Frequently Flying

I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to travel with my family from time to time. Travel opens up new horizons for a child. They get direct exposure to different cultures, and places of historical significance are brought to life. And there's nothing like first hand experience of different languages, diets, climates and so forth to realize how big and diverse the world really is. Having been to 15 countries (and counting), my daughter has some appreciation for this.

But travel quickly goes from "opportunity" to "burden" when I go without them. The phone call where she relays the daily digest of her life's events is nice, but being apart means I'm not able to share in those events with her. And while we can innovate our way through this to some extent - it was fun to watch The Grinch together while on speakerphone last month - it's still low-bandwidth interaction. And all-in-all, these work-arounds introduce their own set of disruptions on all of our lives.

It's great being a dad who can introduce his daughter to vastly different parts of the world. But at the moment that's the exception, not the rule. There's little consolation in being a dad who delivers trinkets of travel: they don't replace what was missed, the joy of receiving is short lived, and they're just reminders of time spent apart. Besides, how many city-themed t-shirts from airport shops can one little girl have?

I'd rather just be the dad who is there.

Missing a First

There are a lot of firsts that you want to be there for as a parent, such as your child's first word and first step. My daughter just ran her first 5k, and unfortunately I wasn't there to run with her or cheer her on.

She didn't run to be competitive. She didn't run to get a time. She just wanted to run a race.

With things like television and video games competing for our time and attention, it takes a lot of motivation to start exercising. But as hard as it is to get started, it takes a lot of will power to sustain an exercise program.

So while I'm disappointed to have missed her first, I'll be there to encourage and remind, run and ride wtih her.

Perspective and Exclusion Bias

I heard my colleague Martin Fowler present a keynote the other day where he called attention to the severe under-representation of different groups of people in the IT industry. As one example, he pointed out that it's odd that although women are 50% of the general population, they're nowhere near 50% of the population of technology professionals. Among other things, this means that the IT profession suffers from an extraordinarily narrow range of focus. IT solutions, by definition, suffer an acute exclusion bias.

We see exclusion bias in many different ways in technology. Consider smartphones. The bias of each of the leading smartphone firms - Nokia, Blackberry and Apple - comes through loud and clear in their products. Nokia is a mobile phone and network company. They make a fantastic phone that also happens to have mobile e-mail and PDA capabilities. Blackberry is a mobile e-mail company. They make an amazing mobile e-mail device that happens to be a phone and also has PDA capabilities. Apple is a computer company. The iPhone is an outstanding PDA (it vindicates the Newton) that happens to have phone and support mobile e-mail.

There's no doubt that, in general, IT solutions have a predominantly male bias, a result of the fact that IT is a male dominated industry. But the fact that it is male dominated isn't a result of innocuous gender preference. If anything, it's self-inflicted: we do things that perpetuate this bias. Intentional or otherwise, the introduction, education and work patterns of IT are probably geared toward how the male mind works. By definition, this excludes women.

Consider how we teach music. Teaching rhythm by counting off integers (1-2-3-4) is probably more effective for a boy than a girl. A girl may very well respond more to patterns (ta-ta-tiki-tiki-ta). The absence of a pattern aligned with how girls learn creates a barrier and, by extension, an automatic exclusion.

After hearing Martin speak the other day, I am more acutely aware that I am very likely contributing to that exclusion bias in how I communicate and collaborate. As another colleague, David Leigh-Fellows put it, we must "understand before being understood." I need to externalize more.

As an IT professional, I do want IT to be a destination career for people. I don't want IT to be unappealing to top talent because we have institutionalized behaviours that turn people away. I also want the profession to be as robust as possible, and therefore inclusive of as much experience and perspective as there is in the general population.

As father of a little girl, I am highly sensitive to this. I don't want my daughter to be excluded from pursuing something for which she may have aptitude just because she processes information differently.

Ideas for Rent

The migration of video, music and books to electronic format will create sweeping changes. Music and video retail stores are in significant decline, and newsprint is on the decline. In addition to now having excess commercial real estate, we may yet see the day when we no longer have bookshelves holding our personal libraries or when our children no longer know the back-breaking pain of hauling textbooks to and from school.

The drive toward digital media shifts our consumption model from “own” toward “rent.” With physical media, we buy an album or a book and the medium was ours to do with as we would: let it sit idly on the shelf, loan it out to our friends or reference it to a state where it wears down. We didn’t have the right to copy the media (because we never held the rights to the intellectual property itself) but possession granted greater – indeed, for all practical purposes permanent – ownership rights to the media itself.

Digital media is an exercise of content licensing. Instead of owning a copy of the book, I now have the right to read the book. Very often, that right granted is specific to a device or platform: for example, my right to read the Wall Street Journal is not transferrable from Kindle to laptop to a printed edition.

The devices themselves are increasingly complex ecosystems, with library management and content acquisition tools such as iTunes, as well as wireless networks through which we connect our devices to management tools and storage. While I may own the media playing device, it’s about all that I do own: I’m renting the means by which to keep the device current and useful, and even the devices are restricted (e.g., “locked”) against use in a competing infrastructure.

