A Good Pen Is Hard To Find

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On Saturday my favorite black ink pen ran dry. [1] It seems like such a trivial thing but this single pen has lasted me 16 years. It was a throw-away pen from a Palm developer conference exhibitor from 1998. The irony: the company didn’t make it out of the .com era but that pen did!

I never gave much thought to why this pen was so special until it died. [2] Then suddenly I’m scrambling to find a new one. I tried all the pens in the house but none were as good. I found four problems, generally:

  1. They had a cap and caps are too easy to lose. I use my black pen a lot when highlighting physical books. Since I’m selective in my highlighting, it spends large amounts of time in my hand. So I don’t risk writing on myself and because I want to preserve the pen’s useful life, I always keep the pen covered. With a cap, I’d have to use two hands to cap/uncap. A click pen works much better.
  2. They needed to be warmed up. A couple of the pens we had around here seemed to constantly dry. I’d draw a line to highlight a passage, read for a while, draw another. By the time I’d draw the second the stinking ink wouldn’t come out and I’d have to try two or three times to get a line. This happened even if I retracted the tip. How annoying!
  3. They weren’t the right weight. I like a medium tip pen. Thin pens don’t do it for me at all. On top of that, some pens didn’t feel right in my hand. Some were too heavy in the tip and some too heavy in the back.
  4. It didn’t move on all kinds of paper well. I found that many of the pens would work fine on a smooth paper but on a little rougher one, the pen wouldn’t move across the paper well, wouldn’t leave the right amount of ink, or would move with the paper instead of my hand, making my lines jag all over the place.

Silly, right? A little so. Plus, it really shows off my anal retentive nature, something I would have been embarrassed about and hid when I was a teenager but now embrace. [3]

The bottom line, though, I made a rare pilgrimage to my local Office Depot and bought myself a new pen. [4] Hopefully my hunt will be over and I won’t have to go through this hell for another 16 years.

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[1] Yes, I keep one black ink pen and one blue ink pen on my desk. My blue ink pen, a Cross pen given to me by my high school computer science teacher as a graduation gift, is my absolute favorite pen, mostly for the memories. I use it primarily for contract signing, which I learned long ago to do with a blue pen so I can tell when it had been copied.

[2] May it rest in peace, wherever the souls of great pens go after death.

[3] Thank you, Apple, for making anal retentive-ness okay. And thank you, web, for making “nerd” a positive term.

[4] It’s a Foray 1.2mm advanced ink ballpoint, four to a package, for $3. And yes, I opened the package to try it out first.

The Presentation Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making

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Fascinating study from Harvard Business Review on presentation and how others perceive it. The bottom line: when you present a list of things (features, accomplishments, etc.) mentally those reviewing that list treat it as an average rather than a sum. From the report:

During an interview, your potential new boss asks you to briefly describe your qualifications. At this moment, you have a single objective: be impressive. So you begin to rattle off your list of accomplishments: your degrees from Harvard and Yale, your prestigious internships, your intimate knowledge of essential software and statistical analysis. “Oh,” you add. “And I took two semesters of Spanish in college.” Not technically an impressive accomplishment, but since the company does a lot of business in Latin America, you figure some Spanish is better than none at all.

Or is it?

Actually, it isn’t. You’ve just fallen victim to a phenomenon that psychologists have recently discovered, called the “Presenter’s Paradox.” It’s another fascinating example of how our instincts about selling — ourselves, our company, or our products — can be surprisingly bad.

I’ve seen this a little bit myself. Until recently we kept web pages around for Palm, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry versions of powerOne, even though those products don’t sell anymore. Part of it was just not getting around to removing them and part of it was wanting to make sure that those folks still had access to help resources. [1]

Oddly (to me anyway), we occasionally received emails saying, “You support Palm but not Windows Phone!” or some such modern operating system version, as if we made the recent decision to write for Palm and it isn’t a decade old app we still have around. I can’t help but wonder now whether this Presentation Paradox was in full effect for them.

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[1] Yes, we still have customers that carry around old PalmPilots just to use our software. While I removed the product pages from view, I minimized the support pages but left them available. They don’t have the same “weight” as the iOS and Android links have.

A New SAT Aims to Realign With Schoolwork

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I saw this news yesterday and had to smile: the SAT exam is being redesigned to better match school work. That’s exciting alone because it has been woefully out of touch with the real knowledge required to do well in college.

In particular, this caught my eye (emphasis mine):

The changes are extensive: The SAT’s rarefied vocabulary challenges will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, like “empirical” and “synthesis.” The math questions, now scattered across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections.

For any of you who have been long-term readers of this blog, you know I spent about 1/3 of Infinity Softworks’ history in math education. What we found is that schools will only use in the classroom what is allowed on the exams. Because the AP, SAT and ACT exams only allow hardware calculators, then only hardware calculators are used in the classroom.

We came very close to upsetting this apple cart. Our software on a PalmPilot was approved for trials on AP exams but before we could implement it Palm fired their education team and the College Board backed out. A decade later and there still are no software calculators available for any of these three exams. In fact, I believe we are the only company in the world who has software calculators available in any standardized exams [1].

The best thing that could happen to classroom advancement of mathematics is the elimination of these calculators on these three most critical exams. It’s like using DOS in a windows world. Most students are turned off by the 30-year old technology more so than the topic. Removing them from exams would open up a world where software could penetrate the classroom, and students could finally get back to learning math rather than learning which buttons on their calculator to press.

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[1] A version of powerOne is available in CLEP exams and in the Praxis, Texas and Georgia teacher licenser exams.

Stop Blaming Developers, Start Blaming Apple

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Brilliant interview with indie developer David Bernard. The three passages couldn’t have been more appropriate. Here’s one comment, based on the question, is there more Apple could do to support paid apps?

Currently developers can use IAP for all sorts of convoluted free-to-play schemes, but Apple has a rule against free trials, demo apps, and the like. With a single policy change, Apple could empower developers to use App Store receipts to roll their own free trials. Surely that’s no more user hostile than Candy Crush’s casino-like techniques for milking users for cash.

Exactly! I’ve said this before — and I’ll say it again and again and again — most of the problems with the App Store are Apple’s fault. All of these discussions about search, top ranked, analytics, even the annoying rate my app dialogs, all of them are really about Apple and the policies they put in place.

As David points out, one single deletion in a policy document — not even a technology difference — could completely change how indie developers make a living.

Unblocked

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Every once in a while there is something that happens and I just have to wait for that situation to resolve itself. The past month has had one of those situations. Ten other decisions [1] hung in the balance while I waited on this one event to resolve itself. There was nothing I could do to speed up the process. I just had to wait.

I could do other things while I waited. I could try to line up everything so coming out of the decision I could move quickly. I did that. I worked on re-arranging the financials about three dozen times and worked on streamlining some of the existing costs. I could analyze what happens in each situation, depending on the decision, but I couldn’t execute and I couldn’t do anything else. I could only wait.

Last Thursday, finally, the decision resolved itself. It didn’t come out the way I preferred but I’ve been running a business long enough to know that sometimes the decisions that work against me at the time they are decided end up being the right decisions in the end.

At first I was sad. I wasn’t wanted and that is depressing. But as the evening wore on I figured it is the way it is meant to be, that it really doesn’t change our near-term plans anyway, and all the things that have been stuck can finally flow. It’s like having a big bolder finally moved out of the way of my stream, and now the water is flowing again.

I have another week to plan and organize and then back to coding, hopefully this time with a release soon around the corner. I knew that this decision would open up avenues one way or the other. What I didn’t realize was that there would be a sense of relief with any decision at all. I’m excited to move on.

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[1] Exaggeration