These days, many of us have our checking accounts deeply integrated into our financial lives via automatic bill payment, direct deposit, and other services.  Untangling oneself can seem very daunting, which is why I took notes during my transition and am posting them publicly here.  It’s as easy as 1-2-3 (-4-5-6-7-8)!

1. Find a credit union you qualify for.
2. From the list you qualify for, evaluate which one would best suit your needs. Criteria for me included:
   • online banking tools
   • the ability to mail in my deposits and/or use direct deposit so I wouldn’t have to travel to their single branch every time I get a check
   • interest-bearing checking accounts
3. Open your new account(s) at the credit union of your choice. Deposit enough money to get you through a month of bill paying. Be sure to walk out with, at the very least, your new account number and routing number. (I walked out with that plus 12 starter checks and a whole lot of literature).
4. Transfer all bill paying, automatic payments, etc. over to the new credit union account. I actually went so far as to keep a running list of places to look for accounts I might have linked with my bank account. Then I just set aside an afternoon to go through all of it, account by account.  Don’t expect to get everything settled that very afternoon; several of my accounts were on the verge of clearing a payment, so I needed to wait for that to go through.  There were also a few that had auto-payment processes I could only change offline by calling or mailing something in.
5. Wait a few weeks and watch the old account to make sure there are no other automatic payments being taken out that you forgot about or checks left to clear.  My tack was to wait one week after the last thing cleared to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
6. Close your for-profit bank account. The bank employee who helps you do this may ask what your reasons are. Feel free to get as activisty as you want, but you don’t owe them an explanation.  Money speaks for itself.  Walk out (or hang up) with a check for your remaining balance.
7. Deposit that check at your new credit union.
8. Reap rewards.

Friday, March 23
O’Brien’s Pub
Allston, MA
w/ Beautiful Weekend, Musuki Aruvavo Lee, and Shooting Spires

RSVP: Facebook, Songkick, last.fm

Monday, April 2
Zuzu (the Middle East)
Cambridge, MA
w/ Columns, Insect Factory, and Public Speaking

RSVP: Facebook, Songkick, last.fm

Saturday, April 14
PA’s Lounge
Somerville, MA
w/ Beautiful Weekend (CD release!), Dan Friel, and Animal Hospital

RSVP: Facebook, Songkick, last.fm

At long last, I am very excited to announce the launch of the Sun Boxes Mobile App in both the iOS (iTunes) store and the Android store!    You may recall from an earlier post that I built the Sun Boxes website last year.  Sun Boxes is a sound installation by Craig Colorusso that uses solar power to play a series of guitar drone notes out of single speakers.  Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it is one of the most humbly powerful pieces of art I’ve seen recently.  I feel lucky to be a part of its momentum!

Our aim with the mobile app was not only to give users an easy way to interact with the piece by themselves, but also to encourage them to stage their own installation of the piece by turning their and their friend’s devices into individual Sun Boxes.

For this project, I was user experience designer, graphic designer, as well as front-end developer. Back-end development was handled expertly by my long-time collaborator and all around kind person, Mark Henderson. He created an API for the project, so you can expect more interfaces to join the fray soon.

Having never built an app myself (I’ve only designed them in the past), I have many, many resources to thank in making this possible.  First and foremost, we leveraged the Phonegap platform in order to develop for both iOS and Android simultaneously, using the web technologies we already know and love.  Steven Levithan‘s Date Format plug-in made handling times much easier than it would have otherwise been.  Jason Job’s epic blog post about archiving and distributing iOS builds saved me from utter failure more than once.

And, as always, I would never get past “hello” without the amazing community that is Stack Overflow.

In it, toward the bottom, was a small item on the Dot Earth blog about a study of the potential causes of the “Little Ice Age”, an era of depressed temperatures worldwide from the fourteenth century to the early twentieth.  While the study focused on the delicate nature of the global climate — how relatively small nudges can dramatically change local weather — I was left wondering more about this Little Ice Age.

