Chris Ziegler

[chrisziegler]

Someone please take my startup idea and run with it

On a fairly regular basis, I’ll be walking around New York and I’ll buy something and then I’ll have a bag that I’m now saddled with carrying for hours until I return home.

There’s a business here. I call it “Leave,” which seems like an appropriately startup-y name. (But you can call it whatever you want, once you secure your VC round.) Basically, it’s a network of lockers around a city — in convenience stores and office lobbies, like Amazon’s pickup lockers — where you can drop off stuff you don’t want to carry around. You have the option of either paying an hourly rate for storage and picking your things up later at your convenience, or scheduling a same-day or next-day delivery of the items to an address of your choice. Of course, there’d be an app to help you locate a nearby locker, reserve space, pay, lock/unlock, and set up deliveries.

I suspect this kind of business might be hyper-specific to Manhattan, but maybe not? It’d need a certain level of density to work.

Whatever, not my problem. It’s your problem. Whoever picks this up, let me know when you have it ready — I’ll be happy to beta test.

[chrisziegler]

An open letter to the guy ahead of me at Starbucks adding sugar to his latte

Top of the morning to you, sir!

I see you’ve just gotten a delicious, piping hot Venti™ latte. You’re probably excited about just how much your morning is about to improve: a magical elixir of gourmet Italian espresso and expertly frothed 2% milk will do that! Armed with a hand-crafted beverage and caffeine flowing through your veins, you’re ready to take on whatever this day throws at you.

Ah, but then I see this sensory experience isn’t quite ready. You have a routine, I’m guessing? Every morning, you make the trip from the barista’s counter to the milk station, iPhone 6S Plus balanced on your shoulder. The lid comes off, but you don’t miss a beat on your phone call. Then, you glance through your Ray-Bans at the bounty before you: natural sugars, both refined and “in the raw”; artificial sweeteners; stirrers made of organic, reclaimed wood; a selection of milk and non-milk creamers that could leave even a dairy farmer in a tizzy.

You’re talking Q3 sales on the phone, but in your mind, the conversation is very different: let’s customize this drink, you’re thinking. The milk counter isn’t a milk counter, it’s your oyster! How does the latte taste after one sugar packet? No need to raise the lidless cup to your lips; a stirrer, dipped slowly into the thick foam, will do the job. But not before a luxurious stir — this is a stirrer, after all! — that will leave no coffee molecule untouched.

Take your time, you think to yourself, as the stirrer orbits the interior of the cup at a snail’s pace. Excellence comes only through a steady hand and a sense of purpose. “Yeah, uh-huh,” you mumble into the phone, even though the barrage of facts and figures on this call are turning into background noise. As any artisan would, you’ve focused singularly on elevating this mass-produced, Americanized coffee drink to greatness.

A minute later, you can guess with reasonable certainty that the sugar has reached the darkest, furthest reaches of the seemingly endless cup. The foam-drenched stirrer reaches your lips. Not sweet enough, you think. But you knew this: you’ve been here before. You’ve been here hundreds of times before, in fact, a cog in the heavy wheel of capitalism that needs to be greased with Starbucks every morning.

Still, there’s no harm in checking. Sugar can change sweetness at any time.

You repeat this process a half-dozen more times, finally settling on a syrupy concoction that more closely resembles a milkshake than a latte, which means the fun can finally begin.

You turn to an assortment of little shakers astride the milk canisters. Ooh! Wouldn’t a careful dash of cinnamon turn this workaday drink into a Tuscan vacation inside your mouth? Maybe — but the only way to find out is to try. Dash, stir, sip; dash, stir, sip. This, too, you know well. The cinnamon is a special treat that you have trained your brain to rediscover each and every day, a break from the crushing monotony of your routine.

The call drones on. So too does your authentic Italian café experience. You move from the cinnamon to the milk: yes, lattes are milk-based drinks already, but why else would the milk be here but for you to use it? Turning each canister in search of a label, you sigh: there’s no almond milk. Muting your call, you turn around, stand on your tiptoes to see beyond the hulking, copper-plated espresso machines, and signal to the barista that you need… what was it again? Soy milk? No, the soy milk is right here. “Never mind. Yes, Mark, I’m still here,” you say, slightly embarrassed and angered that you had to engage the barista long enough to be noticed on this teleconference.

