I hate internet memes too, but I like this one. List 10(ish) books that had a big influence on your life. Here are Will Wilkinson’s and Conor Friedersdorf’s and Ross Douthat’s.

[I started this entry a few weeks ago but it's taking a long time to finish, so i'll post it installments. This is installment 1 of 10ish.]

At the end of the third year at Chis and Sid, I won a prize for the most improved student. After coming dead last in my class in the autumn and winter terms, I came first in class at the end of the year and won a book voucher (I did the same thing in each of the subsequent years too but, by then, they were on to me – no more prizes for me).

On my way home from school, I stopped in the bookshop and picked up a book called Programming in BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

My mum’s company had recently bought a mini-computer and mum took me to work one day to show it off. It was the first computer that I ever saw and she left me on my own with it for a couple of hours. I found the games!

It had a really primitive version of 20 Questions that I played over and over, fascinated that this chunk of metal could figure out what I was thinking. The highlight was when it didn’t guess my animal and it asked me for a question that would distinguish apes from moneys.

The lowlight came soon after when I introduced my first bug into a computer program. All future players, after answering “no” to “Does it have a tail?” would be asked

Is it a chim?

Gah!

The full page dot-matrix ASCII of Snoopy made an impression too.

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A couple of years later, when I won that prize, there was no question but that I would buy myself a book on programming. I didn’t have a computer though, so I wrote my programs on paper and imagined them running.

Another year went by before Sir Clive Sinclair – who inherited the title Greatest Living Englishman when Winston Churchill died – released the first home computer for under a £100. I saved up and bought myself one.

As soon as that fuzzy little K cursor started blinking in the corner of my TV screen I was hooked and there was no holding me back.

I drew my own ascii art. I played chess in 1kB. I painstakingly copied the machine code for a draughts program byte by byte from a book. I wrote a Monopoly program. I wrote a program to do Fourier Analysis. I learned Z80 assembly language which I hand-assembled using look-up tables because I didn’t have an assembler.

Non-programmers often don’t understand what a creative activity programming is. They think it’s about following mundane instructions. I can’t think of a more creative activity.

It’s truly liberating to discover that you can make something out of nothing but the thoughts in your head. Maybe people who are gifted at painting or music get a hint of this but to suddenly find that you can imagine something and then go build it! It makes you feel superhuman.

Sinclair also invented the first commercial electric car which turned out not to be so commercial after all and Uncle Clive lost both his fame and his fortune. A fickle nation turned its love to Alan Sugar and his wondrous Amstrads but I’ll always be grateful to Sir Clive for the gift he gave me.

I have been a Rhapsody subscriber for several years. The service they provide is fantastic:

Think of a song. Any song. Play it.

I suspect that people who suggest “try Pandora” (and there are many of you) probably don’t get what Rhapsody is about. It’s like owning all the songs in the world and you can play any one at any time.

But their software absolutely sucks.

So when Rhapsody suspended my account (I got a new credit card and forgot to tell them), I took it as an excuse to go see what else is happening in music software in the years that I have been gone.

I tried something like twenty different players this week and they pretty much fall into two basic categories:

1. Music discovery (like Last.fm and Pandora)
2. Playlist management

Within category 2, there are two business models (purchase tracks or monthly subscription) but the software all has the same primary use case:

User wants to manage their playlists.

They are playlist managers with the ability to actually play the music seemingly tacked on as an afterthought.

I don’t want to edit playlists.

I hate playlists.

Playlists are very seductive at first. You think Oh yes. I’ll build me a playlist with all my favourite songs. But then, after the third time you play it. You start thinking Oh man! This again!? I’m gonna build me another playlist. Then I’ll have two.

Before you know it, you have hundreds of playlists called things like Early English Folk (I) and Early English Folk (II) and you are spending all your time managing your playlists which, by the way, is exactly what the people who make the playlist managers want you to be doing.

No. Playlists are not a good solution for anything.

Here’s what I want:

I want to listen to music that I like.

