geek2geek

It’s Valentine’s Day, I suppose. Cupid’s here holding an arrow to my head until I write something relevant. I already talked about the dating habits of Klingons and androids, what else is there? I could talk about what turns me on: brains.

I was biking home from my accidental Valentine’s date and thinking about a word Jess introduced me to: sapiosexual. “One who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature.” Yo, that’s me!

At some point me and my friends were trying to figure out what my “type” is going back over my past and current trysts. Physically, I’m all over the place. Nothing stood out about their professions or hobbies. What stood out was that everyone was smart, independent, positive, assertive and adventurous. Mental traits, all. Being able to put up with a flaky programmer that wears goofy shoes helps, too.

brains > boobs

Then I thought: how do I convey my sexual preferences to the world in t-shirt form? My first impulse was “Where the smart women at?” I like it, but maybe only because I get the Blazing Saddles reference.

I like my second idea better: “Brains before Boobs“.  (Thanks to Liz Henry for the use of her brains).  Perhaps a simple black shirt with “BRAINS > BOOBS”.

Or you could go with pictures of a stereotypical smart woman and glamor model. The one thing we can all agree on is that I suck at Photoshop.

talk nerdy to me

At a friend-of-a-friend’s party recently, where I didn’t really know anyone, I found myself looking at a woman there and thinking “wow, she’s gorgeous”. It bowled me over. It’s so rare that I have an immediate and physical attraction. I usually find physical traits attractive because they’re associated with mental ones. More often I meet someone can think “eh, she’s ok”. Then she opens her mouth and speaks intelligently about intellectual property or programming or network routing or ontologies or film or makes some awfulsomely geeky pickup line joke (”I wish I were helicase so I could unzip your genes“) and I melt. Suddenly I’m seeing this person differently, and the mental attraction becomes a physical one. I want to say, “hey, let’s talk geek and make out”.

Which is the opposite of the cliché about someone being attractive until they open their mouth. For me you’re attractive after you’ve opened your mouth.

Let me tell you a design horror story. It has to do with my first experience with the simple act of getting a transit ticket from a BART machine. First, let us contemplate one of the BART’s horrors:

Oh god, I don’t even know where to start either using it or explaining why it’s so horrifying. But this clunking horror is not the machine I have come to tear apart. I’m going to talk about one of their more modern machines. Unrestrained by a mechanical interface, with all the power of modern computing technology behind it, they chose to create… well, you’ll see.

You purchase travel cards with various amounts of cash on them. For a traveler just getting into the city that’s bad enough, I have no idea how the transit system works or what travel costs. First thing I have to decide is “how much money do you want to spend on transit”. I DON’T KNOW! I’m not thinking in terms of “$20 worth of travel” I’m thinking “I need to go from the airport to downtown”. It would be great if it allowed me to add money to my card like that. Push “airport to downtown”. Voila! The actions match my goal. But no, I have to translate my goal into a dollar value which as a new user of the system I have on idea how to do.

Please go on!

It was inevitable that this blog would drift from human -to-human communications to device-to-human communications aka interfaces. Since we design the devices, and whether we intentionally design it or not devices have interfaces, interfaces are just human-to-human relationships one step removed.

That’s the justification, but really I just like to go on about interfaces.

Over on hates-software, Nicholas Clark is busy hating ATM interfaces.

…why use 3 of the 8 buttons to give me the options cash/balance/something-I-forget, and then add a whole extra bloody screen of “would you like a receipt?”.

Just make that 4 options up front - cash with/cash without

Maybe they got their programmers from McDonald’s - and it was only QA that stopped it saying “would you like fries with your cash?”

Why not indeed? Turns out, for once, the software got it right-ish. Nick is thinking like an experienced ATM user who has used their interface dozens of times and trained himself to its idiosyncrasies. He’s looking to make the experience as fast as possible for the expert, a classic programmer desire. But ATMs have to work first for the random guy off the street who’s never used this particular ATM before, then for the experienced user. The two are not mutually exclusive.

There is an interface design principle where a decision tree should be narrow and deep (or shallow and wide, but that’s another post). Each step should require a simple decision be made by the user, and compound decisions should be avoided.

