Josh Shear
Rocky Horror Show at Players of Utica
You've already missed the Players of Utica production of Richard O'Brien's musical ; sorry I couldn't get a review up in time for you to see it.
I trekked out to Utica to support in the role of Frank N. Furter (and also to celebrate 's birthday). And also because I've loved this show since I was about 15.
In case you're not familiar with The Rocky Horror Show, the story goes like this. Brad and Janet are at a wedding. After the bride and groom take off, Brad proposes to Janet; Janet says yes. They decide to drive to see the science teacher who introduced them. They blow a tire in the woods and walk a couple of miles in the rain to a frightening-looking castle.
In the castle they meet a bunch of transvestite aliens (in fact, Transvestite is the name of their planet; it's in the Transsexual galaxy) whose flamboyant leader, Frank N Furter, has created a muscle-bound boy-toy for himself. We're surprised by Brad and Janet's teacher, who turns out to be a Nazi-sympathizing FBI agent investigating alien life on Earth. Frank's "servants," Riff-Raff and Magenta, deem the mission a failure, kill the Transvestites, shoo the Earthlings, and return home.
But really, it's a good show.
Read Jaquays-Tarbox's for a peek into the short rehearsal schedule and intense, four-show (single-weekend) run. It would have taken me longer than the rehearsal schedule just to learn how to run around the auditorium in 9-inch heels with a 4-inch platform toe, or however those shoes are adequately described.
Never mind that. I digress.
Jaquays-Tarbox is brilliant in the starring role, and Jake Meiss's Riff-Raff is superbly creepy. David Kolb does a decent job balancing Brad's nerdy shyness while still exuding confidence on stage. Lauren Noble plays a strong Janet*, and Kelsey Beck clearly has a ton of fun as Columbia.
Our group went opening night and the audience participation aspect – popular in the film version (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) – was light. There was confusion on whether we could bring props (no), and with the exception of one or two audience members, most people seemed to feel weird shouting back at live actors.
The show had a multi-media (filmed) aspect and opening credits.
One thing that must make this show especially nerve-racking to appear in is most people spend a fair amount of time on stage in either their underwear (notably Noble and Jake Meyers's Rocky), or in drag (Jaquays-Tarbox and later Meyers and Kolb), or generally in various states of undress (pretty much everybody else).
Peter Loftus directed the show, and Bonnie Hibbard was the musical director. Randy Fields choreographed the production.
*I may be a little biased; Noble pulled me out of the audience to dance during the closing. (return)
On innovation, with Tom Kelley of IDEO
Tom Kelley, co-founder of design firm and author of The Art of Innovation (2001) and The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005), spoke in Syracuse January 12 as part of the . Here are some take-aways.
About IDEO
IDEO began as David Kelley Design (after Tom's brother), and was a group of engineers when David asked Tom to join the team. IDEO was formed in 1991, and has designed products that are both physical and conceptual for a lot of companies you've heard of. They're responsible for the fact that kids' toothbrushes have fat handles, which they designed for Oral B, and Bank of America's checking account that rounds up to the nearest dollar on purchases and sends the change into your savings account was their idea as well.
Using IDEO's design, Oral B became the top-selling kids' toothbrush in the world for the next 18 months (when everybody started selling the wide-handled ones), and in the first year of the Keep the Change campaign, Bank of America opened 2.1 million new accounts, 700,000 of them for people who had never banked with the company before.
IDEO also designed the Apple mouse and the Palm V.
On innovation
Kelley focused on innovation. Everybody's for it, he said, but in your day-to-day worklife, it can usually wait until tomorrow, because you've got other things on your mind (like deadlines and sales quotas). Here is an example of why that's not OK.
In the 1960s, 100% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. were manufactured in the Akron, Ohio, area by a handful of companies. Minor innovations would appear every few years (new tread patterns, etc.), but nothing major. Then some upstart French company developed something called the radial tire. People in Akron laughed. Now, everyone has radial tires on their cars and roughly 0% of the passenger car tires in the U.S. are manufactured in Akron.
That's right, 100% to 0% in fewer than 50 years.
Interbrand's Top 20 brands in 2009 featured five brands that weren't in the Top 20 in 2001 – that's 25% turnover in 8 years – Google, BMW, Louis Vuitton, Samsung and Apple. (See , page 12.)
So the answer is yes, you have to innovate. And in a flat world – that is, a world where you compete globally and have to deal with factors like big differences in labor and materials cost – you have to do it quickly if you want to stay ahead in the game.
In 2001, you would never have even thought to look at a Samsung TV unless the price point against a Sony was the most important thing to you. Now, Samsung outsells Sony in consumer electronics. Who missed the innovation boat?
