Troy McConaghy's Blog

Two Ways to Move a Pig

2012-01-21T22:22:33Z

I grew up on a farm and learned that there are two ways to move a pig.

One way is to push the pig from behind. If you do that, they’ll lean back, dig in their hooves and scream. We had plywood boards with hundreds of dull nails sticking out of them horizontally. You could use one of those boards to push against the pig’s behind, but it mostly didn’t work. They still got mad and made the whole event stressful and exhausting.

The other way is to carry a board without nails and just stand behind it so it can’t go back. It might dawdle along as it investigates each new step along the path (usually by smelling it), but it’s happy doing that. As it advances (which it will, eventually), you just walk forward with your board. Your board doesn’t have to be able to block the whole return path. You just move it sideways to block the pig if it tries to backtrack through a hole. Sometimes they get tricky and make quick dash for a hole, and sometimes it works, but so what? You can just go back and start again. After a while, the pig figures out that you’re not giving up, and then their curiosity leads them to explore the uncharted lands. This method is often slower, but accomplishes the same thing with way less stress.

Photo Credits: Miss piggy by ** Maurice ** on Flickr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Ebook Placeholders

2011-12-30T21:32:54Z

(I posted this comment on a Hacker News thread, but liked it so much that I’m repeating it here.)

Here’s an idea:

Sell physical placeholders that look like books, along with ebooks. You can put the placeholder “book” on your bookshelf to remind you what you own, decorate your room, and give your kids some reading ideas.

The placeholder could come in a variety of smells: musty, smoky, neutral, National Geographic I-think-I’m-gonna-faint inksmell, and my personal favourite: Earl Grey.

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Photo credits: Library by Stewart on Flickr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Isaac Asimov and the Future of Learning

2011-12-18T20:00:00Z

Isaac Asimov is something of a hero for me. He passed away in 1992, but his writing lives on, alive as ever.

I wondered if there were any interesting Asimov interviews on YouTube, so I did a search and found one he did with Bill Moyers in 1988. It’s wide-ranging, but a recurring theme is how people naturally want to learn about things that catch their fancy, and how computers of the future will enable them to do so.

(If you don’t have time to watch all three parts [ten minutes each], watch the beginning of Part 2.)

Asimov talked about the future ability to look up just about any information from home, using computers. This was a year before Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and HTML, the key protocols which define the World Wide Web.

It’s certainly true that you can get a lot of information on the web today. Sites like Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha and Project Gutenberg are great, and there are lots of specialized niche sites with good information. However, most books are not yet available online, either because they’re not yet available in digital form, or because their copyright-owners have incentives to restrict access.

There are services like Netflix, Rdio and Safari Books Online, which give subscribers access to any movie, song, or book in their collection, on demand. I suspect that model (subscribing for access) will become more common.

Facebook the Swiss Army Knife

2011-12-06T03:59:43Z

In the tech press, there’s a running narrative that goes something like this: “First there was Friendster but then everyone moved to MySpace. Then everyone moved to Facebook and Twitter… and where will everyone move next? Google+? Path?”

That narrative misses the big picture.

As a heavy user of the web, I regularly use maybe a dozen web services / tools with social affordances (e.g. profiles, status updates, comments, groups, private messages, photo sharing, live chat, Q&A, document sharing), including Gmail, Hacker News, Google Docs, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Google Groups, Google Sites, Second Life, Skype and Facebook.

I use maybe 30 other services / tools with social affordances, including Amazon.com, Etsy, github, Goodreads, the Behance Network, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Meetup.com, OSgrid, Bookcrossing, hunch, Elance, Nature Network, Disqus, Vimeo, deviantART, Ning, Flickr, Bookmooch, eBay and more.

I use each of those services for a different reason. They aren’t interchangeable. Each one serves its own niche. deviantART is for visual artists who want to share their latest drawings and 2D art. Goodreads is for book lovers. github is for software developers sharing code. Elance helps people find freelancers to do jobs (and freelancers to get jobs). 500px is for pro photographers to share their best photos.

What’s Facebook’s niche? You can do lots of things there… share photos, post status updates, join groups, follow celebrities… But is there something Facebook is the best at, a feature they offer that no other service does better? Maybe it’s the best tool for finding relatives, old friends and colleagues with low effort, like a magic phone book? Maybe Facebook is like a big club, where almost everyone is a member so non-members feel social pressure to join (but the benefits of membership are unclear)?

As far as I can tell, Facebook is like a Swiss Army Knife. It can do many things, but nothing really well.

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Aside 1: MySpace started as a niche site where indy bands could post their music and get discovered. They were awesome at that. Then they tried to become good at everything and lost their soul. Wanna hear a good joke? MySpace is currently owned by a company named “Specific Media LLC”.

Aside 2: Google+ is interesting because it augments a bunch of pre-existing stand-alone niche services / tools which are already best-in-class, like YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. Facebook has nothing equivalent to those.

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Photo Credits: The photo of the Swiss Army Knife is by IK’s World Trip on Flickr, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Memories of 9/11, Ten Years Later

2011-09-12T05:46:12Z

Today is the tenth anniversary of 9/11, so I thought I might recount my own memories from that day.

At the time, I was a grad student in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, and I was also a math teaching assistant, teaching algebra or calculus to students in the Purdue business or tech schools.

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday and I had a test in the morning, on the second or third floor of the math building. I think the key events of 9/11 happened while I was writing that test, and nobody writing the test knew what was going on.

After handing in my test, I remember I went to the washroom, which isn’t something I’d ordinarily remember except for the fact that some guy in the washroom, who I didn’t know, asked me if I’d heard about what happened in New York City. I said no. He left. I was perplexed. Strangers don’t usually talk to me in public washrooms.

So I left the building and headed to Grissom Hall where I had my office. (Aeronautics and Astronautics used to be in Grissom Hall, and only moved to the new building after I left.) It was a sunny day and there were lots of students going between classes. I seem to remember overhearing someone saying that a small airplane had accidentally crashed into a skyscraper in New York City.

When I got to my office, I sat at my desk and went to CNN.com. It took forever to load the page, which was odd. I don’t remember how much news I got. This is long before live video on the web. Everything was text and images, and it was slow.

I didn’t have any other obligations at the unversity that day, so I went for lunch at a cafeteria near the parking garage. On the way over, I noticed they were ringing the church bells continuously, which I thought was odd, since it was a Tuesday.

There were some TVs in the cafeteria, and they showed the twin towers collapsing. I was dumbstruck. After lunch, I drove home and listened to my car radio for the latest news (on NPR, National Public Radio). At the time, I’d just moved from a small room in Graduate Student Housing to a big room in shithole house where the basement was flooding and I didn’t have a TV. So I listened to the news on my radio in my room.

(The landlord didn’t make me sign a contract, so I moved out of that place about a month later, to a nice appartment on Anthrop Drive, where I lived for the rest of my time at Purdue.)

I don’t think I got much work done that day. The radio had nonstop coverage for a long time after 9/11, maybe a week or more.

I remember there was a candlelight vigil at Purdue, maybe that night or the next night, but I didn’t go. I’ve never been the type to do big-group stuff like that. Over the next week or two, there were bomb threats on the Purdue Campus, but they turned out to be fake.

It was surreal.