Please go on!

With all this talk on the blog about all the issues of textual communication the answer would seem to be to avoid text all together. That it’s just doomed and try to do what you can over the phone or face-to-face. I say no, text is not doomed. Text has issues we don’t always appreciate, and that causes problems, but text itself can be used for empathic communications.

When you’re faced with a touchy situation, or one that might be ripe with potential miscommunication like a geek talking to a business guy, it’s often a good idea to boost the emotional bandwidth. Rely more on all that implicit communication we do when speaking rather than having to remember to add it back in explicitly to text.

Here’s some simple rules of thumb for how to boost your bandwidth, from the least to most effective.

Please go on!

Being unaware of what parts of speech text strips away creates an information void which readers tend to fill in with emotions (read the previous entries in the series to catch up on that). Usually negative emotions. As a reader you can watch yourself for this and seek to fill in the voids with actual information. As a writer you can make sure those voids don’t exist in the first place.

Let’s say you get an IM from your boss, “meet in my office in 5 minutes“. How do you feel about that? What do you think your boss is going to talk to you about? “Oh boy, I’m getting a raise!” No, if you’re like me, and my spy network says you are, you start thinking “oh shit… what did I do wrong?” Your reaction is almost always going to be negative. You brace yourself for a fight or tongue lashing. You tense up awaiting the coming conflict. Why?

There’s lots of reasons. Maybe it’s empirical: Every previous time your boss has called you into her office it’s been to be chewed out. Maybe it’s based on prior experience: You once had a boss who every time they called you in you got chewed out. Maybe you’re just a pessimist. Maybe you just don’t like authority figures. Maybe you’ve trained yourself to expect the worst by watching too many episodes of “The Office“.

emotional projection

No matter the reason for it, you are faced with an information void. “Meet in my office in 5 minutes” can mean different things depending on how it’s said, but since it’s text you have none of that information. Humans can’t stand an information void and will start trying to fill it. In this case you’re going to fill in a lack of emotional content with your own previous experiences and emotions. This is what I call “emotional projection” (I don’t know if anyone else calls it that, but it’s useful for building a vocabulary of socialization patterns).

Oh god, I bet the rest of the post is going to suck…

In We Don’t Write, We Speak With Our Fingers, I gave an example of how speaking with text can lead to misinterpretation. It was kind of weak. Adrian Howard tipped me off to this much better example:

This sentence is interesting in that if you say the sentence seven times, each time placing the emphasis on a different word, the meaning of the sentence shifts.

Try it…

1. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
2. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
3. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
4. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
5. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
6. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
7. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.

[GREETINGS STUMBLERS! Feedburner informs me that this post has been StumbleUpon‘d. Some 40,000 of you so far. I’m glad folks are enjoying this post, and perhaps you’d consider looking at the rest of the blog?  Or maybe subscribe to it? Maybe read some Klingon dating tips or how We Don’t Write, We Speak With Our Fingers]

(This is a guest blog post from Selena Deckelmann.)

Let’s say you’re at a conference. There’s some interesting person nearby. You want to talk to them, so you walk up, and say, “Hi, My name is Violet. Can I take a picture of you with me?” The response, “You’re rude.”

You can see her side of the story here. And Fake Steve Job’s take here.

So, maybe that’s not a typical response to a cute girl asking to take your picture.

But approaching a person out of the blue - the in-person equivalent of the “cold call” - is hard. You’ve got to have something interesting to say, then you have to say it, and finally you’re going to have to respond to whatever the other person says. A lot to think and worry about for what may be a 30-second interaction.

Can you tell whether the person you’re talking with is interested in what you’re saying? And if they’re not, can you do anything to make them more interested?

Enter: The Pickup Artist.
Please go on!

This really is apropos of nothing, but I thought I should post something while I’m working on the third part of the “Text Lacks Empathy” series. I guess I could say that Valentine’s Day is coming up or something.

Worf is an outsider in a culture he either does not or chooses not to understand. This makes relationships… awkward. Sound familiar? He comes from an apparently male-dominated and straight-forward warrior society, but once you get him talking about women… not so sure.