So I looked up “Little Ice Age” on Wikipedia and was introduced to a scientifically and historically fascinating episode in human history.  A subset of that article discussed increased volcanic activity during the LIA, and linked to something called the Year Without A Summer, which I learned had wreaked havoc globally on crops and therefore on societies generally.

At the bottom of that article was a list of “See Also” links to similar events in climate/human history, which included such enticing titles as “New England’s Dark Day“, “White Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere“, and the tersely ominous “Volcanic winter“. In the span of a half an hour, my life had gained an entirely new category of fascination — the dramatic, unpredictable, worldwide climate event resulting from a volcanic eruption.

Whenever episodes like this crop up, I am struck by how seamless and almost lubricated the activity of gathering information has become due to the Internet.  It took me less than an hour to find out more about this topic than a full day (at least) in a library would have done just fifteen years ago.

At first this revelation (which I have almost daily), made me feel very hopeful about humanity.  With near-universal access to all of this information, how will we avoid an imminent era of peace and unity?  Almost as soon as I had that thought, I began to feel a sense of the precariousness of  both factual authority and access to certain kinds of information.

Because it’s clear that my journey depended almost entirely on the sphere of information I live in — one that includes the New York Times, scientific journals, and Wikipedia.  What sorts of narratives are emerging for people who either don’t find those sources of information credible, don’t know they exist, don’t have access to the Internet, or can’t even read? How far apart is my worldview from theirs? How do we start to see the world more similarly, thus making unity even a marginal possibility?

My pal Mark and I launched Some Demands on October 15, 2011, 28 days after the first gathering in Zucotti Park (and three days after having the idea for the site!). While public support of #occupy was rising, so were criticisms that the movement had no clear goals.

We started Some Actions on November 4, 2011, as Occupy Oakland called for and carried out a general strike. Growing numbers of people were asking what they could do to get involved beyond occupying public spaces.

Together, these two sites are known as Some Sites, and they aim to provide an open space for suggesting and voting on what needs to change and how to change it.

Hearing about these two current events in the same news broadcasts this week has given me a bit of cultural whiplash.

I own and use a few Apple products, most of which I need in order to do my job.  They are elegant.  They are easy to use.  They are functional.  Despite all of these things, they are still consumer electronics that I paid a huge premium for.  They are not works of fine art, and they are certainly not works of transformative public policy.

So, while I agree wholeheartedly that Steve Jobs was a visionary who changed consumer electronics dramatically worldwide, the hagiographies that have been sprouting up everywhere are somewhat disturbing to me.  The man was a CEO whose main responsibility was to generate profits for his company’s shareholders.  This situation does not usually a saint make.  Furthermore,

Arik Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek magazine opined that “Jobs isn’t widely known for his association with philanthropic causes”, compared to Bill Gates’ efforts. After resuming control of Apple in 1997, Jobs eliminated all corporate philanthropy programs. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Philanthropy

In short, Steve Jobs was absolutely, fundamentally part of the 1% of American society holding over 75% of American wealth (and likely 99% of its power and influence).  While I don’t view Mr. Jobs and his ilk as The Enemy, I do view them as a huge roadblock to meaningful reform in this country right now.

So, yes, let’s praise the man for his achievements.  But let’s also make an example out of him and encourage other wealthy entrepreneurs to spread their wealth around through philanthropy, through paying their share of federal and state taxes, and through agitating for policies that will help others less fortunate than them have the same opportunities for success that they had.

Anyway, I’ve never once used one, mostly because I don’t even know where one is around here.

So a few weeks ago I was looking at one of these coupons and it dawned on me: They obviously have my address; why can’t they just print the address of the nearest BBB on the coupon? Instead they have a “visit our website to locate your nearest store”, which, for lazy Americans like myself, is way too much to ask.

So I wrote them an email suggesting, among other things, that they change their mailouts:

Hi, BB&B  -

Two things:

1) I get your 20% coupons in the mail pretty regularly, though I don’t think I’ve ever once used one. I realized this week why: You have my address, obviously, yet you insist that I call or visit your website in order to determine the nearest store to me. If you could just print the address of that store ON THE COUPON, I might keep it in my car or something and drop by the location while I’m out and about.