You take one last, long, sweeping scan of the milk station. Is there anything else you might need to make this drink… well, drinkable? For good measure, should you take a napkin? You pull one out of the dispenser, quickly think better of it, and toss it in the trash, which is conveniently built right into the station. They think of everything at Starbucks, don’t they?

Do you need a straw? No; straws are bad for hot drinks, you remember, and they can be difficult to shove through the sippy hole in the lid. Oh! Speaking of lids, you should grab one of these little green stoppers so your drink doesn’t go splashing everywhere. After reassembling your lid (with some trouble), you stuff the stopper in.

But there’s a problem. When the stopper is in the lid, the drink is difficult to drink. Actually, it’s impossible: that’s the entire function of the stopper, after all! After a moment of introspection into this paradox, you discard the stopper, a smile spreading across your face as you realize that your latte is once again drinkable.

Behind you, the line of people wishing to spend just five seconds tossing a small splash of milk into their coffees has just crossed the one mile mark. News helicopters overhead are documenting the incredible scene, men and women with white cups in hand, snaking through the tight alleys of Lower Manhattan. Some give up; some have perished, having failed to get enough life-giving caffeine into their system. For others, they’ve been in the line so long that their workday has passed them by; modern conveniences like cellphones and tablets have allowed them to participate in just enough meetings to feel useful.

As you step away from the station, a bleary-eyed employee flips the “open” sign on the front door. The golden sun dips beneath the Hudson.

A sip. A second sip. This is perfect, you think. For just the briefest instant, you experience complete satisfaction.

But where are you going? It’s now 5AM tomorrow, and as luck would have it, you’re first in line.

[chrisziegler]

Better presence indicators for Slack

Recently, Slack asked me on Twitter to lay out what I meant when I asked for better presence indicators. I’m no UX designer and I can’t use Illustrator to save my life, but I’m going to try to show you what I’m looking for here.

But first, here’s the basic need: Slack has become an irreplaceable tool for us (as it has in many businesses and newsrooms) because it enables a 24/7 worldview of our team for every member of our team. Slack’s persistence enables many email-like features, but in reality, we all treat it as a synchronous tool just as we would IRC — if you message someone, you expect to hear back in a reasonable amount of time (measured in seconds or minutes, not hours or days).

And in a synchronous communication environment, it’s especially critical that the tool enable participants to indicate their “status.” Are they present? Are they AFK? And if they’re AFK, how AFK are they? When will they be back?

Instant messaging tools have known this for a long time and have implemented status tools with varying degrees of depth and nuance. Slack, meanwhile, implements this in the most rudimentary way possible: you’re either online or offline. You can mark yourself “away,” but all that really does is make you look offline, which doesn’t communicate anything to your coworkers who are trying to get in touch about where you are or how long you’ll be.

We need more. Here’s my idea of a very basic system that would meet our needs:

Here, you can set your presence — you’re either available (meaning you’re in front of your computer and responsive), you’re away (meaning literally away from your computer), or you’re busy (you may be at your computer, but you can’t talk). Additionally, a free text field lets you briefly mention what you’re doing; if you’re available, you could say what you’re working on here. If you’re away or busy, you could indicate where you are and when you’ll be back.

In Settings, users could have different notification settings for each status — for instance, when marked Busy, perhaps you don’t want to receive any notifications at all.

Then, this status would be communicated clearly anywhere your name appears in the Slack UI. For instance:

Really, I’m not suggesting anything new or radical here — many IM and group communication tools have done exactly this. But it makes a lot of sense to bring it into Slack.

[chrisziegler]

Sennheiser ganked my headphones, and now I’m sad (updated)

This is a cautionary tale of what happens when you send in your pulled-from-market headphones for “repair.” It is a tale of woe.

I’m not posting it on The Verge because it’s also entitled and whiny, and I prefer not to whine on The Verge if I can help it. Entitled whining is what personal blogs are for.

I bought Sennheiser’s Momentum Wireless headphones when they were first released several months ago, because they’d received glowing reviews (we didn’t have a pair in The Verge’s office) and because I am a serial buyer and seller of wireless headphones, ever in search of The Perfect Pair. There was a lot to like: they look fantastic, they sound great, and the materials feel a cut above what you find on garden-variety Bluetooth headphones. (At $500, they had to look, sound, and feel great.)

