1. Log in to your account at Moniker.com.
2. Go to the My Domains page (i.e. your domain manager)
3. Select the check box for the domain you want to set up for Google Apps
4. On the domain management menu, click IP (third tab from the left in current layout)
5. Click on Template Manager
6. Click on Create New Template and name it something like Google Apps
7. Delete all selections for that template by clicking the check box next to each entry and saving the template. This gives a blank slate to work with.
8. Under Add Template Records -> Select Record Type choose to add a CNAME record.
9. Your hostname will be the verification code Google gave you (something like googleffffffffab123456) and your address will be that code appended to the Google domain (so in this example googleffffffffab770727.google.com). Note that there is no http or anything like that.
10. Go to the Google help page on creating a CNAME record and scroll down to the Check the status of your CNAME record and enter the address with no http prefix (again googleffffffffab770727.google.com in this example). It should verify in a couple of hops if it’s working right.
11. Go back to your Google Apps admin panel and verify your domain.

There is a level a geekiness beyond which few will tread. This likely crosses that frontier. I’m prompted to write this as a result of a discussion on WebmasterWorld about which URLs should and should not have a trailing slash. One person threw out the idea that URLs for files should not have slashes and URLs for directories should. While that seems sensible, when talking about the architecture of a website, that terminology makes no sense anymore in the context of dynamic websites. In that case, we would be better off to speak of vertices or nodes and edges or, if the site is strongly hierarchical, we could think in terms of branch nodes and leaf nodes. In the latter case, we might (or might not) consider branch nodes to be “directories” or “folders” and leaf nodes to be “files”, even though the URLs no longer bear any relation to some underlying structure on a hard disk.

So all of this got me thinking about the characteristics of a modern URL and what it means for thinking about site structure and the implications that has for building listing pages that are good for the user first and foremost and good for search engine optimization as a consequence. Of course, in my usual elliptical way, it will take me 2,000 words to cycle back around to that point.

Before I go into all that, to stave off pedantic comments about URLs versus URIs, a URL is simply “a type of URI that identifies a resource via a representation of its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network ‘location’), rather than by some other attributes it may have” according to the W3C report on the subject (see also Dan Meissler’s summary). Translation: what you see in your browser address bar is always a URL and all URLs are URIs (actually Chrome breaks this by omitting the protocol identifier, but close enough). A URL was once considered a specific subset of URIs, but can now be considered a colloquial but useful (as per the W3C report) rather than a technical term.

URLs Are Abstract

In the old days, it was usual for URLs to reveal something about server architecture, and you still see this on some sites (especially ASP sites on Windows servers). Examples are URLs like:

1. http://example.com/page.html
2. http://example.com/page.php
3. http://example.com/category/
4. http://example.com/index.php?p=123

In the first two examples, the file extension suggests that the URL is pointing at a file, and that #1 is a simple HTML file that will be fed directly to the client (i.e. browser) as it exists on the server, while #2 is a PHP file, which needs to be evaluated by the PHP processor on the server, which will then feed the actual data to the client. In #3, especially since it is on the same domain as the others, we assume because of the trailing slash that it points to a directory, that is a collection of files on the server hard disk. In the final example, the URL suggests that it points to a file and that file is getting a parameter passed to it and the variable “p” will have the value “123″.

Now of course, this could all be wrong. We’re making an assumption that the URL indicates something about the server. However, early on Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Axiom of Opacity of URIs which states simply:

The only thing you can use an identifier for is to refer to an object. When you are not dereferencing, you should not look at the contents of the URI string to gain other information.

source: Tim Berners-Lee, Universal [sic] Resource Identifiers — Axioms of Web Architecture, 1996.

Dereferencing is just a tech geek way of saying retrieving the resource which is a tech geek way of saying displaying the page or image.

So in other words, the URL should only tell you and only does tell you how to locate the thing you’re looking for. It should not and ultimately does not expose the underlying system that is finding that thing. This axiom was usually ignored in the early days of the web because it was so easy to make a URL point to a file or a directory on the hard drive of the server. So out of laziness, URLs betrayed a lot about the server architecture, but this was a consequence of laziness, not an inherent and certainly not a desirable characteristic of a URL.

In my own case, like all beginners at the time, I started with simple URLs that mapped directly to specific files using the actual file names, including file extensions. One of the reason I started building my own content management system (CMS), though, was that the lack of abstraction bothered me. I hadn’t read any of this stuff by Tim Berners-Lee, but I just felt that storage location and addressing should not be so tightly tied to each other.

As a former programmer, I believed in having an abstraction layer between the user interface and the underlying technology. However, at the time I built my first pages, I was writing my dissertation in history. As a scholar, having URLs point to the host, directory, subdirectory and file location was like having call numbers point to the building, floor, shelf and shelf position of a book, rather than some abstract naming scheme like the Library of Congress classification. We do not expect the call number of a book to reveal anything about the architecture of the storage facility and I could see no reason why the URL of the “resource” would betray anything about the architecture of the server. Rather, the LC call number is based on the information architecture of the LC system without reference to the physical architecture of the building holding the books. It seemed only natural to me that my site URLs should be based on the information architecture of the site, without reference to the server setup.

This observation set me on the path of creating my own content management systems where the page content was split among as many database tables as necessary and the URL was simply an entry in yet another table. The URL table had a column with the URL and that was keyed to some number or whatever that told the program how to put together the page. At this point, the URL was a pure abstraction.

Eventually, I began looking for an open-source alternative to my custom CMS, which as a spare-time project of one guy had substantial limitations. One of the things that initially attracted me to Drupal was that it offered complete URL abstraction, using a lookup table as I was doing in my custom CMS. Now, ten years later, Drupal remains my CMS of choice, even though WordPress and many others now have similarly convenient URL abstraction (yes, this blog is on WordPress — I like it for blogging or very simple brochure sites; I like Drupal for almost everything else).

In 1997, to get good URL abstraction, I needed to build a system that had URL abstraction as a basic component and for that I had to know a programming language and be able to interface with a database. Most people were still hand-coding HTML at the time. Only a small number of people, either through reading or just thinking about it, knew about the Axiom of URI Opacity or, as I conceived it, URL Abstraction. Those that did, often did not have the technical means to achieve it. So we came to think of URLs as being somehow related to server technology. And we came to think of branch and leaf nodes in terms of directories and files, and we differentiated directories from files by the presence of absence of trailing slashes and file extensions.

Flash forward to 2012. Beginners are now more likely to install WordPress than to learn to hand code HTML. And WordPress and most other CMS now have very convenient URL Abstraction built in. So I now see abstract URLs, that is URLs that are simply a lookup column in a database, as the norm. The old-school URLs that tell you something about the machine architecture are a dying breed. And good riddance. by implication, the idea that a URL should differentiate a directory or listing from a file or page becomes problematic, as we’ll see.

URLs As API

If URLs are abstract and are just a lookup column in a table, what does that mean? Among other things, it means that they no longer are a server hardware interface, they are a sort of Application Programming Interface. They are a means not simply of looking up a resource, but of interacting with the underlying program through an abstracted interface. I say the interface is abstract because I don’t know what a given URL does once captured by the program (because URI Opacity is a fundamental principle), only that it does stuff. But as a Drupal developer, I can grab any part of the URL and create very different results, routing data through one template or another based on the second or third or fourth term of the URL.

In effect, when I build a site in a system like Drupal with abstract URLs, I can make any part of the URL fire any sort of action, in effect exposing an API to users and designers. Yes, the URL still tells the server how to “dereference a resource” but the underlying program can treat any and all parts of the URL as a parameter and in arbitrary ways (i.e. any part can have any meaning/implication). This is a natural consequence of opacity and abstraction.

URLs are Content

This may stretch the definition of content a bit, but think about what an abstract URL becomes. It is a column in a lookup table, which means that from an information storage point of view, it is identical to the meta title, the H1 tag content, the nagivation menu items and the body of the page, the latter of which may be assembled from many different tables.

We will commonly use the URL as the key to figure out which item to look up in the other tables, but I may decide to list all pages of a certain taxonomic category, in which case the category is the lookup criteria and the URL is simply data.

