Spreadsheet past, present, and future

ZDNet:

On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for [Lotus] 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done.

A significant milestone in the history of the spreadsheet, and more broadly, the PC.

The modern work of many professionals, including my fellow actuaries, runs through webs of spreadsheets. Though Microsoft Excel has been the undisputed king of desktop spreadsheets, I feel like it's been up against an innovation wall. The interface and its basic uses have been largely unchanged in more than a decade (despite a significant visual makeover in 2007.)

I think mobile represents the innovation frontier for spreadsheets. Microsoft has done essentially nothing in that space, and while the Google Drive app is pretty good in terms of accessibility and collaboration, it lacks many features that Excel powerusers rely on.

Apple's Numbers looks good visually and has more features, but it falls drastically short on file sharing and collaboration.

Whoever can come up with a truly mobile-user-friendly system for working with tabular data that has the same degree of buy-in that Excel has enjoyed since the late 1990s, will become very rich.

On the other hand, maybe the concept of the spreadsheet will itself run its course in the next decade or two. It wouldn't be a terrible thing. I've seen the wounds inflicted by both sides of Excel's blade. Replacing spreadsheets created by armchair programmers with more robust software applications is probably better long-term.

Solving the email-while-on-vacation problem

To avoid inbox shock when returning from vacation, a lot of us check email constantly while on vacation. It's a pretty awful way to live if you think about it.

Around the 10:30 mark of his TEDxNashville talk, "My Digital Stamp," Erik Qualman solves this problem:

1. When your vacation starts, set your email's vacation auto-responder to say:

   Thank you for your email. This mailbox is temporarily full. If your email is important please resend it on [Return Date].

2. When you return, select all the emails you received while on vacation.

3. Delete.

A posthumous interview with George Carlin

Yuvi Zalkow:

I’ve always wanted to know how he evolved into the great comedian that he became. So I asked him…

Be an actor

James Shelley on theatrical theory:

Aristotle pointed out that we only know a character’s true character through the choices that they make. If a character delivers a monologue but doesn’t decide or do something, the audience has been given no reason to believe them. Actions alone demonstrate character. . .

Imagine if life were more theatrical.

A book called Markdown

There are lots of places where you can pick up a tip or two on writing Markdown. There are also a ton of apps, services, and utilities for making it easier to write Markdown.

But they're not all in one place. In fact, they're very much in the opposite of one place—spread out across countless dot-coms, dot-nets, and even dot-me's. No one has ever written a book on Markdown.

So David Sparks and I decided to write one.

Markdown, the third book in David's fantastic MacSparky Field Guide series, is 130 pages and 27 screencasts long. There's over an hour and a half of video. We cover Markdown instruction, application recommendations, and offer advice. We also threw in another hour of audio interviews with a few of our Markdown-loving pals: Merlin Mann, Fletcher Penney, Brett Terpstra, Federico Viticci, and Gabe Weatherhead.

Being a multi-media work, filled with audio and video, Markdown is best viewed on an iPad (iBookstore), but we also made a PDF version bundled with all the same audio and video files—if that's your thing.

The pride I have in creating this book is matched only by the gratitude I feel toward:

• John Gruber, the creator of Markdown,
• Fletcher Penney, the force behind MultiMarkdown,
• Brett Terpstra, a guy whose energy for making Markdown utilities knows no bounds, and
• Everyone else who's ever supported Markdown by talking about it or writing up a tip

This book is our attempt to build on all the great work and enthusiasm for Markdown, but more importantly, extend it to new audiences. We want to help people discover the power of plain text writing in the post-word-processor era.

I hope you enjoy this book. David and I certainly enjoyed writing it—in Markdown of course.

Get it in the iBookstore, or read more about it on my Markdown page.

More network controls in OS X, please

Marco Arment on the perils of using an LTE connection on a MacBook:

With LTE, you can burn through a 5 GB data cap in an hour if you’re downloading big video files, and it would be easy to burn through the cap in just a few days if you’re streaming HD video — which, in 2013, is commonplace. And most people’s data plans have far less than 5 GB/month today. (At least they’re cheaper.)

I was hoping Mountain Lion would add some APIs suggesting cellular data considerations, but it didn’t happen. Maybe 10.9 will.

This is really just one example of why OS X needs to become more connection-type-aware. I create a lot of video data in ScreenFlow. Every ounce of data on my computer either flows through Dropbox or Backblaze. With increasingly regularity, I'll head off to the coffee shop not thinking about the fact that, say, Backblaze, is in the middle of a 500 MB upload—or the possibility that someone I'm collaborating with just put 1 GB of video data in a shared Dropbox folder.

"In the old days" when I tethered to a 3G connection, it didn't matter as much. 3G's slowness—not to mention its unlimitedness—prevented me from eating my monthly data allowance in the time it takes to enjoy a cup of cappuccino. My Verizon LTE upload speeds are routinely faster than my home Wi-Fi upload speeds. The damage is usually done before I even think to manually pause syncing.

Not only would I like to see LTE antennas soon included in MacBooks, I'd like to see either Apple or third party developers begin to address this problem by allowing me to prohibit services like Dropbox and Backblaze from running unless I'm on specific networks.

Yahoo: a neologism for discrimination against creativity, art, and innovation

From a recent memo to Yahoo employees announcing CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban all remote work:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Steve Wozniak in iWoz:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me— they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

And finally, Susan Cain in Chapter 3, "When Collaboration Kills Creativity", arguably the most powerful chapter in her entire book, Quiet:

Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.

Susan Cain's book is easily one of the best pieces of non-fiction I've read in the last five years. If you manage people or simply value personal productivity, consider yourself at a competitive disadvantage if you don't at least consider the arguments she presents.

The coming to Jesus review

It's where I go through the harsh, but short-lasting process of deleting projects and actions—and the even more stinging process of emailing associated people to tell them I can't do things I previously promised.

It's not a fun review. But if you don't do a prescribed burn every so often, you end up growing really shitty trees.

Man up.

Silicon Valley and the way we were

Silicon Valley is a fantastic documentary covering the birth of American technology entrepreneurialism. Watching the entire thing for free on my iPad seemed especially fitting.

I can't recommend this film enough. It's a look into one of the most important tipping points in American history and the lives of men who sowed virtually all of the seeds that would grow into the technological standard of living we have today.

For me, one of the obvious sub-themes was how critical government spending was to the creation of technologies that would have otherwise had no market because they were unaffordable to 20th century consumers.

I think the defining distinction between the last twenty years of government military spending and the spending that took place in the 20th century is that this recent round seems to have produced no technological side benefits for society.

World War II, the space race, and even the Cold War of the 20th century were all boons for the American economy—intentional or not. Post-1980s military spending has only served to buy a nice, heavy yoke that will likely adorn the middle class's neck for the rest of my working lifetime.

This century, the consumer has clearly replaced the government as the primary client of new technology. The most successful companies seem to be those that cater to the consumer rather than the bureaucracy. I just hope the consumer can keep up.

via Justin Blanton

PDF to Keynote in a few keystrokes

I have an uncommon-to-most but highly frequent-for-me workflow where I convert PDF slides created from the LaTeX Beamer package to Keynote presentations, which I use in my actuarial education work.

The PDF to Keynote step happens very quickly thanks to an app of the same name: PDF to Keynote.app. I created a short video illustrating how I use this app with LaunchBar.