This creates a high cost of change for the consumer. The further you make use of one particular ecosystem, the greater the dependency you have on it, the more difficult it becomes to change to another. Because I’m renting both the intellectual property and the medium through which I can enjoy it, I stand to lose all of my investment (e.g., sacrifice the right to enjoy the intellectual property to which I’m subscribed) if I elect to change. That isn’t trivial: technology is still evolving at a blistering pace. It’s a bit premature to take a “long” position in an ecosystem that will have a “short” shelf life. That, or I have to accept that I will renew subscription to – and acquire updated hardware – in a particular ecosystem into perpetuity.

It remains to be seen whether intellectual property increases or decreases in value. Intuitively it would appear that the shift from owning to renting the media would make content king. But that isn’t necessarily true. For one thing, people tend to regard things they own with far more respect than things they borrow. For another, electronic distribution gives content a disposable characteristic it didn’t previously have. A person is less likely to associate permanency with electronic possession. Although people have paid for the same piece of recorded music in multiple formats – LP record, cassette and CD – the media was perceived to be considerably different than one would have of changing electronic ecosystem. It seems somewhat incongruous to constantly acquire a short-term right to a timeless piece of music or work of literature. To drive people to acquire more content (and therefore build dependency on an ecosystem), there may be consequences to the quality of intellectual property churned out.

If content is more temporary in a digital world, are we moving into a state where we’re renting ideas and influences? Are they more transitory than consistent?

What we read, listen to and watch contributes to our evolving knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom isn’t something that we want merely to accumulate, it’s something we as parents want to pass along to our children. One way we do that is to share our journey by exposing them to the influencing factors in our lives. This we do over time – and at appropriate times – in our children’s lives so they are prepared to consume and draw their own conclusions. Does “personal digital consumption” create an obstacle to that? Does “idea rental” put us at risk of generational loss or continuity?

Individual philosophy and understanding of the world evolves, giving it a temporary quality. But while temporary, it follows a consistent path. It’s not something that we rent, it’s a store of intellectual wealth that we build. Is it harder to do that through content we never fully internalize and “make our own” because we never feel a sense of ownership of it in the first place?

Flower Power

It's interesting to watch the changes a 7 year old goes through in the course of being a flower girl.

She's confident during rehersals and pictures and all business during her walks up and down the aisle. She's intrigued (if a bit distracted at times) during the ceremony. She's overjoyed to be riding in the limo with the wedding party, devastated not to be sitting at the head table with them, assertive at including herself as a member of the receiving line.


And of course, she's the Energizer Bunny on the dance floor at the reception.


Through all the changes, one thing stayed constant: she made me a proud papa the entire time.

Best summer ever!

Bike rides, swimming, playing catch, playing soccer, monkey bars, field hockey games, Ravinia, frogs, lightning bugs, new & old books, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Tchaikovsky with cannons, parents night at camp, Istanbul, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, and a teddy bear picnic.

And we still have a month yet to go.

Best summer ever.

Generation Gaps

Every generation has gaps to bridge with the next.

Sometimes, these gaps are self-inflicted. The greatest generation experienced economic depression and suffering they didn’t want their children – the baby boomers – to ever experience. Boomers, knowing what they were up to in their youth, kept Gen-X/Gen-Y-ers on a short leash. The absence of an experience in a child's life can cause them to react in unexpected ways (e.g., the 1960s). It also creates a gap between parent (who has an experience) and child (who does not). It's a bit like government policy: no matter how well intentioned, the law of unintended consequences prevails.

Some gaps result from technical or societal advances. Consider that a generation ago, we didn’t have mobile phones, web browsers, instant messenger, or Twitter. Those of us who grew up without them have a pre- and post-context into which these things arrived; that is, we lived before they were available, and we lived after they were available.

The experience of not having something and then having it is significantly different from not knowing what it means to not have something in the first place. Living without instant access to complex market data, detailed sports stats, comprehensive weather, and global news and opinion is simply foreign to the children we’re raising today. Similarly, our children don't understand the inability to be in continuous (if low bandwidth) communication with a network of friends anywhere they happen to be at the moment.

The presence of something like wireless communications at the time our children arrived on the scene gives it a prominance in their lives that we don't ascribe to it. We see it as evolutionary from the context we know; they see it as a permanent part of the landscape.

One consequence is that our children’s context for how they interact with each other is mechanically different from ours. And this is our gap to bridge. Having that pre- and post- context may limit how much we can appreciate how young people come to grips with these things: they engage something like Twitter with less life experience than we have, but with greater creativity and unteathered thought than we do. That, in turn, makes it difficult for us as parents to truly understand the impact these will have on their values, on their ways of communicating and interacting, of learning about things, on their emotions and reactions, and on their interpretation of the world.

The old adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” has stood the test of time. Media come and go: as one generation mourns the death of newspapers, yet another will lament the death of television, and yet another will be crushed by the obsolence of internet search in favor of something else. But we mustn't confuse media for message. It’s up to us as parents to understand the basics and richness of human interaction, and help our children come to grips with it, whatever the media du jour happens to be.

Societal norms of politeness and behavior reflect the available technology at the time, a veneer over our core being. Our needs to interact with each other, indeed the social fabric of our society, follows age old needs and desires that no technology will replace, or define.