The Ten Faces of Innovation
Kelley didn't learn until after he wrote The Ten Faces of Innovation that we're good at remembering 7 items, plus or minus 2. So he doesn't talk about all ten, since everyone will forget all of them. He breaks the ten roles people play in innovation into three categories: learning personas, organizing personas and building personas.
Learning personas: These are anthropologists, experimenters and cross-polinators. They're the people who observe and learn what people need, the people who try stuff and learn from mistakes, and the people who combine ideas that are already out there with new ideas.
Building personas: These are experience architects, set designers, caregivers and storytellers. They're the people who put all the pieces together, put the people who propel innovation in a good space, anticipate and help fill customer needs, and evangelize how the whole process comes together.
Kelley focused on two of these personas: anthropologists and experience architects.
Anthropologists
Kelley is the first to admit that when anthropology PhDs started showing up on the payroll, he didn't get it. There were a lot of them, and he didn't get it for a couple of years. "We have engineers who are developing laptops that don’t break when you drop them four feet onto concrete, and these people go out and watch kids fish and take pictures?" he asked.
He's come around 180 degrees, he says. It's when you go out and watch people that you figure out what they need.
The kids' toothbrush I mentioned in the first section? Anthropologists went out and saw that kids' toothbrushes were really just smaller versions of adults' toothbrushes. But adults brush their teeth with their fingertips – they have the manual dexterity – while kids hold toothbrushes in their fists. That's why they needed fatter handles.
Bank of America's Keep the Change account came about because IDEO anthropologists went into the field and discovered that people were writing checks to round numbers – for example, if your electric bill came to $56.24, you wrote a check for $57 so you could do easier math. Lots of people were doing this, and lots of people thought they were the only ones doing it. So they devised this system where if you paid that $56.24 on your debit card, $57 came out and you wound up with an extra 76 cents in your savings account.
The key is this: you have to go out and observe to figure out what people need.
Experience Designers
These are the people who create an overall experience. Kelley uses a sushi restaurant as an example. Your food is only part of the experience. There's the presentation – especially important in sushi – and then there's not only your table/counter service for beverages and the like, but you actually get to interact with the chef, whose preparation becomes a performance.
In terms of a website, visitors create some of their own experience: we can't influence their physical surroundings, the noise level in their room, the size of the screen, the weather, etc. But we can set up a website experience in such a way that they can get our content (the primary reason they come) in as pleasant a way as possible. [Kelley didn't mention Steve Krug's book Don’t Make Me Think, but I'd highly recommend it.]
Your Customers
Your current customers can help you innovate in baby steps, but they're never going to tell you the next giant leap – you have to figure that out for yourself. For example, let's say you make VCRs, and you ask your customers what they want. They say, "we want it to rewind much faster so we can just bring the tape right back to Bliockbuster."
So you go back to your development team and they say, "Sure, we can do that," and next year at the Consumer Electronics Show you arrive with a table showing off the fastest rewinding VCR in the history of the world.
And then you look over at the next table and see a DVD player – no rewinding at all, and the discs even take up less space than videotapes.
Your customers can tell you how to improve your existing product a bit at a time, sure, but if you really want to innovate, you need to get out there and see what people need.
Suggested Reading
Be it resolved
Simple foods
I love simple foods. These are frequently foods that originate in cultures that are old, poor, or both. These are also civilizations that have found ways to fill their dietary needs with these foods so that they don't, you know, die.
This recipe is scalable, either up or down (this is quite a bit of food. I decided to make it on a Friday night with the expectation it would last me at least the weekend). It's the lazy version of this (I didn't make the tortillas or the salsa).
Tacos
Ingredients
• 2 cups rice
• 2 cans black beans, rinsed
• 2 cups salsa
• 1 tbsp hot sauce (optional)
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup shredded cheese (cheddar or jack)
• corn tortillas
Put the rice on to cook. I use a rice cooker, so I use a 1:1 rice:water ratio to make it a little bit dry. If you're making the rice in a saucepan, you probably want to go 1:2 rice:water.
In a saucepan, combine black beans, salsa and hot sauce. Bring to a boil then simmer, stirring occasionally.
Warm the tortiallas – you can do this either in a frying pan (a half minute or so on each side over medium heat) or the microwave (about 15 seconds for two).
Onto a tortilla, spoon rice, then salsa and bean mixture, then sprinkle some cheese. I put two in the microwave for an additional 20 seconds to melt the cheese, but that's up to you.
Eat.
This is how you do it
Via
Book(ish) meme(ish)
I'm grabbing this from , but like her, I'm not going to tag anyone. If you do this sort of thing, by all means...