I’ll clarify that a little:

One day, I might have a hankering to play 7 different versions of My Funny Valentine (Chet Baker’s is best) or every single recording of John Barleycorn Must Die (Traffic’s).

Another day I’ll have an urgent need to listen to Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys – because there is a piratefest coming up – or to hear the latest Lily Allen album.

I might have just read that there have only ever been two songs sung in latin to make the UK Top Twenty and I’ll want to hear them both.

I might be on my way to a Gogol Bordello concert and I want to hear their albums over and over to get myself in the mood.

But most of the time,

I just want the thing to play me stuff that it thinks I’ll like.

Pandora excels at that last one but is a non-starter for the rest. iTunes will do the job if you don’t mind shelling out 99c every time you have a hankering to listen to some early Abba. If you listen to a lot of music, those 99cs will soon rack up.

So given that

a) music subscriptions rock and

b) the software for music subscription services sucks

oh, and by the way,

c) I have been meaning to learn Flex for a while now

there is only one thing for it…

..I’ll have to write my own damn software.

So that’s what I have doing the last few evenings. It’s fun. I don’t get to program much at work any more so it’s a nice change of pace. I have a prototype that will play Rhapsody or Napster tracks on my wonderful Squeezebox. I have a design all sketched out and I even have a color scheme and icons (step 3 – profit!)

So, meanwhile, in my ongoing quest to find some existing software that doesn’t suck (and to steal ideas) I keep trying out new players and services. So far, they are all – every single one of them – playlist managers until…

…this morning I discovered GrooveShark.

GrooveShark is uncannily like my sketched design (they even copied my color scheme and icons) and I have been playing it all day.

They have a passably good search screen (mine is better of course but, since it is only sketched on paper, doesn’t work as well as theirs) and it is easy to find a song and stick it in your queue. But, what makes them different from everyone else is that tantalyzing autoplay button.

If you stop adding tracks to your queue, AutoPlay will start playing stuff that it thinks you will enjoy. That was gonna be my killer feature!

I have figured out their algorithm though.

It is:

Play The Smiths.

Did the user veto it?

No – Play The Smiths all day. Over and over (and over). Throw in the occasional REM track.

Yes – Play REM all day (throw in some Smiths though in case they have changed their mind).

Try playing some rap every now and again to make sure they are paying attention and not just listening to any old crap.

Play some more Smiths.

That’s it.

If I had known it was this easy, I would’ve done it years ago.

Ron Jeffries, on the agile-testing mailing list said

The last couple of times I read it, I took a somewhat different lesson from /Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance/, having to do with one’s own level of caring, and the key role that plays in happiness, at least to a certain kind of person. I include myself in that “kind”. There are lessons to be learned about outsiders’ view of quality as well. I like my work to be appreciated — though sometimes I wonder whether that is perhaps a personality flaw. I also like it to be valued economically, which may be a flaw as well, but leads to a certain kind of convenience.

I like to consider myself “that kind of person too”.

Kathy Sierra says there is no culture of design in the USA. She covers a lot of ground but her Exhibit A is dollar bills.

Anyone who has come to the USA from another country knows how hard it is to tell one bill from another. I would guess that it took me about a year before I could reliably tell a $1 bill from a $10 in less than three looks. I still can’t tell nickels from quarters unless I have one of each in my hand to compare side by side or unless I look very closely. I still can’t calculate change quickly because the 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢ scheme makes no sense to me.

There is something very beautiful about the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, ₤1, ₤2, ₤5, ₤10 scheme in my home country. If you can calculate the change from 50p, you can calculate the change from ₤50. The rules are the same (at least, that’s how it used to be when I was there. they might all be using zlotys and glotys now for all I know).

Kathy reminds us that aesthetic benefits are so closely bound with ergonomic benefits that it is hard to separate the two and therein lies the root of the problem. Too many people dismiss design as prettying something up (including too many designers). The best designers (I am not one of them) are able to make something that is both beautiful and easier to use.