for bigosity):

I wrote about taking that shot–it’s from Malta. So, too, is the photo on Julie’s laptop.

More or less at random, I chose Unique Skins, and placed an order. It costs $20 per skin, which seemed pretty reasonable to me. The skin arrived last week, and here it is on my laptop:

I’m pretty happy with that result. That photo doesn’t really do the colours justice, but they feel quite true to my original capture.

I asked around on Twitter, and a couple of people recommended Gelaskins as an alternative, Canadian vendor of custom skins.

Yesterday I was invited to a Facebook group entitled “Save the Rifle Registry. No to C-391″. That made me realize how little I actually knew about the Canadian Firearms Registry. I don’t have enough information to know whether it’s a good thing or not. So, let’s learn.

What is the Firearms Registry?

Established in 1996, it’s a program that requires the registration of all firearms in Canada. Interested in getting a gun? According to Wikipedia:

Any person wishing to obtain a firearm must first acquire a Possession and Acquisition Licence or PAL. The PAL carries a fee of $60 for non-restricted, $80 for restricted, and is renewable every five years. Expiry dates are set on the holder’s birthday following the fifth anniversary of the initial issue of the licence

How do you register firearms?

You can do it online, apparently. I can’t get past the first step, as I don’t have any firearms license numbers handy, but it looks straightforward.

Why require citizens to register their firearms?

The big argument that I see again and again is that the registry is a useful asset for police. Police across the country apparently query (PDF) the database more than 13,000 times a week. That number sounds ridiculously high to me (though a CBC article claims it’s used 6,500 times a day), but the RCMP’s site makes similar claims about office safety: “Without a firearms registry, when police are called to a residence or stop a vehicle, they would have to take the word of the occupant whether firearms are present or have been surrendered.”

How much does the registry cost?

This is the big knock against the program. By 2004, eight years after its inception, the total program costs had risen to over $2 billion. Annual operating costs are reportedly anywhere from $15 to $80 million. The Conservative Party of Canada has introduced Bill C-391, a private member’s bill, which aims to eliminate the program. The Conservatives argue that the money spent on the registry could be more effectively spent elsewhere in law enforcement.

The other question, which I was unable to answer, is ‘what percentage of firearms-related crimes involve an unregistered gun?”

So where does that leave us? It’s an expensive but apparently useful program. To be honest, I’m no closer to forming a strong opinion on this one. What do you think?

We’ve been doing some marketing for the book–mostly soliciting blurbs and reviews. However, we’re going to fire up our book blog for at least a couple of months (here’s the RSS feed), and have plans to make a short-lived podcast that will feature readings from the book.

We adapted our book site from our old ebook site, which is why it may look familiar to a few of you. My first blog post over there is about a lack of magic beans:

We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.

On a related note, we were debating as to whether we should set up a Facebook page for the book. I wonder if it’s worth the effort, given that we don’t have the bandwidth or attention span to make it a longterm, sustained online community.

A Matter of Priorities

On another related note, at BookCamp Vancouver, I participated in a panel with the lovely and super-smart Monique and Deanna. Somebody asked me why, when they visited this site, they couldn’t find any information about the book. Given that we were advocating that authors need to become more engaged online, they asked it with a certain amount of relish. I may have even seen them high-five their colleague at the back of the audience.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way I answered the question, and wanted to give it another crack. To me, the stuff I promote on my site is a balancing act. I don’t want to inundate people with ‘asks’, so I generally try to limit myself to one item at a time. Before October 15, I was running a Blog Action Day badge. Now, on internal pages at least, I’m running a banner for TckTckTck.

Will I eventually stick up a little ad about the book? Yep, though if you’re a regular reader, you already know about the book. You’ll buy it, or you won’t, and the ad probably won’t change your mind. Besides–and I don’t want to sound ungrateful here–the book is just one project among a bunch of things I’m doing. So I don’t feel a need to pimp it more aggressively than I am.

One additional point I should have made in the video: this app really bleeds your iPhone battery. I’m told it’s because the GPS is making a query every second or two to determine your location, and that requires a lot of power.

On a related note, Jen recently wrote about her favourite running songs. The three songs that, uh, bring me home are:

• Seven Nation Army - White Stripes
• Crossroads - Cream
• Voodoo Chile / Slight Return - Jimi Hendrix Experience

I’m shadowing people at work to find out what they do, what sort of skills they need to do it, and whether or not it would be a match for me. In a sense, I’m still hopping around in the career bouncy castle, but this time I’m looking before I leap.