Is it content? I would say that ideally it is in the sense that it contains actual information that tells the user, search engines and site editors what the page is about. If it is stored like any other data and it conveys information about the page like any other data, is it not page-specific content? If you’re paying attention, it might appear that passing information about the page through the URL violates the axiom of URI opacity. However, URI opacity refers to how the user agent is to treat the URI, not whether or not it can convey information to a reader about the meaning and content of the resource that is referenced. In the case of a web page served via HTTP to a browser, it means that the browser is not to make assumptions about how to handle the page based on any component of the URL (file extension, presence/absence of a query string). It is, rather, the job of the HTTP headers to pass this information and the browser to do what it’s told. So URI opacity means opaque to the user agent, not necessarily to the user!

Directories Are Abstract

Since URLs are abstract, opaque and serve as API and content, what then is the distinction between “directory” and “file”. In the discussion that prompted this, someone said that directories are lists of pages. I can see that definition working on a classic server setup where when you have a URL that points to a directory and you allow the user to have the “index view”. In that case you get a list of files in that directory. In that case, we typically want (and depending on server setup may even need) a trailing slash to indicate what we’re looking at. But such a view is a gross violation of the principle of abstaction. It’s fine for a file server, but not for a website.

If we switch to a dynamic site built on Drupal (and to a much lesser extent WordPress), we quickly lose all sense of listing pages as directories. To take a very simple example, my Yosemite flower identifier page is what would be a classic “listing” page. And yet, what do we find there?

• Rich Structured Data. What’s here is being pulled from several different database tables to put together a list, yes, but not really a mere list of pages and certainly not a list of files. It has a photo, the common name (which is the only part linked to the page for that specific flower), the Latin name (genus and species) and the Family name. This is not merely a listing or link to the page, but a subset of data on the page. This particular page does not have any introductory content, but it could easily prepend a 30,000 word discourse on the native plants of Yosemite to the listing. In which case, is it primarily a list or primarly a page? And what possible meaning do those terms then have? In any case, the terms “directory” and “file” have no meaning at all here.
• Arbitrary Data Collections: Infinite Directories for a Given Set of Pages. The structured data presented here is arbitrary. I could list these same pages and have the strucutred data show as paragraphs rather than columns, I could have columns with color and number of petals rather than taxonomy. I can have a virtually infinite number of presentations for this same listing of pages. Because we have abstracted URLs, collections of pages are arbitrary, abstract themselves and blur the line between listing and page. The distinction between branch nodes and leaf nodes still makes sense, but both become “pages” (though in Drupal parlance only leaf nodes are “nodes”).
• The URL is an API. The user has access to various select boxes to create a custom listing page. This is simply offering the user a convenient means to hack the URL, which is to say, the API for this list. Again, thinking in terms of a URL that points to a directory loses all meaning.

Who Cares?

So who cares whether or not URLs are abstract and whether or not a trailing slash is added to a URL? More to the point, what does this have to do with anything practical? I would say there are substantial implications here for the design of pages, specifically branch node pages. The most important of them is this: if the distinction between directories and files is meaningless, between listings and pages has become inobvious, and if we see all page-specific parts of the page as “content”, this suggest something to us about site architecture.

The main thing it suggests is that we need to look for the “value add” that a listing has. If it is a mere listing, does it help the user or merely add one click layer to her quest to find relevant information? The value add might be a nice introduction and guide to the category, with most popular and best pages highlighted. In the case of my flower finder page, the value add over a straight list is that people can filter by characteristics they know in order to get a small set of photos from which they can, perhaps, visually identify the flower.

All of this has me thinking in terms of paying more attention to the content of my branch nodes, as it were. It has me thinking that laziness and sloth lead me to create simple listing pages, but these have little value to the user and they also make it harder for the search engines to differentiate one collection of pages from another. So ideally, every branch node becomes a significant content page, a guide to both user and search engine and, I would say, to site editor to sharpen her sense of the information architecture of the site. As you can see, sadly, the organizational principle of Raised By Turtles is basically to put things in the blender and then pour… but that’s work for another day.

What does that mean? For my dad, it meant that he ultimately felt responsible for all sorts of things that weren’t, strictly speaking, his job. He used to joke that he was the only NCAA Division I athletic director in America who got called a 9pm when someone was locked out of the building. Yet he did and he’d go up there with his keys even if it was security’s job. But security maybe wouldn’t know the person and it would get messy, so he would shoot over (only a quarter mile from the house). Not that he occuppied himself with the details per se, but he couldn’t walk by a piece of garbage, a broken doorknob or anything like that without taking ownership. Every semester, he looked over the grade report for every single athlete — and they had 26 varsity sports teams. If an athlete was getting low grades, he had a meeting with the athletic director. If there’s something that marks the person who takes ownership, it’s the desire to take on things simply because you see the problem as your problem, even if nobody else does.

I have a bit of this in me, but not a lot (I’ll come back to what I mean by a lot in second). One time my boss at the ski area asked me to do something “Because you’re a take charge kind of guy.” I thought he was joking, because I didn’t seem myself that way. When I laughed, he said, “No, seriously, you are.” I found this so odd and amusing that I told my wife about it that evening. She said “Well, it’s true. You are.” And that really confused me. I said, “But I don’t like to be in charge. I’m just impatient. I only take charge when something isn’t happening that should and nobody’s doing anything about it.” She laughed and said “Exactly. And how often does that happen?”

It slowly dawned on me that everyone has a certain reluctance to take ownership, but we all have our threshhold. Mine is somewhere in the middle and there are enough people around who are at the bottom, that in some contexts, that makes me a take charge kind of guy. In some cases, our threshhold is triggered by impatience or civic duty or fear. In some cases, ownership goes with the job. I can excuse myself from a lot of high-level problems, because I’m not the high-level guy. That’s my boss’s boss. That’s the governor or the president. He owns that problem.

Some people take ownership of things they have no real need or compulsion to own. Bill Gates decided to take ownership of the problem of vaccination in poor countries. Of course, I still have my excuses because I would do something big like that if I had his resources, right? But then there are the remarkable people who give lie to our excuses. People with no more resources than us for the most part, who make the biggest problems of the world their problem. Rachel Carson took ownership of the national pollution problem. Nelson Mandela took ownership of both apartheid and post-apartheid reconcilation, waging a violent campaign to end apartheid and then turning himself into one of the great peacemakers of all time. Helen Caldicott took ownership of global nuclear proliferation. Mohammed Yunus took ownership of poverty in India and now much further afield, with the Grameen Bank.

Now I’m wondering, what’s so different about them? What makes these people of unexceptional means have the audacity to take on the world’s most intractable problems and then feel a duty and responsibility to do so. For me, it’s impulsive and automatic to take ownership of the problem if I see a guest at the ski area who is having a bad time or I see a dangerous obstacle on the slope. Some employees would ski right by, but as an employee at the ski area, I couldn’t. That seems natural to me. Somehow, though, as a citizen of the world and a human being, I can ski right by poverty, children dying of diseases for which they can easily be vaccinated, nuclear proliferation, gross pollution problems and let someone else take ownership. It seems petty and small. It seems shameful. And of course, it is.

And so I wonder, what accounts for the difference between Mohammed Yunus and people like me?

And yet, my experiences in The Real World have shown me that there are some things that scholars consistently do better than business and government and that failure to see that can have severe deliterious effects on the bottom line and the lives of their employees and citizens. Three that come to mind (or perhaps two and a corollary).

1. Continuous Evaluation from Varied Perspectives.

In The Real World, I have been evaluated by my boss either annually or on the day I quit in the case of seasonal jobs. I have never once been asked to evaluate my boss and very few people I know have been asked. If companies do “360 Reviews” it’s a rare event and often very poorly conducted. In the unreal world of The Ivory Tower, faculty are evaluated:

• By students. In the abstract, the professor is of course the employee of the student, but everyone knows that the power relation is the reverse and the professor has a relationship to students more like boss to employee. Full-time faculty are evaluated by those “under” them two or three times per year, and typically those reviews number in the hundreds. Furthermore, some students go the extra step to review professors publicly at various websites. I don’t know any low-level manager who gets that level of feedback from her employees.
• By fellow faculty members in their department, peers and department heads, from high-stakes tenure review to reviews for promotion and perhaps (or perhaps not) annual reviews. These reviews include teaching performance, but also include all other aspects of the person’s performance.
• By peers at other institutions who evaluate and review books and articles for publication and reviewers who review books after publication. This is a completely different type of review that, flawed as it may be, holds the scholar’s research to certain standards.

