Below Belief

Google amazes me everyday. Below Belief is nothing more than a tiny backwater on our planet-wide internet of tens of billions of pages and yet, Google came by yesterday, reliable as ever, cached my pages again and indexed my latest updates. It’ll probably come back in a few days and check again.
I build web technology for a living and I am still astounded every time I witness Google’s efficiency, scale and scope. How is there enough time in the day for even the most well organised of crawlers to reach just my pages regularly – once it’s done all the other more important sites on the internet. That it got this far down it’s list of sites to check is awe-inspiring. Do most people understand how this all works? How many people actually recognise the brilliance in what it has achieved?
Knowing the problems that IT can generate and suffer from sometimes, it is great to be inspired by people at Google who have designed a system so resilient to failure, so reliable, so efficient that all us consumers have to remember is that it just works.
“It just works” characterises a very special elite group of services and products which feel like they are shaping this new internet economy. They present such low “barriers to entry” that their take up by the mass market is virtually assured. They are generally free or very cheap to use, they are uncomplicated, quick to get started, easy to use, instinctive and have obvious and compelling benefits.
Google is long in the tooth now, but other products which give me the same feeling right now are:
MovableType – which makes this blog so easy to manage and just does everything I want of it, immediately and without hassle. It can be made to do other stuff it was never designed to do, quickly and simply too.
Flickr – a well thought out and well executed photo depository and management tool
ProfiMail – a recent recommendation from Simon, it’s just this very day revolutionised my mobile emailing
Apple and their beautiful iPod – which has changed for good the way I listen to music and revived a tired music collection and my weariness of it
“It just works” is the philosophy and the rarest of attributes which we should strive to achieve in every service we build.

From Paul Ford at Ftrain.com, I felt just like this yesterday.

I carried much of [my] junk with me to New York, finally coming to rest in Brooklyn. For the last 5 years I’ve struggled with my apartment, as I described. It amazes me, when I walk into the place after a client meeting, wearing an ironed shirt and tie, having presented myself successfully in a PowerPoint presentation, to find my trash can overflowing, crusted dishes resident in the sink, and everywhere books and clothes, with nothing hung on the walls, and a slowly deepening surface of books on all exposed surfaces. The paradox of my exterior self and interior space made me feel that I was presenting a total lie to the rest of the world. The young, capable fellow who was describing the merits of good branding and smart data sharing to corporate souls was a complete fraud who could not keep his bed made.

Paul Ford at Ftrain.com writes on that peculiarly invigorating of activities: cleaning. I am cleaning my apartment this afternoon and it struck a chord…

I find it hard to clean. Certainly the basics are simple. If I can kneel, mix warm water with chemicals, and hold a broom or mop while moving my arms, I should be able to bring a blessed sense of order to my tiny apartment. Yet it’s taken me 5 years in this space to have even the desire to see it organized.
What I need is fundamental order, not nice carpets and fine furniture. I want to let a friend into the bathroom to pee without insisting she wait while I fix a few things first. I want my bed to be sleeved in clean sheets, not cluttered with books and papers, my closet to be a sorted index of good clothing options, not a chaotic pile of shirts and pants, clean and unclean, which must be sniff-tested moments before I run out the door. But keeping any real order has been stunningly hard.
Something always gets me down when I have the broom in my hand. I ask myself, how could I let it get this bad? How can I be such a fuckup? Going through boxes, I uncover photos of old girlfriends; one woman’s face, in particular, crops up every time I clean, and I always put it away somewhere with the idea that I’ll find a place for it in some album at a later date, only to find her again a few months later, her 19-year-old face, framed by blond hair, smiling at me across the table of a coffee-shop in Alfred, New York. I say “hello” to her, now, even though she stopped speaking with me years ago. “How you doing?” I ask. “I hope it turned out okay. Sorry I was such an asshole.”
Usually, after an hour or so of such discoveries, I put down the broom, telling myself I’ve got a good start, and step over the stacks of undershirts and printouts to the bed, where I curl up on the mattress with a random collection of sheets, clothes, pillows, and printed matter. I sleep very peacefully, then, having just escaped the weird emotional territory into which cleaning sends me while feeling I’ve accomplished at least something. Within three days things are just as messy; entropy trumps progress, and I’m back where I started, humbled by my own – laziness? denial? I don’t know.

Ethan Watters writes a fascinating book on Urban Tribes – about our generation and the reasons why we are delaying marriage. In it, I found this piece which, while it rings far too many bells and makes me feel thoroughly ashamed to be male, also needs to be written down and bourne in mind next time this situation arises. I feel sure it is possible to rise above the shallow seediness with which we seem to be programmed…

• There exists a depressing reality behind the cliche that men are often grossly inarticulate in situations where they are expected to talk about their feelings and expectations for a relationship
• Men think that the early stage of a relationship (the point at which routine sexual access is achieved with the lowest possible commitment of time, resources and personal energy) is a fine place for a relationship to remain indefinitely
• A man tends to overestimate his importance to a woman at the moment when she asks him to assess the relationship. Simply put: At these moments, men often assume that the woman has fallen in love with him.
• Men overrate the value of their affection – regardless of its quality, consistency or certainty.
• Men’s tendency towards grandiosity combined with their inability to articulate their intentions reveals them to be the most reprehensible of cowards. Surely, if men so readily perceive themselves to be the be-all and end-all at the moment when their girlfriend wants to know what’s going on in a relationship, shouldn’t that grand self-conception carry along with it some responsibilities for addressing the situation with candor, clarity and honour?
• Men often ride along in romantic relationships with one hand on the doorhandle. This fearlessness of momentum leads them to perform all manner of foolishness, including dangerous stuntman-like dives out of high-speed romances as well as more comical leaps from relationships yet to leave the driveway.

Photo by jessamynnorth.

Don’t you wish sometimes you were able to express your emotions as freely as this! Fabulous photo. (And I’m demonstrating how fascinating viewing other people’s photos is using Flickr!).

Yosemite National Park in California is a special place. I was lucky enough to be there in November and stood to admire the view…

Hugh MacLeod is a genius. He writes gapingvoid and makes me laugh out loud at least once a day. I can’t pretend to know anything about the marketing or advertising industries but as a consumer I have a strong feeling that what he preaches about the future of “markets as conversations” is going to come true. Is already coming true. Read the Hughtrain to make sense of it all.
This cartoon is a favourite and for me, sums up the crazy dichotomy that most of us face in our working [and personal] lives. To be the wolf or the sheep? And the dreadful unhappiness that comes from not feeling comfortable being either…