Klingons do not click the “more” link, they stab it!

This tip comes by way of Andy Lester. He pointed out a blog about the book “Brazen Careerist“. From what I’ve read so far, it is most brazenly careerist in a sort of greasy saleman sort of way, but Andy found one bit particularly useful. It’s a social exercise.

Count how many times you interrupt someone.

If you ask a sales guy why they are good at sales, they always say they are good listeners. And then, in fact, they display those skills during the flight.

I am not a good listener. I spend the flight hearing myself interrupt. Constantly.

It sounds like a moment that is bad for my emotional intelligence work, but really, it’s good. It’s good because it allows me to go to the next step, which is asking myself why I am so reluctant to wait to hear what someone has to say. That’s where I am now - asking myself that.

People say I’m a good listener. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. I’ve caught myself constantly interrupting someone, especially in a heated technical conversation. Even when I realize what I’m doing I’m strangely compelled to continue. Part of it is being caught up in the heat of the argument (note, not discussion, argument) and wanting to pick at any point of weakness. Part is that engineer’s mentality to want to correct people before they waste any more time doing it the wrong way, even to the point of talking about it.

If I could just interrupt for a moment… *more*

My friend Candy is one of the Bitch Overladies of Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books (yes, smart and witty people who love romance novels. They exist, I swear). They’re pretty merciless when they come upon something they really don’t like. Just read some of their pieces snarking on book covers. And, of course, the genre’s fascination with man-titties. Oh god the man-titty. But when they find something they really like, they pour praise upon it.

Point is, these are fans of Romance criticizing Romance. There’s something extra special about picking apart something you love from the inside out, as only a jilted lover can. I feel a kinship.

Recently they stumbled upon evidence of plagiarism in a very popular (but generally regarded as crap) author. The story made the rare, and very rapid, jump from blog to print press and is now in the process of blowing up into a Major Scandal. You can read the whole Cassie Edwards Extravaganza if you like. It’s interesting to watch an industry cope with Intellectual Property and Ethical Considerations live, particularly the issue of where “didn’t break the law” diverges from “did nothing wrong”.

All this has landed them quite a pile of new readers. Readers who don’t know what’s going on, and have no background. They just see this bright pink page slagging off some author. This has gotten them quite a bit of negative comments in spite of their remaining fairly restrained and objective… at least by their standards. But their glee at a bad author getting caught out oozes through.

Candy frames the problem in “Your Taste Sucks, But I Still Love You“.

…people often read a whole world of motivation and intent into my words, despite the fact that by and large, I lay it all out there for people to see and read. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not especially good at keeping my opinions hidden.

So here’s one thing I want to make clear, once and for all:

I don’t want people to stop reading the things they love, even when I think they’re absolutely terrible. Why would I? They love it. That’s excellent. I may shit all over the book you love, but that doesn’t mean I want to deprive you of the right to read it and enjoy it. In fact, I want you to engage me about why you enjoyed it, and disagree with me about the points I’m making. I loves me some vigorous, informed argument. I may think you have terrible taste (depending on how bad the book is), but I promise you that I won’t think you’re stupid based solely on the fact that you enjoy something I don’t, or that you’re wrong for liking what you like. I’m a reader of romance novels, ferchrissakes; this means far too many people who don’t know me assume I’m stupid based solely on a genre I read. I’m not about to inflict that particular brand of assholishness on other people. (There are so many other superior varieties to choose from.)

Unless you can see them laughing while they do it, one person’s “vigorous, informed argument” is another person’s hateful bashing. Since I know Candy personally, I can “see” her talking and laughing as she writes and that it’s all in good fun. But if you don’t know her, or haven’t read enough of her writings to build up a picture, you might think it’s all petty piss and bile.

Like someone walking into a meeting of people you don’t know and they’re the middle of joking around and making light fun of each other. Except on the Internet you can’t see that they’re smiling or hear that they’re laughing. No emotion, just the nasty text.

Candy, being a good writer, saw and filled in that emotional gap that the combination of text and a lack of context leaves.

Heh, man-titty.

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