But I almost immediately noticed that the Momentums had a tendency to drop Bluetooth, sometimes so severely that they’d “freeze” and need to be turned off and back on again. It tended to happen more at Manhattan intersections than anywhere else — something about the way RF interference interacts there, I guess — so I just chalked it up to a downside of living in the city. Poor stereo Bluetooth range is practically par for the course, and I just sort of overlooked the fact that the Beats Studio Wireless and Samsung Level Over (the two sets I’d owned prior) both performed fine.

But then, Sennheiser pulled the Momentum Wireless from market over Bluetooth issues. It was an “ah ha!” moment for me: this explained why I couldn’t use the things walking to work. I packed them up, opened a warranty repair case on Sennheiser’s support site, and sent them in.

A couple weeks went by. Eventually, I emailed and asked for status. Here’s what I got in reply:

"But to be honest it’s probably going to be a few months.”

That’s the point when, as a company, you say, you know what? “We messed up, we can’t fix it in a reasonable amount of time, let’s just give this dude his money back.” But they didn’t.

I just chillaxed for a few days at that point and didn’t worry about it. Then I got this letter in the physical, real-world, United States Postal Service mail:

That’s cool, I appreciate them trying to tide me over with another pair of headphones. But I didn’t want wired headphones, I wanted wireless ones. I have really good wired headphones already.

So I emailed their support team and told them I just wanted my money back. Nothing more, nothing less. Just give me my $500 back.

Here was the response:

I’m skeptical that they “cannot” refund me. Don’t want to refund me, perhaps, but “cannot”? No.

Still, I was more or less resigned to my fate: I’d get the wired Momentums, put them on the shelf, and use something else for God-knows-how-many months until the revised Wireless shows up.

Then, the final insult.

The wired Momentums showed up today. They aren’t even the $200 over-ear ones, as the Wireless are — they’re on-ear. The on-ear Momentums retail for $87 on Amazon. My headphones were $500.

I don’t think Sennheiser is actively trying to screw me here, I just think their customer service team is disorganized and unable to recognize a dumb situation when they see one. It’s pretty simple: offering an $87 pair of headphones as a replacement for broken $500 ones is not an option. Like-for-like, or refund the money. That’s all I ask.

/rant, as they say in the blogosphere.

Update: A Sennheiser manager called me to apologize for the situation. Long story short: they won’t refund me directly, but offered to send the original unrepaired headphones back to me so I can seek a refund from B&H, where I bought them. (Considering how far out of the return period I am, I’m skeptical that would work.) They’ve also agreed to send me a pair of over-ear Momentums to replace the on-ears they sent originally.

Rants work sometimes!

[chrisziegler]

On aggregation

(First things first: these are my opinions and my opinions alone; they don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of The Verge or of Vox Media.)

Perhaps one of the last great opportunities for protracted bellyaching in new media’s disruption of legacy media is in the handling of original reporting. Traditionally, a publication’s scoop — which could have involved days, weeks, or sometimes months of hard-fought legwork — would either be conspicuously ignored by its competitors, or, more likely, would trigger a secondary cycle of reporting trying to advance the story further, often without crediting the original report. (I’ve been there, as have many of us new media types.)

So it is that “aggregation” — the act of publishing the news of someone else’s reporting — is a relatively recent phenomenon. Of course it is: 20 years ago, Tuesday’s physical copy of the New York Times couldn’t link to an article in Monday’s Washington Post.

Some have accepted aggregation as part and parcel of the new media landscape, others have turned it into a four-letter word (a little like “blogging”!), deriding it at every opportunity. And there’s no question that aggregation can be predatory, even unintentionally: a tiny link at the end of a post to the original source doesn’t cut it. Poorly executed aggregation is virtually indistinguishable from content theft, and it devalues the work of everyone involved.

But good aggregation, in moderation, is amplification. It highlights and name-checks the source, and offers multiple opportunities to click through to it. It may offer additional context from the aggregating writer if any additional context is available and appropriate, or it may simply be a “hey, check this out” (I’ve long appreciated the way NYT’s Scuttlebot approaches this; Daring Fireball is commonly cited as a good example, too).