Below the CEO and Board level, how many people in The Real World are reviewed so often and in such varied contexts?

But so what, why bother? A quick personal story. My first ever teaching evaluations came back and out of about 120 students, two mentioned in the comments that they did not like my sarcasm in the classroom. It’s a small number, but it was a shocker to me. I didn’t intend to be sarcastic in any way, but I failed to understand the power relationship at play and the fact that students took things in ways I did not intend or expect. I wanted to create a comfortable environment so I paid close attention to my mouth. Soon the mentions of sarcasm disappeared. And then over time, something else appeared. The last time I taught a course, about one third to one half of the students mentioned in free form comments (thus completely unprompted) that my classroom was one of the most supportive they had known, that though my course material was challenging and difficult, they were not afraid to speak up and be wrong, that because of that comfort, they could push themselves. It is what I had always imagined my classroom would be like, but without the reality check of evaluations at the end of every single course, would I have gotten there? I think the clear answer is no.

Meanwhile, out in The Real World, I see managers who are good at schmoozing up the ladder and get great reviews from above, but fail to motivate those below because they have no feedback on their bad habits and, perhaps even more importantly, they have not been trained to see the value of frequent, anonymous evaluations from those below as well as those above. And if they maintain a good smokescreen, the people above them have no clue that the manager is killing morale. My limited Real World experience has shown me that this one difference is a tremendous drag on productivity in the workplace.

2. Truth versus Proof

Every good scholar understands that there is a difference between what is true and what is proven. If I were going to come up with a single definition of a scholar, I would say that a scholar is someone who spends the first five years finding an answer and the next five years looking for contradictory evidence. It’s not enough to be sure. I need to be able to make others sure. I’m certain that at some point in his long life Socrates uttered the ancient Greek equivalent of “I don’t care.” I have no doubt. But I have no proof.

Scholars spend their lives juggling conflicting evidence and holding opposing viewpoints in their minds. This can be paralyzing. It is the number one thing that makes scholarly writing so bloody boring. It also contributes to the Ivory Tower stereotype. But consider the contrary, which we find behind so many of our scandals and debacles. If more people on Wall Street, in Enron, in Fannie Mae and in Freddie Mac had interrogated the evidence more, had actively sought out contradictory evidence, would we be in the economic mess we’re in? If we had people with the minds of scholars rather than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld looking at the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would we be in the military and fiscal mess we’re in? Decisions in business and government may be made in real time and with incomplete evidence, but just a nod to the scholarly mind could save us tremendous heartache and reap long-term efficiencies.

3. The Power of Evidence

This is a corollary of #2. Scholars are often accused of not having common sense. But let me be the first genius to tell you that common sense is overrated. That post quotes the most intellectually important single thing anyone said to me in grad school. I was telling some story about something I had seen and said “You’ll never believe this.” Andrew Pettegrew responded with “I’m a scholar. I’m trained to believe the unbelievable.” This, I think, shows the true power of scholarly training. If I were to hazard a second definition of a scholar, I would say that a scholar is a person equipped to believe or disbelieve anything given enough evidence. In the previous point, I argued that scholars need sufficient evidence before they will accept something as proven. This is the corollary that follows from that: a scholar is someone who, presented with enough evidence, can discard deeply held opinions and “facts” in the pursuit of that ever-elusive truth.

I’ll be the first to admit that scholars, being human, regularly fail in this. In some cases, they fail spectacularly. However, they at least understand the pitfalls of confirmation bias and in their better moments put it to the test. One place where we see both the need to change one’s thinking in the face of evidence and a demonstration of the inability to live up to that standard is the “crisis” in scholarly publishing. The crisis has been long in coming and is reaching a breaking point, yet hidebound scholars wedded to old models of publishing and old criteria for evaluating faculty performance have been unable to cast it aside.

But the failure of scholars to live up to the standards they set in their research and act on this one particular business problem is more the proof of the value of a scholarly mindset for business, rather than proof to the contrary.

First things first. Reboot of your computer after install (not just a standby/hibernate). Though rare, it can happen that the http server can’t access port 80 and therefore can’t start (port 80 is the default for webservers). If you don’t know what that means, that’s fine. Just read on.

So now you’ve rebooted and it’s still not working, so we want to find out whether it’s on the WordPress end or the server end.

• Can you access a text file through your browser using http (i.e. not opening the file directly, but through the server)? Let’s say you have a readme.txt on your local server. If you go to http://localhost/readme.txt (assuming that exists), will that come up? If that works, than your http server is fine and the issue is with WordPress.
• If you get a Page Not Found error (also known as a 404), that means the server is running, but it doesn’t have a file named readme.txt in the root directory. If you think it does, you’ll need to figure out which directory WAMP sees as your server root. To figure this out, find out where WAMP is on your computer. Typically, unlike most applicationsm, WAMP installs to C:\wamp, but it could be in your Program Files directory depending on how you installed it. There you want to find your httpd.conf file which is going to be in a location similar to C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf. In the httpd/conf file, look for places where DocumentRoot is set. It will have one global setting and may have additional settings depending on how things are set up (if you have additional virtual hosts set up). The first one should be where localhost runs. So verify that DocumentRoot points to where your files are actually stored. Now try to load the readme.txt file
  again.
• If that works we can now make sure that PHP is up and running right. Create a file that has just this one line in it:
  <?php phpinfo(); ?>
  Now save that to something like info.php in your server root and just go to http://localhost/info.php. That should bring up a long page of output about your PHP setup. If you are just getting a blank white page when you go somewhere you expect to open a PHP file, that means WAMP is running, but you have either errors or no content in your application. That’s a whole different debugging process.

Assuming you can’t bring up a simple text file.

So you’ve done all that, and things just don’t happen when you try to open http://localhost. I’ve had this happen fairly often because I’ve had Windows (especially Vista) turn on Microsoft’s IIS server after automatic updates. When this happens, IIS grabs port 80, it’s not available for Apache and your web server can’t start. So you run automatic updates and suddenly Apache and WAMP and all that go away. So we need to get rid of IIS and open up port 80.

• Via the Control Panel
  • Open up Programs and Features
  • Select Turn Windows Features on or off
  • Navigate to IIS (Internet Information Services) and just turn all that junk off. Deselect it all.
  • Restart
• Via the Services Manager
  • in the Start menu, type Services. This should bring up the Services icon. Click it to open
  • Scroll down to Windows Web Publishing Service and right click and choose properties
  • Change the startup behavior from Automatic to Disabled.
  • reboot

If you’ve rebooted and you still can’t get Apache started, check that something else isn’t blocking port 80. So from the Windows command prompt (go to Run and type cmd) type:

> netstat -aon

then check for a line that has port 80 appended to an IP address, for example:

TCP 255.255.165.21:80 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 832

This tells us that Process 832 is using port 80. Go the task Manager to check the PID of 832 and terminate it if it’s not WAMP. Now try to start WAMP. If it does, you have figured out the problem, but you will want to figure out why that process is starting up and whether you can either stop it from launching when you boot or get it to use another port. I’ve found that Skype is common offender and it has a setting in the Skype options to make sure it does not use port 80.

As with any complex application, there is room for all sorts of other things to go wrong, but in practice I’ve found that in most simple cases, this will get you up and running.

Obviously this is a cheap spammy ad no matter where you are. But in this case, it takes Yosemite National Park as my city, and then tells me that banks in Yosemite National Park are waiting to refi my loan. Since there are no banks in Yosemite…. It’s one of those small benefits of living in a national park — quick spam detection!

That idea has given me a useful mental tool for thinking about what I say and do. I’m not saying I’m good at it. I’m not one of those that consistently amplifies signal and filters noise. All I am is better at it.

What’s noise? Noise is gossip, negativity, criticism aimed at bringing someone down, complaining for complaining sake, pointless discussions about Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian (I still can’t figure out why anyone cares). Noise is anything that diverts the people around me from being happier, smarter, more confident, more efficient, more joyful.

