ALL ART BURNS

For the past few years I’ve been working for a high tech company doing various tasks related to provisioning service on clients that make a regular connection to home base. That’s a rather wordy way of saying, “I make people pay us every month and shut them down when they don’t.”

About a year into my job I inherited the code that does all this and took the opportunity to rewrite the code from the ground up. One of my first self-assigned tasks was code instrumentation — generate logging messages that would reveal how the often the code did what and how long it took to do it. I’ve done this enough times that I’ve learned to make the output easy to graph or massage with other programs. (Most of my career seems to be discovering something needs to be done, deciding to do it, then having to make graphs to justify the time spent on the task.) I had no idea what the code did and how often it did it, thus there was no way for me to tell someone how many servers we’d need to add to support a given number of new clients. Logs and graphs seemed the obvious solution, with PERL and gnuplot being the obvious tools.

Now — several years later — I can call up massive graphs of server activity and point to various events in our product’s history: There’s where we launched a new optional feature in version N, and here’s where we made it a built-in feature a few versions later. There’s Christmas. Well, it’s not Christmas, really, it’s the first weekend after Christmas, because most customers don’t bother using it on Christmas day. There’s the day the power went out in the server room, there’s the day the router died and the failover didn’t, there’s the day, well, you get the idea.

One of my favorite things to look at is how the curves flatten over time. Some events only happen once a month, others once a week, others once a year and others only when the client is first activated. Due to random communication issues, every client doesn’t report to the service every day and over time the partial harmonics of the initial event (say, the first weekend after Christmas) slowly flatten out and turn into the fundamental of the daily connection. A spike of activity corresponds to a spike in server load and spikes in server load means we have idle equipment when there isn’t a spike (too many servers) or overloaded equipment when there is (not enough servers). We’d like to avoid overloaded servers as much as possible and not have equipment sitting around idle, so there’s a reason for me to pay attention to the graphs. And hey, this is something I like doing in the first place.

A few days ago I came up with a way to flatten the spikes within a day or two instead of within months or even years. It’s a painfully obvious solution and something we should have been doing all along to smooth out load on the servers. We didn’t suffer any problems, but that’s like saying I didn’t need to wear my seatbelt today because I didn’t get into an accident.

There’s just one problem with the fix: my beautiful graphs will turn into efficient, flat, boring, and completely uninteresting lines. A life unlived is not worth living, a life without interesting graphs is a life not worth graphing.
I need graphing in my life. I need to find something to graph soon lest I go into withdrawal.

Current options include:

• Get a power meter for my bicycle trainer and start graphing that against my exercise routine and caloric intake. Also get a heart rate monitor and use that once it warms up and I’m riding on the streets again, then compare those graphs to the power meter graphs and my daily weight.
• Put a weather station on the roof and compare it to our gas and electricity usage. This would require devising an optical recognition system that could read our ancient gas meter every minute and transmit the data over wireless. (Bonus points if I make it out of Lego Mindstorms, double points if it survives the winter.)
• Put wattmeters on all my wall outlets and figure out why my electric bill is so high.
• Sit down and type in the ~5 years worth of data I have on my truck and make some graphs. I’ve written down all maintenance, gas usage, and abnormal driving patterns since the day I bought it, might as well do something with the data.
• Write a system monitoring app that compares how much time I waste waiting on apps and browsing the InterWeb to how much time I actually work, then have it display realtime, hourly, daily, and weekly summaries on a big screen over my desk.

Technorati Tags: metrics, geek, graphs, obsessions

Here’s an interesting interview with Lance Barr, the industrial designer who developed the NES case.

Technorati Tags: NES, Nintendo, industrial design

Dorkbot Pittsburgh is in the works, sign up for the dorkbotpgh-announce mailing list if you’re interested.

“Right. What’s a ‘dorkbot’?”

Dorkbot is simple: people doing strange things with electricity.

Technorati Tags: dorkbot, Pittsburgh, electricity

I picked this up at a used bookstore because it was only a couple of bucks and it was something other than another boring picture book of beautiful but uncomfortable furniture that I can’t afford and that nobody will want to sit upon. What I was looking for: an academic discussion of the history of chairs that would teach me the right “design words” to use in class or when talking to designers. What I found: an excellent history of things to sit upon, the social issues around why we sit, and the sorry mess we’ve gotten ourselves into by sitting on chairs for far too many hours a day during the past century or so.

Cranz — a Professor of Architecture at Berkeley — boils down the history of chairs, sitting, and ergonomics in plain terms that can be understood by the lay person. This history helps explain the ergonomic nightmare we live in today and suggestions on ways we can start to improve our situation.

I’ve always been (too?) willing to question elements of the world I live in, however where I sit has never been on my list of things to question. I don’t like sitting in chairs nor sitting up straight; I prefer to lounge, lie down or sit on the floor while reading, watching TV and even when doing metal work or fabrication. While this leads to interesting discussions at home about who is hogging the couch or why there are magazines spread all over the floor, it’s never led to my thinking about why I try so hard to avoid sitting in chairs. My job requires me to sit for extended periods of time (and I have worker’s comp RSI receipts to prove it) but when I’m doing something I want to do, I’m often standing at a workbench, sitting on a stool with rollers or squatting on the floor.