It’s kind of like bring your daughter to work day, but it’s bring your unemployed 33-year-old friend instead. It’s an opportunity for me to test drive careers, but also to explore the myriad of work (be it weird, wonderful, or ordinary) that people do everyday. And to find out what it is that makes people truly enjoy the work that they do.

So far she’s tried a melange of jobs, such as stock broker, chef and reporter. It’s a fun project, and exactly the sort of thing that gets one a book deal.

Helen comes into your workplace for a day and kicks the tires. She’ll do “whatever menial or mundane task that needs to be done” assuming it’s legal and doesn’t involve removing “all of my clothing”. Can you provide a new stop on her tour?

1. You’re going to create a soup recipe. Collectively, decide what kind of soup you’re going to write about.
2. Each of you works on a different section of the recipe. One person lists ingredients, another writes the procedure, a third writes a review of the soup and the fourth finds links to other similar soups.
3. Open up a Google Docs document and start working.
4. After you’ve all contributed, review each other’s work and make changes and corrections.

It went surprisingly well–we achieved five apparently tenable (and all vegetarian, as it happens) soup recipes. Here’s what they came up with:

• Hell’s Kitchen Tomato Soup
• Roasted Pumpkin Soup
• Annie’s Amazing Carrot Yam Soup
• Scandinavian Split Pea Soup
• Yummy Fall Squash Soup

I can’t really vouch for the quality of the recipes, but I thought I’d share nonetheless.

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• Regretsy - You’re likeliest to have seen this one, which is kind of a People of Walmart for crafting. The site features the worst and strangest products advertised on Etsy. Speaking as a craft-free zone over here, the site comes off as rather cruel: “ha, ha, look at the crap people are trying to sell”. But, each to their own.
• Hey Oscar Wilde - “This website, now in its tenth incarnation since being launching in June, 1998, is an extension of a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character.” A source of excellent illustration and portraiture work–I quite like this vogon.
• 2000 Dollar Wedding - These folks are, you guessed it, planning their $2000 wedding online. I found this site because she was a Blog Action Day participant.

Today I read on Rebecca’s site that the Yellow Pages Group has finally implemented an opt-out option. They’ve framed it, rather absurdly, as a ‘Custom Delivery Program’:

You can now choose to receive more copies or to be removed from the distribution list. At all times, you can also consult our online directories YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca. In addition, you can select gadgets and mobile applications to access our Yellow Pages™ directory content on the go.

The deadline to opt out of the next delivery is November 19, so if you don’t want the Big Useless Stack of Yellow Paper, get thee to this web page and decline your copy.

I’m not going to fall all over myself giving credit to Yellow Pages Group for this because:

1. It’s 2009, and they could have easily implemented this five years ago. Heck, they could have done it 25 years ago by including a comment card in the physical directory.
2. You’re not declining delivery permanently. From their frequently asked questions (PDF): “Your registration is valid for two directory deliveries. After that time, you must register again at www.ypg.com/delivery.”
3. It remains an opt-out system, meaning that waste will be reduced, but it certainly won’t be eliminated.

The Devil and the Details

I wanted to explore a few of the nuances of how they’ve implemented this program. The home page for this section is interesting in and of itself. There are two text links in the introductory text which are far more visible than the ‘Continue’ button, which is buried unobtrusively in the bottom righthand corner. It’s surprising, but we often see links in text receive higher clickthrough rates than graphical buttons:



Why are the frequently asked questions presented as a PDF? Is there a more effective way to discourage people from reading them? Additionally, the page doesn’t render correctly on my version of Safari (BroswerShots confirms that it’s not just my machine–note the overlapping text and oddly placed field):



That’s a bit ironic, if user stereotypes hold true. It seems to me that your average Mac user is far likelier to want to opt out than your average Windows user.

Lower down on the page, after you’ve entered your details, they offer some alternative apps for your mobile device. I don’t care to marketed to when I’m engaged in a customer service experience, but that’s their prerogative. What I do object to is the explanation-free captcha at the bottom of the page:



You need to complete this captcha to move to the next step in the opt-out process. To veteran web users, the captcha’s function is obvious and it’s easy to complete. However, I’d guess that many (a majority of?) Canadians have never completed a captcha, and has no idea what to do with one. Yellow Pages Group offers no context or instructions regarding what it’s for or how it works. It thus presents a significant barrier to the opt-out process.

Why do they need a captcha in the first place? Other forms on their site don’t include captchas. Do they really think they’re going to get a ton of spammers opting into or out of receiving directories? And isn’t it rendered unnecessary by the subsequent email confirmation step?