One book that changed your life: The Collector, by John Fowles. There's a strong chance you haven't read this book, and there's no real reason to. It's about a guy who gets bored of collecting butterflies, and so he decides to collect a beautiful woman instead. (Some people might call this kidnapping.) But what got me is that it's written twice: Once from the collector's viewpoint, and once from the collected's viewpoint. It's really a lesson in multiple perspectives.
One book you have read more than once: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This was my introduction to the cyber-punk genre. It's set in a world that is hyper-capitalist and (therefore?) all kinds of corrupt, and all the religious zealots are out at sea (literally). There are alternate realities (pre-Matrix, of course), and it very much predicts MMRPGs and VR capabilities. You probably need to be at least mildly a geek to enjoy it, but as someone who doesn't read sci-fi or fantasy novels, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.
One book you would want on a desert island: My Complete Illustrated Shakespeare. Pretty sure I don't even have to justify that to you.
One book that made you laugh: If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell. I'm a big fan of Bruce. One of the nicest celebrities I've had the opportunity to interview, super-nice guy, super-funny guy, and I'm a sucker for a really bad movie (and he's made plenty).
One book that made you cry: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. No, I'm not kidding. This book includes kids stabbing each other to death because when one child plays the butcher and the other one plays the pig, the butcher kills the pig. This doesn't end happily ever after, people.
One book you wish had been written: I'm still working on books that have been written. I know the point to this is "what do you wish you had learned," so I'm going to give a cop-out answer and say, How to Spot a Jackass at 20 Paces: A Guide to Making the Right Choice About With Whom to Surround Yourself.
One book you wish had never been written: Tie: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I actually held a grudge about Return for four months. I didn't for Heart of Darkness only because it's a quick read, even if it is miserable.
One book you are currently reading: Trust Agents by Chris Brogen and Julien Smith. I've got a couple going, actually, but that's the one I'm recommending (so far).
One book you have been meaning to read: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's sitting on my shelf, yet I keep going to my local library. Maybe I'm scared of it or something.
The weight of books
I'm an avid reader.
I haven't been moved to get a Kindle or a nook or any one of those other e-Reader deals, but I do have an iPod Touch (like an iPhone without the phone [or the camera]), and there is a free Kindle application (as there is for a PC, apparently).
I got invited to a book-club-among-friends. We were to read by Jonathan Franzen.
Now, this was mid-December. I had a couple of choices. I first got online and checked the library catalog. I could have run out to grab the last copy locally (one of the other attendees grabbed the other copy), but I get renewal guilt, so I probably would have returned it before we discuss it. The other, equally obvious option, was to run to a bookstore and get a copy – it's a pretty famous book, it wouldn't be hard to find.
Except it was mid-December, and I wasn't going to a retail outlet. No way, no how.
And then I remembered I had an email gift certificate to Amazon.com. And it was for a penny more than the Kindle version of the book. Hmm, convenient. I commenced to downloading it.
I read the whole thing on my iPod. Here are my thoughts.
Things I Liked
Readability: Awesome. The default font was a comfortable size and face, although I did have the option to change to several other fonts and to make the font larger or smaller. Navigating through was easy; you just push the current page to the left, and you were at the next page. You could make notes and add bookmarks, and as long as you were online, you could sync those to your PC version (and, I'm guessing, to your actual Kindle).
Scanning: Decent, not amazing. There were some obvious errors. Aslan (you'll recognize the name if you're a CS Lewis fan) frequently shows up as "Asian" and there are a few others. Fortunately, the scanning wasn't so bad that it was unreadable, it just wasn't perfect. And since publishing companies actually put these pages in an electronic format before they send books to be printed; why not just pay for that version?
Price: Amazon prices the Kindle version of books about $1 to $3 less expensive than the paperback versions. Of course, when you sync your Kindle (or Kindle app), you may have to worry about your book getting taken away – apparently there was a little rights issue with some authors' works.
Portability: I love being able to have this in my pocket. That alone might be worth the price of admission.
Things I Didn't Like
Pagination: I'm going to be discussing this book with other people, and I'm going to have no idea how to tell them where to look. The Kindle version put things in units, and I don't know what those units were. The Corrections came in at 9,971 of these units. So if I want to refer people to something that happens at, say, unit 4,156, I have to tell everybody else, what, go about 41% of the way into the book? I still have no concept of how long the book is, and now when I get there I'm going to have to ask how long it is and do the math on the fly.
Weight: For me, one of the joys of reading a book is the weight. It feels like something substantial. And as you make progress, the weight begins to shift from right to left. That's worth a lot to me. Apple says the Touch (that's a smidge over a quarter pound). That's nothing like substantial, and the weight only shifts from right to left if you change hands.