I can’t guarantee the reader will click through to the original source — no one can do that — but I can guarantee that the reporting will be exposed to a wider audience, and that audience will be made acutely aware of where that report came from. (And for what it’s worth, major publications register in our Chartbeat stats without fail when they aggregate our work. We notice.)

If you are a reporter or an editor who doesn’t look for opportunities for your work and the work of your writers to be amplified, you’re probably not going to survive in a digital-native landscape, full stop.

Good aggregation is also mutual. No one in new media that I’m aware of expects this to be a one-way relationship. Really, nothing would make me happier than a world where WSJ is aggregating Micah Singleton’s phenomenal and ongoing coverage of streaming music. They are generally not ready to do that. Perhaps in ten years, they will be.

Credit concerns aside, I’ve also heard arguments that aggregation begets homogeny. I don’t buy it. No two publications approach stories in exactly the same way; no two publications share identical readership demographics. If anything, smart aggregation is an opportunity to focus your lens on a story, to make it relatable and appropriate for your audience.

Of course there are bad actors, content mills that churn inappropriately aggregated content with zero value-add and with no intention to pull the story forward a notch. But as an overarching tool in a publication’s toolbox, aggregation as a general concept is here to stay. Let’s be sure that it’s done fairly and for the benefit of all of our readers.

[chrisziegler]

The perfect set

I've probably tweeted about it a dozen times at this point, but it bears repeating: Ilan Bluestone's set from ABGT100 at Madison Square Garden is textbook perfect. It simply couldn't be a better hour of uplifting trance and progressive. It's what I'd aspire to make, if I was talented enough to be playing for a crowd. I think I've listened to it 50 times now, and I'll probably listen to it another 50.

If you give a damn about electronic music (or maybe even if you don't?), give it a try.

[chrisziegler]

Twitter channels

In my line of work, I use my Twitter account @zpower for... well, a lot of things. 95 percent of it is a bitter mixture of inane commentary and feeble attempts at comedy. Of the remaining 5 percent, about half is Spotify track shares, and the other half is real, actual feedback on news and events that arguably shows some remote glimmer of intelligence and/or expertise.

That's just who I am, and that's fine — but different people follow me for different reasons. The people who want to know what I think about Android Wear aren't necessarily the same people who want to know what I think about Anjunabeats Volume 11. (It's good, by the way. Very good. Anjunabeats 11, that is; haven't spent enough time with Android Wear yet.)

I think people like me would benefit from being able to "broadcast" multiple "channels" in their Twitter feed. For instance, I might have feeds called Music, Cars, Nonsense, and News. If you want the full, unfiltered @zpower, you can still select All, which would be the default. But if you just want news, you'd follow my News channel.

You can effectively simulate this now by creating multiple Twitter accounts and tying them together for the benefit of your followers using a list, but that's messy — in my proposal, everything would fan out from a single account and handle.

I'm no UX designer, but it's easy enough to imagine how this would work: a dropdown below the editor would let you select which channel(s) to publish the tweet to. Most users, especially low-volume ones, would never even encounter this — they wouldn't create channels, and therefore the additional UI would never be exposed to them. But for those of us who are trying to balance work and play from a single account, it'd be huge.

[chrisziegler]

Things the United States could do instead of spending $1 trillion on the Joint Strike Fighter

By the time the program is over, the total cost of the F-35's three variants is expected to be a trillion dollars, even as the Air Force's and Navy's F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, and F-22s are likely to outlast the existence of manned air combat. Here are just a few of the many things we could've done with that money:

Triple NASA's budget for 25 years.

Pay for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for over a century.

Give 4 million kids $250,000 college scholarships.

Pay for every single US national laboratory for over 32 years.

Close the UN World Food Programme's budget shortfall, 1,000 times over.

Give every homeless person in the United States over $1.5 million.

And some not-too-ridiculous sounding stretch goals:

Cure cancer.

Eradicate HIV.

End hunger.

But hey, at least it looks pretty cool.

[chrisziegler]

Minimix April 2014

My first since moving to New York, and my first with a controller and mixer precariously balanced on a cardboard box (I don't have much furniture yet).