What’s signal? Signal is the latest, greatest, coolest thing you’ve learned. Signal is news about the cause, the candidate you believe in and, possibly, useful, actionable news about the cause and candidate you oppose. Signal is the good word about the best mechanic in town or the friendliest cafe. Signal may be criticism, but well-placed criticism aimed at raising your friend to the next level, at helping her over a hump. It may not be easy for the person to hear, but neither is smoke alarm going off in your house. It’s still signal. Anything that makes the people around me happier, healthier, smarter, more confident is signal. And, yes, as unpleasant as a piercing smoke alarm or some truly thoughtful criticism may be, they can do any and all of those things.

So we always have a choice — do we boost signal or do we boost noise? Do we pass on the latest negative gossip about an co-worker? Do we repeat inanities about celebrities we’ll never meet (or buy magazines that do so, thus ensuring they continue to sit in the supermarket checkout aisle)? Do we tout our favorite cafe (Cool Beans in Oakhurst, California) or merely complain about Starbucks taking over the world? Do we pass along unhelpful criticism for the sake of passing it along (thus amplifying noise) or do we fail to pass along praise because we get distracted (thus filtering signal)?

If we’re going to live to our fullest, we need to be both filters and amplifiers, but each one at the right time. Now that I have that thought in my head, it gives me a tool to use (in my rare better moments) where I can ask myself before speaking “Am I amplifying signal or noise?” or “What signal do I want to amplify right now?” and redirect my conversation to something more useful.

You can pull this data from Ubercart simply enough but it requires a few subqueries to get all the data you need. This is because both the sales data and shipping are in the same table, namely uc_order_line_items. So you need to pull each line item from the table as a separate subquery.

There’s one other gotcha. Ubercart carries tax through to four decimal places in the database, so you need to round that to the nearest penny, as Ubercart does on checkout. This gives you a spreadsheet with all the values you need, minus the actual amount paid for shipping, which you’ll have to pull from Quickbooks or whereever.

It’s possible, also, that you’ll have to adjust for your server time if your server is in another time zone. In other words, you may need to adjust the timestamp to take that into account. And of course, Ubercart stores your order dates and times as Unix timestamps, so we have to take that into account when we do whatever conversions we need. Fortunately MySQL handles Unix timestamps with no problem.

When all is said and done, we end up with the following query:

SELECT FROM_UNIXTIME(o.created,"%Y-%m-%d") AS 'Date', o.order_id AS 'Order ID',
    tax.sales_tax AS `Sales Tax`, shipping.shipping AS 'Shipping Charged',
    o.order_total AS 'Order Total', o.billing_postal_code AS 'Zip Code', o.billing_city AS 'City', z.zone_name AS 'State'
FROM
    (SELECT ROUND(amount,2) AS sales_tax, order_id FROM uc_order_line_items WHERE TYPE LIKE 'tax') AS tax,
    (SELECT amount AS shipping, order_id FROM uc_order_line_items WHERE TYPE LIKE 'shipping') AS shipping,
    uc_orders AS o,
    uc_zones AS z
WHERE o.order_status LIKE 'completed'
    AND tax.order_id LIKE o.order_id AND shipping.order_id LIKE o.order_id
    AND o.created > UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2010-12-31 23:59:59') AND o.created < UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2012-01-01 00:00:00')
    AND z.zone_id LIKE o.billing_zone
    AND o.billing_zone LIKE '12'
ORDER BY o.billing_postal_code;

Notice that we are ordering by billing postal code. This is because in many ways, this is our most relevant piece of information. Many of the client’s customers order while on the road, so the billing address is the one that counts for tax purposes (the same as for a gift purchase or whatever). The postal code typically determines the tax rate, so it allows us to effectively sort by location. Once exported into an Excel spreadsheet, though, we can of course sort and hash however we want.

Here’s a sample of the final output in SQLYog (a Windows MySQL client):

Sample Output from SQLYog

Enjoy!

Since my first explorations, a handful of modules have made great progress and you can achieve full-featured mega menus with the excellent Megamenu module. There are also some other now-mature projects like Nice Menus, and the Superfish module, which includes mega menu support. Upon further reflection, though, I became increasingly troubled by various usability drawbacks and SEO concerns. My notes on the topic got rather long, so I’ve divided them into a series that sums up some thoughts on the usability advantages and disadvantages of mega menus and then looks at the SEO concerns with mega menus. You can see an example here from the new YosemitePark.com site (click to view full size):

Lots of Options!

You might be able to see some potential problem areas there, but let’s take a look at the good, bad and ugly of mega menus in the next post. Read on about Mega Menus and usability ——»

Usability Advantages of Mega Menus

• All options visible. A traditional dropdown menu hides almost all options from the user until she hovers over the parent category. If the user does not think with the same hierarchy as the designer, she will have to play Treasure Hunt, hovering over many parent items to find an item. This can lead to frustration too if the dropdown keeps disappearing when the user is not asbolutely precise with the cursor. In theory, mega menus can solve that problem.
• Organizing options. Mega menus allow friendly and visual grouping of options into logical groups. A traditional dropdown becomes completely dizzying when the number of options gets too large.
• Images and Icons. Often, mega menus are designed to have images or icons that correspond to, and quickly confirm for the visitor, the content of the menu. So the Contact category might be illustrated with an address book or telephone icon or some such thing.

Usability Concerns

So mega menus are a no-brainer right? What could go wrong? As it turns out, plenty. Jakob Nielsen has highlighted a few mega menu usability issues. Usability expert Jared Spool noted early on that mega menus could get you into trouble in his article on 6 Epic Forces Battling Your Mega Menus. Usability aside, Spool explains the sudden popularity of mega menus thus:

Mega menus seem like such a good idea. After all, they make the marketing team happy, as they remove all that nasty navigation away from the prime real estate of the home page, leaving room for the team’s messaging goodness. At the same time, the mega menu gives the design team a rich sandbox to play in, with much flexibility on how they display the site’s main links.

He lays out his six arguments against mega menus, most of which are in fact not unique to mega menus at all and I don’t find them inherently problematic (not that germane here; scroll to the bottom of the article for some thoughts on Spool’s six problems). He notes that Amazon, a rigorous conversion optimizer, tried mega menus for a year and dropped them. Spool concludes:

If your design would benefit in some desperate manner from this navigation cliché, go ahead and use it. However, you probably want to watch it real close. Make sure you’re watching your users and your key performance indicators (especially revenue, if you’re an e-commerce concern).

I wouldn’t go so far as that, but the it’s easy to see some of the issues that might arise with mega menus.

1. Forest of Options Obscures the Trees. I know, that metaphor usually runs the other way around, but with mega menu, you often see a pretty forest, but have trouble finding the tree you want. You can see in my screenshot from the introduction, there is a temptation to make the mega menu into a sitemap (cick image to enlarge).
   

   Lots of Options!

   Since you can throw in every imaginable option, you do. As a result, the user is presented with a dizzying array of options and, one might guess, becomes paralyzed by the number of options. It creates an easy out for designers and site architects who don’t want to make choices. Now, I don’t want to get into the old saw about only presenting users with seven choices in menus. It is not true now and never was, but at a certain point, the number of options becomes visually distracting and difficult to read, and it seems to me quite common to see mega menus cross that line simply because they can.

2. Screen Size problems. This is not unique to mega menus. This can be a problem with options dropdowns (i.e. select boxes) that have long options or standard dropdown menus if they get big enough. The problem is that the mega menu is, well, mega, so this is a lot more common. You can see from this screenshot that mega menus can become completely non-functional if the window is narrow, as on a mobile device, or short, as on a netbook (click images to see full-sized):
   

   Oops! A not-so-mega menu

   

   Oops! Short window problems

   You can see that the mega menu is cut off on a narrow or a short screen. Anything that sticks out past the browser window is missing. With most types of content, this isn’t a big deal. Sure, the user has to scroll right to see it, which is annoying, but it can be done. With a mega menu, however, the user cannot scroll! Why? Because it only stays displayed when the mouse is hovering over the menu. Move the cursor down to the scroll bar, and the mega menu disappears. Scroll, and the link goes off screen. You literally cannot use the mega menu on a narrow screen.