Finally, there’s the confirmation step:



The heading is oddly worded, considering that I have declined, not ordered a delivery. And they’ve included another commercial offer, despite the fact that I was viewing the page with Safari.

Am I picking on the Yellow Pages? Yes, and I probably shouldn’t, because I want to encourage sustainable behaviour. I’m obviously underwhelmed by this effort, though. In web design and usability, the devil is in the details and the mistakes I’ve outlined are pretty obvious ones.

This opt-out process seems designed to create barriers between the a site visitor and their desired outcome. Here’s the fundamental question: have they made it as easy as possible to opt-out? I’m afraid the answer is obvious.
]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/opting-out-of-the-yellow-pages.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/opting-out-of-the-yellow-pages.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/cVLDEkiW2Dc/an-unforeseen-side-effect-of-pedestrianization.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/an-unforeseen-side-effect-of-pedestrianization.html#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:29:37 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6728 The other day I was scheduling a meeting at the sushi restaurant on Granville Street that’s really near Cherry Bomb and Fluevog. I couldn’t remember the name–maybe I never knew it–so I brought up Google Street View to have a look.

When I went to drag the little Street View orange man over Granville Street, it didn’t turn blue like the rest of the map:



That’s because, earlier this year, when the Google Street View car drove by, Granville Street was under construction or otherwise restricted to pedestrian traffic.

This isn’t that big a deal here, but what about the great pedestrianized streets of Europe and Asia? I’m thinking here of Dublin’s Grafton and Henry Streets, which are long and restricted to walkers and cyclists.

Maybe Google needs to expand into other vehicles. A Google Street View tricycle, perhaps? Or maybe something mounted on a human, like a four-way SteadiCam?

]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/an-unforeseen-side-effect-of-pedestrianization.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/an-unforeseen-side-effect-of-pedestrianization.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/_VsVcFt0l8E/five-articles-for-writers-articles-and-publishers.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/five-articles-for-writers-articles-and-publishers.html#comments Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:17:02 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6723 Today I attended BookCamp Vancouver at SFU. It’s was a well-run, well-organized event that frequently featured an engaging exchange of ideas. It probably could have used a few more of the unconference features that make BarCamp so special. I expect some industries are more comfortable than others with this kind of open, egalitarian model, so better baby steps than none at all.

Throughout the day, I recommended a number of articles to various writers, editors and publishers. I figured I might as well gather them here in case they’re of interest. Long time readers have probably seen me recommend one or more of these articles before:

• The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - From 1994, but still pretty relevant today. Extremely prescient for the time. “Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed - floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages - will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one. “
• The Next Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - Six years later, and even more insightful. I’ve been saying this next sentence ever since I read this piece: “Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to “content” is like praying in swear words.”
• 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly - I recommend this to every artist I meet, regardless of medium. It’s an extremely elegant way of thinking about fostering community and building an audience. For some reason it reminds me of the central metaphor in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”

I wanted to offset those first three from the next two because the former are truly remarkable, visionary pieces. The next two are smart thinking and worth reading, but might pale a bit by comparison.

• Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists by Derek Powazek - A great essay debunking the search engine optimization industry. The best advice comes at the end: “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”
• The 10 Principles of Lean Publishing by Peter Armstrong - Some very useful thinking about what publishing can learn from software development. Includes concepts like “fail fast” and “a book is a lean startup”. Now, Peter, go write a great, simple manifesto, instead of a waffly top-ten list.
]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/five-articles-for-writers-articles-and-publishers.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/five-articles-for-writers-articles-and-publishers.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/xz3PzgXDKJk/how-people-count-money-around-the-world.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/how-people-count-money-around-the-world.html#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:30:49 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6720 Yesterday, Amber Case tweeted about this awesome ethnography video that shows the shocking diversity in (and apparent consistency with) how people count money:
]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/how-people-count-money-around-the-world.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/how-people-count-money-around-the-world.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/oOOOq2knd78/giant-ant-medias-great-climate-change-video.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/giant-ant-medias-great-climate-change-video.html#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:13:00 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6718 As I recently mentioned, today is Blog Action Day. Ironically, because it’s Blog Action Day and I’m involved in the TckTckTck campaign, I don’t have a lot of free time to write a long, heart-rending blog post about the dangers of climate change.

Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:

I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.

]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/giant-ant-medias-great-climate-change-video.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/giant-ant-medias-great-climate-change-video.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/G8pGCb8GEdo/what-the-climate.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/what-the-climate.html#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:12:15 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6709 In the next couple of weeks, there are two big climate change-related events that I wanted to mention.