Enjoy.

[chrisziegler]

With Batkid, don't point out the obvious

In a Washington Post editorial, Princeton's Peter Singer helpfully reminds us that the money spent on Batkid in San Francisco last month could've more efficiently been used saving or bettering the lives of dozens, if not hundreds of people through the efforts of nonprofit organizations operating around the world.

Clearly. I don't think anyone had argued that making 5-year-old leukemia patient Miles Scott's day was the most efficient, mathematically optimized use of money. But Singer skims over the fact that our spending as members of a wealthy industrialized nation spans the entire spectrum of utility. Did I need that slightly upgraded television with an extra HDMI input? How about that new Montblanc pen? Or the millions of Xbox Ones and PlayStation 4s sold in the past several weeks? What if we'd all went to a slightly less expensive place for dinner last night?

Indeed, on that scale, Batkid's Make-A-Wish outlay was money well spent: it brought a major city together in a way that little else could, put a spotlight on leukemia research, and mesmerized a weary nation in perpetual need of good news.

[chrisziegler]

Things that have gone horribly wrong since Thanksgiving

Comcast service has been out since Saturday, which also means my phone doesn't work since I rely on a Microcell.

My garbage disposal stopped working.

My humidifier broke.

I ordered a vegetarian sandwich today and discovered when I got home that it was tuna salad. Gross. (Coincidentally, this is also how I found out that my garbage disposal broke.)

Paul Walker died in a tragic car crash.

One piece of good news? Anyone?

[chrisziegler]

The sad pizza 'debate' that wasn't

New York can't let this pizza thing go, showing its crippling insecurity in the "debate" yet again by calling on a bunch of B- and C-list celebrities to prop up its giant, floppy sheets of dough that sit out on a counter until you ask for them to be reheated at the time of purchase by a shady man who hides his "C" health code grade behind the counter.

In reality, there is no debate. Chicago pizza is mathematically, objectively superior. It ends here, with this post.

It's unclear why New York is fighting so hard, rather pathetically, to be known for convenience store-style gruel.

There will be no further argument. Any response to this post suggesting that Chicago pizza is not better than New York pizza is a revealing of your own deficiency in understanding culinary science, culture, and — to be blunt — good taste.

If you disagree, you, and your logical fallacy of an opinion, are irrelevant.

Coincidentally, New Yorkers, you have a stereotypical image of Chicago pizza that is not accurate. You frequently use photos of Giordano's; most Chicago pizza looks nothing that. You wouldn't know, because in the off chance you've ever left the tri-state area and visited a "flyover state" such as mine, you wouldn't have ventured away from Michigan Avenue, which means the touristy Giordano's on Rush would be the only experience with Chicago pizza you've ever had.

But it doesn't matter, nor does your opinion. This "debate" — which was never actually up for debate in the first place — is over.

[chrisziegler]

Things I hated as a kid but learned to respect as an adult

1. Porsche

2. Chocolate

3. Led Zeppelin

[chrisziegler]

I never get tired of looking at (or hearing) P-51s. Here's "Little Horse," a P-51D on the tarmac at AirVenture this year.

[chrisziegler]

Next week, I head to the greatest celebration of aviation in the world

I'll be at EAA AirVenture, which marks something like 25 consecutive years that I've spent a week in sweltering mid-summer Wisconsin heat with a few hundred thousand other airplane nerds.

It's glorious.

Don't get me wrong, I have my complaints about AirVenture. It lays the patriotism on thick, which undoubtedly makes the show uncomfortable for the tens of thousands of foreign nationals who attend it. World War II factors heavily into the programming, which increasingly feels out of date and out of touch with what's going on in the world. Veterans and warplanes should be celebrated and honored here, but the time for WWII to be a central theme of an internationally-recognized air show has passed.

Be that as it may, seeing dozens of P-51 Mustangs, Bearcats, Hellcats, Corsairs, B-17s, B-25s, and the only flying B-29 in the world — Fifi — is a special experience that I never tire of. (To help understand the significance of that, Enola Gay is a B-29.)

Of course, seeing old-school showmen like Gene Soucy perform alongside some of the greatest pilots in the world (including perhaps the greatest, Sean Tucker) is amazing, too. The endless parade of Extra 300s performing bog-standard competition aerobatic routines can get old, but there's just enough variety to keep it engaging from beginning to end.