   The Yosemite Park site solves this by allowing you to click on the root term and be taken to an index page, where the sub-options are displayed by default. That’s a pretty good solution, but it means the user needs to know, or guess, that the root term is a link and is clickable. It would be interesting to track visitors and see how they ultimately use this navigation.

This was part of what ultimately took the blush off mega menus for me personally. I just found that you compound implementation problems and if you’re not careful and don’t test on a lot of platforms, you have a high chance of letting a significant usability problem creep in. In addition, I was also concerned with the SEO impacts of mega menus (next section) ——».

Addendum: Spool’s issues with mega menus

If you’re really interested in Jared Spool’s Six Epic Problems, here’s a quick rundown, but it’s really more the SEO issues that you should read about next. Anyway, I’m not all that concerned with most of these issues, but here are some supplementary thoughts on Spool’s Six Epic Problems.

1. Menus are not Buttons. Since a menu isn’t a button, users don’t know they have to do something to make it expand. Realistically, they may simply not know it expands and will go there to click, only to see more options revealed. It’s better than not expanding.
2. Missing Trigger Words. In other words, since most options are hidden, users can’t see that they exist. But short of the navigation taking up the whole page as a sitemap, you’re not going to change this, and a mega menu at least gets you half way, though as you’ll see in the next part on the SEO problems with mega menus, that halfway solution is often a result of a bad information architecture decision.
3. Category Names not always inherently sensible. Well, of course not. This is a problem with any navigation and, again, is an information architecture problem more than a user interface problem.
4. Users Wait Before Moving Their Mouse. In other words, if they can’t see what they want, users sit there paralyzed and won’t click anything at all. Again, mega menus aren’t the root problem. If the design only allows, say, seven navigation links, then that’s what there is and they may not always have enough information scent to get the user to click, whether on hover those menu items reveal nothing (i.e. it’s a single-level menu hierarchy), reveals a cascade of hierarchical dropdowns (classic model) or is a mega menu. Realistically, the mega menu at least removes a one or more decision points vis-à-vis the classic hierarchical dropdown, where the user will have the “pause” problem at every level, instead of just at the root level.
5. Mega menus hide the information that’s under them. That’s a problem when the user accidently hovers over the menu while trying to read the content, which suddenly get’s hidden. That can be annoying, but in a minimally usable design, the mega menu should disappear simply on mousing out and most users today will know this. I find this a much less problematic usability issue than the one I noted where in a small screen, parts of the mega menu are not visible, clickable or usable at all.
6. Problems with hoverless devices. As we move to devices that don’t have cursors and mouses, they can have trouble triggering the menu expansion. Of course, this again is not unique to mega menus, but concerns anything that uses hover behavior as a trigger. This has become so ubiquitous that I think this is largely solved by most devices these days, though I am an iPad virgin, so I can’t say for sure.

Read on about the SEO impacts of mega menus (next section) ——».

Mega Menus and Search Engine Optimization Problems

Ultimately, it wasn’t the usability questions that brought me up short with respect to mega menus. It was the SEO concerns. Mega menus end up putting lots of links at the top of the page, sometimes hundreds. Google itself says in its Webmaster Guidelines that webmasters should “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.” Google’s official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) recommends that webmasters should avoid “creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page” (p. 12). When the mega menu gets truly large, it effectively ends up doing just that or very nearly.

Few voices in the Search Engine Optimization community are more respected, experienced, and authoritative than Ted Ulle. Back in 2008, Ted had a number of clients with -950 penalties and one of the common characteristics that jumped out was a tendency to have site navigation with tons of links. In internet years, 2008 is a while ago, but Ted continued to see this problem in 2010 and 2011, as we’ll see. Also, in 2010, Jane Copland of SEOMoz said that in her opinion “massive drop-downs certainly aren’t adhering to SEO best practices.”

So why would a large collection of links in the page templage create problems? There are a number of possible reasons. Unlike some of the usability issues, none of these are unique to menus formatted as classic mega menus. Instead, they are a simple function of the number of links, but I do believe that once the mega menu tool is available to the design team, the number of links tends to explode. So it is more an enabler than a cause per se.

1. Confused Relevancy Signals. It helps the search engines determine what a page is about if you keep it laser-focussed on the topic at hand. Normal navigation adds a handful of keywords that can confuse the signal a bit, but it compensates by helping focus the search engine’s understanding of overall site content and spotlight the most important pages. Mega menus, on the other hand, can add hundreds of keywords that confuse the signal. In information theory, the keywords in the mega menu are “noise” and it make it harder for the search engines to figure out the “signal” (page topic) and therefore figure out relevancy of the page to a given search.

   Google is getting better at ignoring navigation and boilerplate content. Some people contend that, therefore, this is not a problem. But Ted Ulle stated in January 2011 that he still believed that a large number of links in the page template is problematic for relevancy. In brief, you are challenging the search engine by adding this much noise to the signal and you have to ask whether or not you really want to depend on the strength of the Google or Bing algorithm to sort out your “semantic chaos” as Ted calls it.

2. Link Equity Dilution. This is similar to the semantic confusion caused by the forest of anchor text in your navigation. Each page has a certain strength and each link passes some of that page rank to the pages it links to. You can stop passing that equity by using the nofollow attribute on your link, but you can’t preserve the link equity this way. When you add a nofollow attribute to the link, it still leaks equity from the source page, it just doesn’t add it to the target page. So no matter how you cut it, they massive number of links are diluting the link strength of the page and tending to make it harder for the engines to figure out which parts of the site are important.
3. Crawl Challenges. This was more of an issue in the old days when search engines crawled only the first 100KB of code or so, but even with improvements, you’re putting a bigger challenge before the search engine.
4. Page Load Times. Again, this is a minor issue, but a massive collection of links in the navigation will slow down load times and rendering. Of course, one decent image or a large CSS file will quickly outweigh this, but we do know that load times are or soon will be taken into account in the Google algorithm at least, and we can expect other engines to follow suit.

Fixing the Mega Menu Problem

So what is an enterprising webmaster to do? You have a number of options, some better than others.

1. Reduce the number of links.good results with clients by reducing navigation from over 60 links down to 22. By tracking click patterns, Ted and his team found that a single link accounted for 60% of the clicks from the front page and the top ten links accounted for 99% of all clicks. So with some serious thinking about information architecture and some good analytics, you can simply reduce the number of links which will also improve usability. If you can get buy in, this is the preferred solution of course, but buy in will be difficult in any large organization unless you have the data and a strong case. And even then, some doorkeeper with a love of the current layout may block any and all arguments, no matter how reasonable.
2. Source-Ordered ContentIt is quite possible to put your menu at the end of your code and get your main page content at the top, but then display the page with the header (and thus the navigation) at the top. This is relatively easy to implement and I used to do it systematically (less so now), but of course, the links are still on your page. So though it mitigates the effects of having all that anchor text and links high on the page, the noise is still there.
3. iframe for navigation. I’ve never actually done this, but some people recommend it for boilerplate content in the site footer. The problem with doing this for the navigation is that you’ve entirely removed the navigation as an on-page factor for relevancy and so forth. So yes, you get rid of the noise in the signal, but you also get rid of a lot of the signal and your ability to build link flow throw the site. It seems like a collossally bad idea.
4. Use HTML 5 and hope the search engines understand. The HTML 5 spec includes the ability to specifically denote part of your document as navigation using the nav element. Of course, this is bleeding edge, so it’s rather early to expect the search engines to be smart enough to understand this and act appropriately. But let’s just assume it’s 2015 and they all “get” this. You still have the fundamental problem that your navigation is a key tool in telling the search engine what your site is about, and by including a massive number of links, you’ve given up your chance to provide signal to help the search engine cut through noise. In other words, at a certain number of links, you’re still adding noise rather than adding signal. So, again, it may mitigate the ill effects of the design, but it still misses out on a great opportunity.
5. Lazy Loading. Lazy loading is where delay loading content until the user wants it. So you images that are low on the page, for example, don’t get loaded until the user scrolls down. There are some excellent JQuery lazy loader plugins that let you implement this simply enough. So that would keep it out of the search engines, but the navigation needs to be responsive and readily available to the user, so load on demand seems like a terrible solution in this case.