Would I Do It Again?
Yes. In fact, I'm just jumping into .
Wait! Wait! Aren't you going to tell us what you thought of the book? Nah. I haven't fully formulated an opinion. Maybe we can actually sit down and talk about it, you and I.
A bleak future for search?
Microsoft's Bing is reportedly on the Wall Street Journal's . With exclusivity.
Rupert Murdoch, who runs News Corp. (which is the Fox network and its cable spin-offs in the U.S., along with newspapers and TV stations in the U.S., UK and Australia), the Journal's owner, has made no secret that he is considering blocking Google from searching paid content on the Journal's site. Google isn't exactly fighting back – the search engine figures that they make that option available to everyone, and if the Journal doesn't want the Internet's most popular search engine finding its content, that's no skin off Google's teeth.
But let's say Bing pays for the privilege of being the only major search engine that can search the Journal for news (the idea being that people will want Journal content included in their searches and as such will turn to Bing instead of Google). Then let's say a whole chain follows suit – maybe Bing signs up Hearst, or Belo, or both. At some point, Google has to counter.
When that happens, we come to a point where, if you want to include certain news outlets in your searches, you have to know which search engine carries what content. And maybe by now that extends to musical artists – perhaps Bing has paid one studio and Google another for access to search their artists' pages.
This is where the two search engines cease to be money-making platforms for their respective companies. Why? Because now I'd just go to , which searches them both. And then Bingle gets lots of competitors, all who search both Bing and Google. And all those search engines make money.
OR:
This exclusivity fight leads someone to develop an entirely new way to search the web. And it becomes the next Google. And then the next Bing follows. And then we do this whole thing again. Vicious cycle, anyone?
(Hat tip to James Bedell for the story link.)
The truth: The Internet is a great big rumor mill
I tend to check in the morning. It's one of the things I do in terms of a morning coffee ritual when I get to work. For those not familiar, it's a list of the things people are searching for on Google; typically it's updated every hour or so, but sometimes it goes on for a few hours before it updates. Whatever.
Frequently, it's people wanting to watch one of last night's TV episodes. There's usually something that's been featured either on The Today Show or Good Morning America. Sometimes there's sports scores. And sometimes it's people in a large enough market searching for school closings.
And then sometimes it's dead celebrities. The Internet loves to . Failing that, maybe the Internet is .
Tuesday morning, there were two. The top search was ; the second hottest search was .
Being a pop-culture-ophobe (OK, not really, but I'm pretty dim when it comes to this stuff), I'd never heard of either of these people. Which means that I had to wade through the search results to figure out who they were, never mind if they were actually dead.
Bieber, it turns out, is a who is some sort of pop sensation or something. He appears to be living and breathing and making teenage girls cry with his sensitivity instead of in mourning. This, apparently was not the first time the Internet killed Justin Beiber (via :
Casey Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of one of the founders of the Johnson & Johnson Company (if you've ever read a label on anything in a bathroom, you've heard of them). She's also the daughter of Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets.
Casey Johnson . She died this week at the age of 30, and at this writing, we're not sure why.
So, what did we learn from this? That Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes was correct: Newspapers (and other traditional news outlets) are going to turn into truth filters.
While we'll get most of our news from places like Twitter or Facebook (not necessarily those places, but places like them), where we select who we get the news from so the news will be relevant to us, we'll still need places like The New York Times to tell us whether the news we got is actually true.
The lesson: If you're not sure, check with someone you trust. Don't freak out over something you heard from someone who heard from somewhere that something may or may not have happened, which means it absolutely did.
Just like in many aspects of your life, you need to actually use your brain to use the Internet effectively.
A very Twitter new year
I rang in 2010 with a great crowd of people: , , , , , and .
Every one of those names up there is linked to a Twitter account. I met all of those people thanks to Twitter (either connecting on Twitter or having them connected to someone I had connected to on Twitter), and all of them in 2009. I know there are still nay-sayers – people who think that Twitter is just a bunch of nerds chatting online who couldn't hold a conversation in real life so they're hiding behind a utility – but as I mentioned last month, Twitter leads to more in-person interaction, not less.
I'm not the only one who about our new year's eve gathering.
I know the other question on your mind is: Were we talking or tweeting all night? I just went through all of our Twitter streams. Frank tweeted 3 times while we were out; one of those was a photo from our night out. Rochelle tweeted once; it was a photo of our night out. I posted once; it was a scheduled happy new year tweet I had created two days prior.
So, we were either talking to each other, or we were standing around in awkward silence. And there was no awkward silence.