Business Time

by Flight of the Conchords from Flight of the Conchords

Hi all, just adding yet another quick entry, because well I actually have stuff to update on. First and foremost, I saw the best concert ever (well in the whole wide room), as in I saw Flight of the Conchords live in concert at the Nob HIll Masonic in SF a few weeks ago. Seeing them live definitely makes you appreciate how funny and how clever they are. Almost as funny as the songs, was the random and often times ad-libbed banter between them throughout the show. Most choice quotes....

"Jesus is our drummer"

"My rhymes are so potent, that in this small segment, I made all the ladies in the first three rows pregnant...congratulations bitches!"

"We care about issues...anything Bono is into, actually"

"Actually, Jesus is the boom king"

Plus many many more. The only downside was that they did not play one of my favorites.

The week after that, I attended the Union Street Festival in the city. It's a huge fair where a a lot of local retailers get to hawk their goods. Most of it was non-guy friendly but there was a ton of food booths. Which gave me an excuse to gorge on expensive fair food like corn on the cob, chicken terriyaki sticks, and really expensive beer from the beer garden.

Speaking of food, I have decided to start living a more healthy and active lifestyle. You see, I went swimming at Stanford two weekends ago. There was a water polo tournament happening and I happened to walk past about a dozen water polo players. If you ever want to feel bad about yourself physically just stand next to a water polo players. They were taller, skinnier, and more muscular than me. Plus as I have mentioned before, my weight is now at 183 which for my height puts my BMI right at the edge of being overweight. So yeah I decided I could stand to lose a few pounds. So here is the plan I laid out.

Diet:
- No more fast food
- No more soda
- Only fruit for breakfast
- Reduced portion sizes for lunch and dinner
- Fruit for desert instead of sweets

As for exercise, I resolved to do something active (even if it is not hard core exercising) each day. This past week

Sunday: Swimming
Monday: Bootcamp
Tuesday: Bike to/from work
Wednesday: Bootcamp
Thursday: Bootcamp
Friday: Bike to/from work
Saturday: Clean up apartment/vacuum/clean bathroom/clean porch/laundry
Sunday: Weights + Swimming

And after all this during the past week, how many pounds did I end up losing? The answer is.... 0.0! Yup I didn't lose a single pound which leads me to believe that losing these 5 lbs is going to be an ordeal. But it is not all about losing weight. I am planning on doing another sprint triathlon so it is good training. In addition, it will make me more productive so that I am not sitting on the couch as much.

There is some good news though. This past Sunday I was swimming at the San Jose State pool and decided to time myself for a 100 yards. Much to my surprise, I was able to clock in at 1m 17secs. That surprised me since I didn't think I was nearly that fast and I wasn't going all out. If I was going all out, I suppose I could get near 1:10, which is about 10 seconds off my all-time personal best of a minute flat for 100 yds. 10 seconds may seem like a lot but seeing that I have not been regularly swimming for over 10 years, I thought I it was pretty good.

There is one issue that is bothering me at work. There is a common feeling out there among us in the user experience world that our jobs shouldn't be trying to put lipstick on pigs. Meaning it is not really worth the time of a talent UX designer or UX researcher to work on a product and feature is crap but for some reason or another, is trying to be saved by improving the UX, when it really needs to be totally rethought. This is where I find myself recently. A few months ago, the designer I usually work with and I got pulled into doing some work on this lipstick pig feature. I performed a usability study on it and predictably, it didn't perform too well. It then went into a white list. Well the results of the white list came in and well, the feature bombed...badly. Namely, adoption rates and other metrics were far far far below any targets. So one would assume this feature would die a well-deserved death. Nope the plan is to launch it anyway. Now the motto of Google is launch early and often and in some cases we probably launched far too early (Google Talk is a good example). And while one can argue that even though the V1 maybe is not up to snuff, if you continually improve upon it the users will come. That's nice in theory but is usually proved wrong in practice. If something launched with far fewer features than its competitor or a substantially inferior experience, users who use that version will most likely not come back for the new and improved version later on. Just ask anyone who bought the 1st version of the Zune. Given this, I am puzzled why anyone would insist on releasing something they knew was not up to snuff. But the explanation I hear time and time again is "We have to get something out there..." My response is that what is missing from that sentence is "with quality." Apparently, some people don't understand that "something" is not better than nothing when it is crap. It's a frustrating job having to convince people of this. Needless to say, if this feature does indeed launch and bomb badly as all indicators say that it will, I will no doubt do my "told yah so" dance on this blog.

Anyway, it's late and I need to get to bed if I am going to ride to work as part of my new active lifestyle. Until next time everyone. Peace.