So in short, it seems like the best alternative is to use your navigation like a lens to focus the search engine on the main points of your site, and you do that by making hard choices. As I mentioned at the outset of this series, in the end, I found great solutions for mega menus in Drupal , but for all the reasons detailed here, have tended to avoid mega menus if possible.

To be healthy humans, we need a reset button too. But we need lots of reset buttons, small, medium and large. We need to hit the small reset button a couple times every day, the medium button a few times per year, and the big reset button… well that’s the interesting one.

The small reset button can be anything. It’s the little breaks we offer ourselves every day and it can be anything. For me it can be a workout, some chocolate, a movie, a cup of tea and a book, lunch with a friend, or any of those little things we do just to have a little break. They do a couple of things for us. They give us some rest and set us up to tackle the challenges we have ahead of us. They can also be the things that give us meaning – lunch with a friend, movie with my wife, some volunteer work. It can be about creating a little space to be human and feel alive. No matter how much we love or hate our work, it’s essential to hit the small reset button a few times every day just to take stock. The musican Jimmy Buffet said, at 26:52 in this video: “Somehow I was lucky enough to get my thumb on the pulse of some people’s idea that they needed a little vacation every day of their lives.” That’s what the little reset button is. A little vacation every day of your life.

The medium reset button is the least interesting of the three. It’s like the small button, just more — the vacations we take, the visits home to family, that special concert we go to, things like that. It’s the least interesting not because I dislike vacations and concerts, but because the medium reset button is the one that people tend to spend the most time thinking and talking about. The ever-so-important small reset button is often unconscious or for too many people, absent entirely. It goes underappreciated while they think about the medium reset button. The BIG BUTTON is the one you think about languidly on the beach during a medium reset, but then the margarita wears off (I have Jimmy Buffet on the mind) and you get back to “reality.”

The BIG reset button is something that only comes along once in a while for most of us. It can be an extended sabbatical off from the same job, or it can be working eighty hours per week at two jobs while making a transition to something totally different. I’ve done the eight-month leave of absence to bum around, but it was really just a long version of the medium button. It was an extra long vacation, nothing more. Fantastic, but not a big reset. Neither it’s purpose nor it’s effect was the big reset. The big reset comes along, sometimes when you expect and sometimes when you don’t. Many people think they want to hit the BIG BUTTON but can’t. The opportunities for the big reset are actually plentiful, but we run from it screaming most of the time. I certainly have. If it isn’t scary, it’s probably not the BIG BUTTON.

I’ve hit the BIG BUTTON a couple of times. When I went to grad school or moved to Switzerland, those were major transitions, but not the BIG RESET. Mentally I was already there. Those were transitions from one thing to the other, without killing the power switch. The big resets were more open-ended and sometimes way smaller events to outside observers. I drove out of my programming job at MITRE with no idea what I would do with my future (aside from finish college in the short term, but not in computer science), but the greatest feeling of exhiliration imagineable. After college, I went to Alaska to work the fish processing plants because it was as far away from home as I could get without needing a work visa and it was as far away from Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, blah blah blah university culture. That particular adventure was less about hitting my own reset button than it was about hitting everyone else’s. After graduating with various honors and such, people kept implying that I was supposed to continue on that path. I had never cared excessively about grades in college. I was just passionate and so I got good grades. Though it wasn’t true, I’m sure, to my 22 year-old mind it seemed to me that I needed to reset everyone’s expectations about what I would do. So I went and worked the fish processing plants and delivered pizzas until people quit asking what I was really going to do with my life. Now I’m probably less susceptible to outside influence, but then I felt like I needed everyone to know that I was going to do what I wanted to do, not what they wanted me to do (and I must say, my parents were NOT part of the problem; they were the rare adults in my life who didn’t really care what I did as long as I was happy and making some contribution, whether that was cleaning fish or saving the world).

Most recently, after 20 years as a historian, I hit the BIG button and spent the summer as a National Park Ranger. Again, less dramatic than moving to a new country or embarking on my doctoral studies, but it was consciously aimed at hitting a button, though I wasn’t sure ahead of time whether or not it would be the BIG BUTTON. It was a great job, but mostly I’ve only had great jobs over the past twenty years. So it was less of a dream job for me than for other people (and in any case, I don’t dream about jobs!). But it was a huge reset. My historian job involves day after day alone in a room with just a computer. I can easily go three or four days and talk to nobody but my wife if I don’t make a solid effort. That might be fine for an introvert, but I genuinely like people. I rarely meet someone I dislike. As a ranger, it was out with the public all day long (less nature, more public than most people think). On average, I would spent about three hours per day talking to crowds, a total of 100–200 people per day. And then I spent a lot more time talking to people singly or in small groups. I spent almost no time with a computer and little time truly alone. And I realized that the solitary life of a scholar is not really my strength, I realized I’m actually a good public speaker, that I have the ability to inform entertain and occasionally even move people. A lot of friends said “Of course. You knew that before you started obviously.” But no, I did not. That was not how I saw myself. It is now. I’m a different person than before not because I’ve changed so much, but because I see myself differently. I set it up to go back to my old job after the ranger season, but one of the fundamental characteristics of the BIG BUTTON is that there is no going back. The big button changes you, so the job might be the same, but you are not.

The small reset button gives you some breathing room, it makes your bad situations palatable and, ideally lets you see your good situations. It helps keep you comfortable.

The BIG BUTTON makes you uncomfortable. It’s the one you hit when you are too comfortable, when your creativity and productivity have stagnated on the cushy couch of your mind, when you’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and it doesn’t do it for you anymore, when the challenges of the past have become the routine tasks of today. The BIG BUTTON takes you out of the comfort zone, teaches you about who you are, shows you new strengths and weaknesses, shows you your potential, for good or ill. It isn’t a breather on the path, it’s the fork in the road, the resets that divide your life into before and after. It’s the Phoenix Button.

When is the last time you hit the reset button, large or small? What did it do for you?

[And this is for Mark and Ping, who just dropped everything in the professional careers, sold the house, moved to Taiwan. There's no going back from hitting the Phoenix Button]

In addition, one of the main products of his business is disgruntled guests. Employees tell me that a very high percentage demand a refund because of the condition of the units. In other words, he’s a miner. He takes the income he can out of the house and and the customer and puts none of it back. Like a miner who’s done with the land, it has less value than when he first arrived there.

In the real world, miners mine because you can’t get beryllium any other way. They mine it because they can’t grow it. But in the metaphoric world, it’s often a choice between a mining approach and a farming approach, extracting value or cultivating value, making it worse or making it better. We have our own yosemite vacation rental, but we like to think of ourselves more as farmers. Our house is more modest than the log castle, but we put the effort in to make it better. We try to turn our rental income back into the house to give people a great experience. We want to build long term value in the building and we also want to build long-term relations with our customers. We essentially get no complaints, because we think of our transactions as cultivating a relationship, not exploiting one.

But since I first started thinking of our neighbor as a miner, I find it a useful heuristic for looking at all sorts of things. It’s a question I can ask myself (is this miner or farmer behavior?). It’s a screen for looking at all sorts of decisions, actions, relationships and so forth.

So are you a farmer or a miner?

• My expenses will rise by $500 per month.
• My income will drop by $500 per month.
• That’s $12,000 per year difference. With an extra $12,000 per year I could:

• Retire eight years earlier.
• Take the family on a couple of major trips per year.
• Make the difference between my mom being able to afford to stay in her house or having to move into an apartment.

The key thing about finding The Number is that it allows you to see more clearly the tradeoffs you’re making. If I know the shortfall in my mom’s income and I know the amount I’m giving up for the move, I can use the The Number to decide. It might not be a dollar figure. It could be hours. If it’s four hours per week that I’m going to volunteer at the food shelf, I need to find four hours in my schedule. Maybe I’ll give up the four hours I spend watching televsion (actually, I don’t even receive a broadcast signal at my house, so that’s just a hypothetical, but then we don’t have a local food shelf either). Maybe I’ll have to give up two days per week of exercise. Well, I’d like to be noble and volunteer, but I really like my exercise. At least now I have The Number. It’s still a question of values and what’s important to me, but at least I know which important thing, if any, I’m trading for.