First up, this Thursday is Blog Action Day, a day on which a bunch of bloggers agree to all write about the same topic. This year, that topic is climate change (over at TckTckTck, we pushed hard to make that happen).

If you’re a blogger, please consider joining Blog Action Day and, this Thursday, writing about climate change. If you do, you can find plenty of helpful assets associated with the TckTckTck campaign. We’ve got a bunch of evocative photos on our Flickr stream, and a mega YouTube playlist of great videos.

Bridge to a Cool Planet

October 24 is the Global Day of Climate Action, where people all over the planet engage in thousands of actions–flash mobs, parades, protests and other events–to call for a fair, binding and ambitious climate treaty. This two-minute video (featuring an awesome Sigur Ros song) explains:

The biggest event that I’m aware of locally is Bridge to a Cool Planet. The northbound lanes of the Cambie Street Bridge will be closed to traffic, and people will walk north across the bridge and then east over to Science World, where there will apparently be festivities throughout the afternoon.

The excellent people at the Surrey International Writers Conference have kindly shuffled the schedule around so that I can come down and take part for a couple of hours in the afternoon. If you’re in the vicinity during the actual walk, drop me a tweet or text.

Many years ago, my friend convinced me that the Cambie Street Bridge, though least attractive, has the best views of any bridge on the south side of downtown. That’s a bonus to the whole fighting climate change business, but the views alone are worth the walk.

]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/what-the-climate.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/what-the-climate.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/qx2ScXko1V8/i-just-ran-five-kilometres.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/i-just-ran-five-kilometres.html#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:55:09 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6685 I don’t like reading braggy, boastful blog posts. I know I’m as guilty of them as anybody else. But when I read somebody writing about their recent award, weight loss or awesome new job, and I’m sitting at home all awardless and fat, I feel the little green Kobolds of Envy and Jealousy whispering in my ear canal. It’s petty, I know, but what’re you going to do?

This is one of those blog posts.

Today I ran five kilometres for the first time in my life. I know that five kilometres isn’t very far–for most runners it’s trivial. My siblings are all long distance runners of one kind or another–just this morning my elder sister, bless her, ran her first half-marathon.

But you need to understand what an unlikely achievement this is. I was an indoor kid, and I always hated Phys Ed class. As I said recently:

Whenever we did any kind of long distance running, I would usually come third to last in the class. I’d beat the corpulent Chinese kid and an asthmatic Brit with skin the colour of fluorescent light.

My chief torturer in Phys Ed was one Wayne Desjardins, who owned every cliche a gym teacher could. Once, after executing a particularly awful flexed-arm hang, I cursed under my breath. He made me do push-ups on my birdlike arms while the rest of the class took their turns. We did these things in alphabetical order.

I’ve always hated all kinds of exercise, except for some competitive sports and the occasional hike. I especially despised running. I mentioned running to my step-mother recently and she just sighed and said, “ah, Darren, it’s a hateful thing”. Indeed.

A little over two months ago, I wrote about an iPhone app that helps you get off the couch and running five kilometres in nine weeks. I predicted it would take me 12 weeks, and I was right. I blame lethargy and busyness.

It’s All For Vanity

Do I still hate running? Pretty much, yeah. Though it has granted me 30 or 40 minutes of much-needed free thinking time during a particularly busy couple of months. So that’s a plus.

Will I keep running? I think so. Frankly, I’m motivated by vanity–I don’t want to get corpulent–so that’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Oh, and Mr. Desjardins? He can suck it.

In writing this post, I was reminded of a terrific song by the lovely and talented Gemma Hayes. It’s called “Ran For Miles”. You can watch a live version here in English, or here it is in Irish:

How is it that Ms. Hayes isn’t world famous yet? She’s a great singer-songwriter and, as you’ve probably observed, rather easy on the eyes. See also the single from her new EP.

For you kids out there, ‘EP’ stands for ‘Extended Play’. Ironically, it’s shorter than a full-length album.

]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/i-just-ran-five-kilometres.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/i-just-ran-five-kilometres.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/9wwKPulRTQs/social-engineering-and-taking-the-stairs.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2009/10/social-engineering-and-taking-the-stairs.html#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:43:13 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=6689 Oh those clever, clever Swedes. Some smart folks from a Swedish think tank (I think–my Swedish is not strong) devised a way to motivate people to take the stairs:

I really like approaches like this, where we use natural human behaviour to motivate better outcomes. I wonder, though, whether the piano stairs have long term stickiness. Won’t the gimmick wear off and people will return to taking the escalator?

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