A few years ago I accidentally started studying Japanese wood and metal working techniques while studying Japanese history and modern Japanese design. One of things that surprised me was the number of modern Japanese craftsmen who to this day sit on the floor while doing rather difficult labor. Even an episode of Discovery’s Biker Build-Off showed the Japanese bike firm Zero Engineering working the way Japanese metalworks worked for centuries: sitting on the floor.

As it turns out, sitting in chairs at a workbench or table is the odd way of doing things in the big historical picture. Until the industrial age, plenty of people sat on floors or stood while working. If the average person was (is) lucky enough to have something upon which to sit, it was likely a bed, bench or simple stool without a back to lean against.

Not only did The Chair open my eyes to the “pro-chair” Western bias that we have sold to ourselves and other cultures, it also helped me understand just how much of modern chairs is form and how little is function. I never really understood why the really expensive designer chairs we had at work or the fancy chairs my friends bought were so uncomfortable. The simple fact of the matter is, they’re supposed to look good, not be useful chairs. These chairs were not furniture, they were art. Now there’s nothing wrong with filling your house with expensive art, but expecting your guests to sit on the art and be uncomfortable is another matter entirely.

The act of sitting in a chair, especially for extended periods of our waking hours, is a modern invention and something our bodies were not designed to do. We did not evolve sitting in chairs, they were thrust upon us (or us upon them) over the period of a few short centuries. This is stating the obvious, but the unstated obvious is that our bodies don’t like it one bit. We are suffering many health problems related to chairs and the sedentary lifestyle they encourage: back and neck pains, varicose veins, RSI injuries and so on. Making matters worse is the use of chairs that are picked not for their functionality or long-term effects on the human body, but for their form and cost.

The solutions are simple: stop sitting, sit differently or at least minimize the amount of time spent sitting. Solutions like these are easy to say but not easy to implement in a chair-based culture that is focused on short-term benefits . The average American is probably not used to sitting on a backless chair for hours on end or standing while working at their computer. “Perching”, or making a tripod of your legs and a chair, is also going to take some getting used to for many people. Sitting in chairs has destroyed our muscle tone and posture so much that what should be a simple task — standing or sitting up straight without any sort of support — is difficult for most people. The next time you’re in a “waiting” situation, in a doctor’s room or waiting on take-out at a restaurant, try standing instead of sitting and see how long you last.

Another problem facing a change in how we sit is the relationship between employer and employee. Some of these solutions — which would require spending as much on an employee’s chair as you do on their computer if you expect them to sit for several hours a day — are not going to go over well with the business community. I’ve done facilities management consulting a few times, and it’s amazing how much a company will spend on a computer that will be replaced in a year and how little they will spend on a chair and desk they expect to last for a decade. Spending $300 on an office chair when there’s one available for $250 requires extensive justification, while buying everyone a new PC every year for $1000 is obviously a good decision. Complicating matters, many employers will not let employees bring their own chairs to use at work, so an employee who’d rather perch or stand can’t even pay for it out of their own pocket.

Unlike many books I’ve read in the past few years, The Chair has made a quick and positive difference in my every day life. I sold my Aeron and have a Hag Capisco (designed for “perching” not “sitting”) on order. I bought a cheap-but-comfortable task chair in the meanwhile, ripped the arms off and sit forward on the seat with my feet elevated enough to take the weight off of my thighs. In the few months I’ve been working with better posture, I’ve noticed that I can stand for longer periods of time, that I don’t have achy legs after working all day and that my infrequent migraines and frequent neck-aches have all but disappeared.

I think the best possible thing I can say about Cranz’s The Chair is that it’s one of the few books I’ve ever bought extra copies of to give to co-workers and friends.

Technorati Tags: chairs, industrial design, ergonomics, books, furniture

TeX Dorkery:

@book{cranz-chair,
Address = {500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110},
Author = {CRANZ, Galen},
Edition = {Softcover},
Isbn = {0-393-31955-5pbk},
Keywords = {chair design},
Publisher = {W. W. Norton},
Title = {The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design},
Url = {www.wwnorton.com},
Year = {2000}}

I’m not even close to being able to do a project on this scale either financially or technically, but I like the guy’s attitude:

“Considering that a fully sorted nationally-competitive DSR car, whether from Stohr, Radical, Merloy or someone else, would set me back around $60-65K I’m certainly not saving any money by building my own. To me this project is a form of self-expression and a way to learn things that can only be learned by doing. I look at it as an alternative to getting a Masters degree in vehicle design – about the same time, about the same money but a whole lot more fun and I get a car for graduation :)”

In short, he’s building a ultra-light AWD race car of his own design from scratch — think 4/3 scale shifter cart or D Sports Racing car if you follow those. More importantly, he’s documenting his project along the way, including sketches, plans, decision making process, the cost of parts and so on. I’m impressed when someone tries something very difficult and documents it along the way, showing their thinking, their mistakes, their fixes and how they got to the end result.

He’s in the construction phase now but first check out
three years of designing the DP1.

Technorati Tags: design, journal, fabrication, shifter cart, d sports