Over the past couple decades, I've seen an SR-71 land here. And a Concorde. I watched a 787 prototype do a low-altitude, high-speed flyby, and an A380 demonstrate insane 80-degree banks. Walk around long enough and you'll bump into Harrison Ford or John Travolta, both aviation enthusiasts who usually make the trip.

(Not to say I'm really interested in bumping into John Travolta, but, you know. Still cool.)

Ultimately, AirVenture is about general aviation, and every year I walk away inspired and energized that private plane ownership has a future. I watched the Cessna Skycatcher take shape here over the course of several years, from a design study to a production aircraft. Terrafugia, which has made a lot of mainstream news, always exhibits here, as does Icon.

Even if you're not a pilot and have no interest in becoming one, I implore you to check out AirVenture at some point in your life — come on Saturday, which is typically the show's biggest day both for attendance and razzle-dazzle.

Here's a picture I took at AirVenture back in 2005 of an F-4, an F-16, a P-38, and a P-51 in formation. If you don't think that's awesome, I don't really know how to help you.

[chrisziegler]

Minimix July 2013

Posted this in the wee hours last night. It's my first mix in, like, forever... and also the first using the Traktor Kontrol Z1 I recently bought. It's paired to a Kontrol X1 and Traktor Scratch Pro. Feels good to be back at it.

[chrisziegler]

Divvy is almost perfect

Dan Frommer calls Citi Bikes his "new iPhone," a game-changing product that has the potential to fundamentally alter the way New York City works. Divvy — produced by Alta, the same company behind Citi Bikes — recently launched in Chicago, and I'm immediately understanding where Dan's coming from. It's a transformative solution for a dense urban population that has a constant need for better and more efficient transportation. Just a week into the launch, it's already having a profound impact in where I go, when I go there, and how I do it.

But Divvy isn't perfect. Here are a few of the (minor) complaints I have so far.

Highest gear (third) isn't high enough. I'm fairly certain this was done intentionally for safety reasons, but it's a little excessive. In fact, I rarely switch out of third at all, even when coming to a complete stop. Pedaling extremely fast just to keep up with non-Divvy bikers on major thoroughfares gets tiresome.

Docks require a lot of effort. On a couple of occasions, I had to pull so hard on the bike that I was putting most of my weight into it, and I'm not a small guy. Same when reattaching — you have to push really hard, to the point where it can be unclear whether you're doing it correctly.

30 minutes isn't quite long enough. I get that Divvy is intended to be a dock-to-dock solution, but I'd love to see the annual members get 45-minute rides (like New York's Citi Bikes) so that you can comfortably make it from, say, Lincoln Park to the South Loop without worries. If you're using Divvy for a longish daily commute, overage can add up, even with an annual membership.

Many of the seat height clamps aren't correctly adjusted. The first thing I do before taking a Divvy bike is adjust the seat (the side of the pole is conveniently marked by the inch, so you know what position to set). Once I start riding, I realize that I'm slowly sinking. The problem is a nut on the side of the seat clamp, which must be pretty precisely set to make sure the pole is securely held in place when closed. On a few bikes I've grabbed so far, this nut isn't tightened correctly. When you only have a half hour before you get charged, every second I need to fiddle with the bike is a second wasted.

Bike counts don't seem to be accurate. I use CycleFinder to check whether there will be a bike available at my dock of choice, but the number never seems to be exactly right. This might just be the lag between the dock communicating to Divvy and that information getting passed on to the online system, but it needs to be effectively real-time considering how frequently bikes are docked and removed, particularly at high-volume locations.

And the big one: there aren't quite enough docks yet. This will fix itself over time — Divvy's pretty early into this launch, and there are hundreds more docks coming. I also worry about vandalism. Are there cameras at the docks? What's to stop some idiot from walking by a dock and slashing all the tires? Chicago, like most big cities, has problems with flash mobs, and Divvy docks would certainly seem like a ripe target.

But again, in the scheme of things, these are minor problems. Over time, they'll get ironed out. Divvy is going to be a huge deal for the city, and hopefully it'll be an example for other cities to follow.