I find that people frequently make their decisions without finding The Number. I don’t mean they don’t "run the numbers." I mean they don’t find The Number, which is to say the figure that allows them to really crystallize the decision, really understand the tradeoffs, really see the impact. To do that, The Number needs to be related to other things, the things you’re giving up because time or money are finite. This is the step that people often miss. A couple of examples.

When we lived in the Bay Area, people were always saying they were buying a 4WD vehicle “because we like to go to Tahoe sometimes.” Quite often 2WD cars are required to put tire chains on, while 4WD cars are allowed on the roads without chains and they hated putting chains on in the snow during these occasional trips to the mountains. These friends were always dismayed, and sometimes a bit angry, when I would run them through the numbers. Let’s say I’ll keep the car for ten years and these are the costs of owning that car versus a small, highly fuel-efficient 2WD vehicle (say 35mpg versus 25mpg @12,000 miles per year and $4/gallon) :

• Extra cost to bump up to a 4WD vehicle: $2000.
• Lifetime extra cost of insurance: $1500.
• Lifetime extra cost of gasoline: $5486.

There are other costs, like you are likely to spend more on tires over the life of the car and things like that, so we’ll round up a bit and say the lifetime cost over 10 years is an extra $9,000 or $900 per year. Now, most of these people I was talking to would go to Tahoe about ten times over the course of a winter (every other weekend, Thanksgiving to Easter). Fewer than half of those times would the highways be under chain controls. So about three times per year, they would be putting chains on their car. That means that they are effectively paying $300 per time they avoid having to get down in the snow and put chains on their cars.

As it turns out, typically there are chain installers at the checkpoints in the Tahoe area. So for only $40, you can pay someone else to put tire chains on your little fuel efficient car. But not a single one of these friends had ever ponied up $40 to avoid getting down in the snow and putting the chains on themselves because it was too expensive. In other words, when faced with paying an extra $9000 over ten years for their car, they had no problem doing so. But when it can to paying $40 to avoid ten minutes of unpleasantness in the snow, the thought it was too expensive. And yet it is $260 per incident cheaper than buying the 4WD car. So somehow it was not worth paying $40 to avoid having to put chains on, but it was worth $300. Just to get the cost down to the price of hiring a chain installer, you would need to chain up 22 times per year, but remember, when faced with paying that cost in the moment, none of them would do it. If asked how much they would pay, I bet the
number would be around $10 per incident. For us, when we moved to the mountains and spent most of the winter under chain controls, it became absolutely worth it — not only are we down under $10 per incident, we were burning through $300 worth of chains every winter, or $3000 over ten years, which takes a substantial chunk out of the $9000.

This comes up today, because I’m looking at snowblowers. The track-driven Honda is $3000. The wheel-driven Sears blower is $1000. The Honda is a better machine, but for the price difference I can have new skis for me and my wife (in which case The Number is $2000). Looked at another way, we have a couple of storms per year that will overwhelm any blower. If the Sears is overwhelmed an extra two times per year, I’m still ahead, because I can pay someone with bigger equipment to clear my driveway for $50. So I’m still $100 ahead for that year (in this case, The Number is $200/year over ten years). Or looked at yet another way, the Honda is maybe better built and will last longer.
But it has to last three times as long (in this case The Number is 3, the price ratio between one and the other).

The key to making The Number work for you is to use it to avoid buyer’s remorse. This is simple. Every time you’re down in the snow getting wet, freezing your hands, putting on chains, remind yourself that you are effectively being “paid” $300 for that. Ask yourself: “On a night like tonight, if someone said ‘Hey buddy, I’ll pay you $300 to put my chains on,’ would I do it?” I know if I could get $300 to put chains on, I’d be doing it all the time. This winter when I’m out manhandling the Sears blower out of the gutter between the driveway and the road (the one place where the wheel-drive blowers often get stuck), I will remind myself how excited I am to have new skis. And I’m writing this so that as I wrestle, fume and swear when that wheel-drive blower gets stuck in the gutter, I’ll have a record of why I chose the cheap one!

In other words, the key is not simply doing the analysis and finding The Number, but then translating that to what else it gets you and then, every time you feel remorse that you didn’t buy the nicer model, take the other job, volunteer for a good cause, watch another four hours of television, move to the new city or whatever, remind yourself what you gained by making your decision.

When hippies rioted in Yosemite and the Park Service was looking for ways to keep them out of the parks, Hartzog went to investigate the situation. Arriving in the park, he put on old clothes and went out to the hippy campsite and just sat around the fire for several hours listening. He held an all-Valley meeting the next day and invited all questions. He then completely revamped how the parks were run, splitting the rangers into law enforcement and interpreters (who interpret nature and history, not languages), hiring new interpreters and tasking them with creating programs for young people. Hartzog had the vision to realize that a strategy that hinged on excluding young people would end in the utter destruction of the parks over time. So rather than focusing on keeping hippies out of the park, he focused on getting them in. In doing so, one might say he literally saved the parks.

I’ve always loved the riot story, but I found one I might like even more in his autobiography and illustrates his free-wheeling leadership.

The National Park Service had the most educated, talented, innovative cadre of people I have ever known — in or out of government…. I wanted to turn them loose. I told the regional director that I thought the handbooks which, for the most part, told you how to do your job were stifling our field people. They disagreed; so I appointed a committee of them to look at the situation and make recommendations. Soon, the committee reported the handbooks were needed to insure uniformity. That did it!

My objective was not uniformity, but creativity and productivity. I abolished fifty-six volumes of handbooks, including the three I had written, and substituted instead objectives, goals, program and personal performance standards. Man-o-life did I catch hell, one would have though I had repudiated the King James version of the Holy Scriptures!
——Hartzog, p. 152—53.

It’s yet another example of how he didn’t enter the debate, he didn’t even reframe the debate. He threw the debate out, opened things up to personal initiative, unleashed that talent. Hartzog himself, before becoming director of the Park Service, passed the bar and became a lawyer despite never attending college let alone law school. And then went on to be accepted to the bar of the Supreme Court. It’s no surprise that he was willing to ride a bit free and wild and was willing to encourage those in his agency to do the same.

I certainly don’t see anyone like that in Park Service, probably not in all of government today. I wonder though how Hartzog would be taking on the challenges of today. I think it’s safe to say he’d be making people a lot more uncomfortable, but a lot more engaged.

“What are universities, but parking lots for youth”

(the interview was in French and I recall the quote as something like “Quelles sont les universités que les parkings de la jeunesse.” In other words, universities to Botta are the place we put youth because we don’t know what else to do with them. We don’t have good jobs for most eighteen year-olds, so we put them in universities to grow up for a few years and, if they get the education they deserve, well that’s an accidental by-product.

The second quote comes from my major professor, Bob Kingdon. I believe he was quoting George Mosse, the great scholar of German nationalism, but it may have been Garrett Mattingly, the great scholar of Renaissance diplomacy. Mosse was Kingdon’s predecessor at Wisconsin and Mattingly was Kingdon’s major professor. No matter, the quote was (again, roughly):

“Classes are for mediocre students. Good students would learn more by spending an hour at the library.”

You might debate either of these quotes, but for a long time I’ve been thinking that the university system is becoming unsustainable. State legislators are givign up on higher education, but in a very real way, I think educators gave up on education first. How so? When my father started at the University of Vermont, a standard teaching load was five courses per semester. When he left, it was five courses per year. Yes, it’s true that tuition has risen in part because university administrators now outnumber university faculty, but it’s also because universities gave up on education as their primary role and came to see research as their primary role. Let’s face it, cutting the number of classes professors teach in half at a school like UVM, which not so long ago was an undergraduate school with no graduate programs, has had a lot to do with raising the cost of tuition as well.

Meanwhile, faculty have a “pull the ladder up after us” mentality, by which I mean that the vast majority consider themselves liberal and pro-labor, yet universities have terrible labor practices, often employing adjunct teachers at starvation wages and no benefits. If faculty taught, on average, one additional course, that would save more money than hiring adjuncts. Of course it would mean many of those adjuncts would not work in university teaching, but I’m not at all sure they would be worse for it. But since academics as a whole are rarely known for their courage, don’t expect to see action on this front soon.