2) Your website’s sitemap is worse than useless. I don’t know if you only have it there for bots or something, but in trying to figure out how to contact you, the sitemap was obviously of zero help to me.

Keep on truckin!

Today I got another Bed Bath & Beyond mailer and lo! it has the address of the nearest store on it.  Perhaps it was not just me giving them some common sense advice, but it still felt like amazing turnaround for an off-the-cuff suggestion.

If only my government was this responsive to common sense suggestions!

You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy – you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place.

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem.

As is my wont, I immediately saw how this problem is not confined to the world of software (and web) development, but really to any project at all that has an element of iteration to it.

For example, consider making a table.  You really need this table fast, so you don’t spend as much time putting it together as you could.  Maybe you don’t let the glue set long enough or you don’t countersink the wood screws.  Whatever the shortcut, shortcuts have consequences.  Your table might not last long or put up with continued use.

To go even further, away from the arena of “making stuff”, think about a relationship in your life where many initial missteps were made that were not vetted at the time.  Those missteps almost always come back to haunt you once the relationship is tested, even if that test is just the passing of time.

Now, as many have pointed out, sometimes the debt is necessary.  Martin Fowler again:

The metaphor also explains why it may be sensible to do the quick and dirty approach. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

So how can we get better at knowing the difference between the debt black hole and the debt that confers an advantage?  Which messes are worth making?  I’ve been thinking of some criteria:

• Have I encountered this situation in the past, and the debt just wasn’t worth it?  This is seemingly obvious, but oftentimes I find myself glossing over how bad it was last time.  It’s better to really get inside of how frustrating the shortcut ultimately was.
  
• Does it just keep bothering me?  This sounds vague, but I think all of us know what it’s like to have a decision or conflict or debt that gnaws at our minds.
• Will it possibly be the ruin of my project?  This is heavy, but needs to be asked, point-blank, at key decision times.  Sometimes we don’t want to believe something seemingly so small (and so helpful!) could undermine everything, especially if the alternative route is painful in any way.  Interestingly, many times I’ve confronted this metric only to realize that I actually didn’t care if the project destroyed itself. Which made me realize I was spending my time on the wrong project!

Over the spring and summer, I had the opportunity to work with Local Projects on the companion website to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.  The memorial doesn’t open until 9/11/11, but you can already start exploring  the names on the memorial wall now at the website:

http://names.911memorial.org/

For this project, I created the interface and client-side interactions for the CMS used to maintain the memorial names database.  This involved everything from concepting intuitive layouts and interactions within an existing design framework, to handing the data off to the server via JSON.

I also pitched in on the rest of the guide’s front-end development, in particular scripting the interactions for scrolling through the names on the wall.

It’s rare that a project gives me the chance to do new things (build a CMS from scratch) while contributing to a meaningful cause (remembering 9/11).  It was great to have such an opportunity in this site.

Frequently, clients want to include a page on their website that both welcomes the new user into their world and also expresses their mission and philosophy in detail. They also often want this page listed first in their main navigation, which is tough from a user-focused perspective. I usually advocate putting the things first that your users are putting first, and reading a lengthy essay on how your organization views the world is almost never their primary goal when visiting your website.

But I was recently disarmed by just such a main navigation point, and it had everything to do with the language.  The link said, “Hello”.  As a human, my immediate impulse was to say “hello” back, and the only way I knew how to do this in the context of visiting a website was to click the link.

That transaction amazed me, not least because once I got to the page I realized it was just the usual four paragraphs of abstract corporate purpose.  I had unwittingly clicked through to a mission statement!

Not to put too fine a point on it here, but the words we use in the context of applications matter (and not just for SEO).  A door that says “pull” is very different than a door that says “push”.  A link that says “hello” or “start here” or “read me” feels very different than a link that says “our mission” or “our philosophy” or “who we are”.  Had this nav point said one of the latter, I almost certainly would not have clicked it.

But really the lesson of my amazing experience is that even if you do manage to get a user at “hello”, you aren’t guaranteed a relationship with that user until you give them something worth clicking to.