And there are other aspects to the rising tuition as well. Universities increasingly resemble Club Med with deluxe rec sports facilities and other amenities that are ultimately rolled into tuition in the name of attracting better students. All of this costs money and if the goal is actually educating people for their futures, we should save these frill for those students who are willing to pay for membership in a private gym or movie club or whatever (spoken as someone who spent more time than most at the gym and the campus movie club during my student days — these are great things; they should just be optional, not rolled into tuition).

I’m thinking of this after successive conversations with my brother about the crushing cost of college and after looking up the costs of some universities. My alma mater is now $48,000 per year for an out of state student (I had a full tuition remission when I went, so I don’t really know what the cost was, but it was a lot less than that). I remember as recently as 10 years ago my brother-in-law was at Cal Tech, then the most expensive school in the country at $35,000. Now that’s a bargain. Saint John’s, the liberal arts school with a “great works” curriculum is around $55,000 per year.

Let’s be real. How can it possibly be worth $55,000 a year to have someone guide you through the reading of Aristotle? If you have two children at Saint John’s, you’d be better off hiring a couple of out-of-work PhDs to come to your house and home school your kids through university. And by the way, that cost doesn’t even count opportunity cost from four years of lost labor. Let’s assume an average of $10 per hour for four years. That means the true cost is actually 75,000 dollars per year!

But this is where I get back to the quotes from Botta and Mosse. Three hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend on parking your kid for four years and, if the kid is going to Saint John’s he will graduate with no identifiable skill, no preparation for a job that would remotely prepare him for repaying that money.

Am I a calous philistine? Well, yes, but not because of what I just said. Let me take on some imagined counter arguments.

1. It’s a worthwhile long-term investment.

This is what the Ivy League schools used to say, because their grads made so much more money. Some research suggests this may not be so. Kids who were similar to those (SAT, rank in class, GPA) as those who went to Ivy League schools but who did not themselves go Ivy, had similar income to those who got Ivy League educations. Furthermore, Ivy grads had lower job satisfaction ten years after graduation than those who went to more modest schools (see NYT article). All of this makes me wonder whether you would see a similar phenomenon if you tracked highly motivated kids who could have gotten into Ivy League schools but chose not to go to college at all. We know that some who never graduated have done pretty well for themselves. I’m thinking of college dropouts like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell and Larry Ellison (these are the proof cases for Mosse’s comment that the brightest students don’t need classes). But I could also be thinking of the guy who did our tile work who makes $60 per hour without a single college course to his name (and he can’t keep up with the demand on his services, even working weekends quite often, out-earning all the humanities PhDs I know who are within 15 years of his age).

The second thing I would say is that if someone gave me $300,000 right now, I could within four years leverage that into a rental business that would be self-sustaining and support me for the rest of my life with plenty of time to read Aristotle. I wouldn’t even have to start a computer revolution or lay tile.

2. The value of a liberal education can’t be calculated in dollars. It’s about broadening kids and teaching them to think.

Fair enough, but there is always an opportunity cost and dollars allow us to see what it is. We know that for Saint John’s that cost is $300,000. Frankly, on that much money, I could travel around the world for ten years, visiting probably every country on the planet, learning two or three languages well, learning customs of far off lands, seeing countless new things and, by the way, having plenty of free time to read Aristotle should I so desire. I don’t think anyone could argue that a university education is broadening on that scale.

When I see tuition prices that really are only affordable to the ruling elite or America, when I see unpaid student loan debt crest one trillion dollars, when I see students graduating with English degrees owing $800 per month on their loans, when I see an educational system that tends to stifle creativity rather than encourage it, it makes me wonder if the whole costly edifice is about to crumble. I think the answer is yes. The university system as we know it, primarily a product of the nineteenth century, is poised for a major change and, for many in education, major pain. But I believe the financial burden of the system as it exists is no longer warranted by the benefits. I also think that such changes tend to be slow, which means that my friends in academia will mostly all be fine. They’ve got the ladder up after them and can breathe a sigh of relief. But if I were a parent now, I would seriously consider what else I could do with my money. If I were a student, I would be putting together “grant” proposals and business plans to get “angel investors” (i.e. mom and dad) to fund my Great Adventure (think of the Grand Tour of the seventeenth century) or my startup. And if I were a young person considering grad school with an eye toward university teaching, I would look upon the venture more carefully than ever.

Today, they rolled out the new look for GMail (at least I got my first look today). The new look is a mixed bag. I generally find it less readable. The layout of messages is much harder for me to navigate. I find it harder to see what’s going on in a message thread, because in the past I had collapsed versions of all messages in the top of the screen and I could expand and contract them as I wished. I still haven’t figured out what the organizational principle is for the new layout and, from a usability point of view, any interface that you can’t figure out after an hour is rather a usability failure.

But, just after firing off an email to Google to explain why I found their new interface so difficult to navigate, I was poking around the settings and realized that GMail Offline is finally back and now inlcudes offline access to Calendar and Documents! It is currently only integrated with Chrome as a sort of standalone app (download for GMail or Calendar and Google Docs).

This is what the GMail offline app looks like:

GMail Offline Interface

The video shows it in use. I apologize for the terrible audio that goes in and out of sync and has a lot of noise – I did this on my slow old laptop with the mike built into my cheapo headset. The video is a bit disorganized, but hopefully it’s enough to show you the power of wp_pear-debug. See below the video for some useful links.

The common methods available in php_debug are listed here:
http://www.php-debug.com/www/docs/V2.0.0/PHP_Debug/Debug.html

That page is surprisingly hard to find from the php_debug home page, so make a note of it.

Plugin Home Page
http://www.communitymodder.com/Released-wordpress-plugins/wp-pear-debug-wordpress-plugin.html – nice description, screenshots, and help on how to install and use the plugin.

The official WordPress.org Plugin download page

In the video, I call the dump() method using the direct invocation:
wp_pear_debug::dump($defaults, ‘Defaults1′);

Since I’m not doing much, this was simpler than creating a new object and invoking it as

$debugObject = wp_pear_debug::get();
$debugObject->dump($default);

1. Secret Sync – this is an add-on that encrypts files on your computer, using a key that nobody at Dropbox has, so even if someone gets into your Dropbox account, they can’t read your files. It’s free, but they plan to roll out a “pro” model with additional features.
2. Spider Oak offers client-side encryption built in, so it’s essentially the same as Dropbox + Secret Sync and is, like Dropbox, free for 2GB.

Secret Sync (or actually, I think it’s SecretSync as one word), being a different company entirely from Dropbox, means that your DB and SS passwords are not shared between companies, so that should be as secure as your passwords.

Spider Oak is one company, but they claim a higher level of privacy than Dropbox:

At SpiderOak we have created a true ‘zero-knowledge environment’ meaning that no one including the SpiderOak employees will ever know what you are storing on your SpiderOak Network. We can maintain this environment because at no time will anybody know your password (or the answer to your password hint) except you.

I still haven’t decided whether to switch. I’m pretty pissed off at Dropbox for the misleading statements they make on their site (saying all files are AES 256 encrypted – essentially unbreakable – but neglecting to say that they have the keys and with certain forms of attack the hackers could have them too!). Still, one of the things about Dropbox is it is very bandwidth efficient and I am bandwidth limited because I’m often connected over satellite. Dropbox tries to upload just the pieces of a file that have changed (based on filesystem sectors?) and to not even upload common files that a lot of people share (very popular songs). Once you switch to full encryption, I would think that changing a single period in a document would result in a completely different encrypted file, like if you were doing a hash, and require a full upload.

Spider Oak says no:

SpiderOak will scan the file and find only the changes, and store new data blocks for those areas of the file. This means that SpiderOak is able to store all historical versions of a document using little additional space.

For example, if you’re working on a research paper, and add new sections, charts, and other information to it as you go along, SpiderOak just stores these additional items. So, SpiderOak will be able to store all of the historical versions of your research paper using about the same amount of space as would be needed to only store the most recent version.

So it would probably be worth it to switch, but we turtles don’t do anything fast!