skinnywhitegirl

Friday was my first day! Exclamation point! Exclamation point! Finally I was able to legally stand on the corner with my little red and pink pie stand.The first game was Rock Paper Scissors. If we roshambo and I win, I get to pick what flavor pie you get. If you win, you choose.

The first day, delayed though it was, went off without a hitch. I met the City of Portland inspector at 11pm and he issued me my sidewalk permit without further hassle. Whew.

I haven’t been blogging much because the large part of what I’ve been learning is about the intricacies of Portland zoning, permitting, and food safety. I’ll summarize to say that I’m finally done paying for permits and the total bill is just slightly under $1100. Those permits are calendar year and NOT prorated. So that huge sum is good for four months. It appears that prorating the first year is just too much math for our good government officials. I commiserated with other cart owners who had no pity on me, saying that they have eleven permits to my four so suck it up. First lesson, starting a cart is more expensive than you think.

Lessons Learned

Cutting and serving pie is sticky business. I need gloves. If I’m going to record tallies of game play with a pen and paper, I need to be able to quickly go from sticky hands to clean hands. The devil is in the details, you know.

I need to make more pie. I wanted to ramp up gently, so Friday I made four pies and a double cobbler, roughly 45 servings. I sold out in two hours. TWO HOURS! There were lines of a dozen folks at a couple of points throughout the afternoon.

People loves some piez. A lady with a dog walked around the corner and exclaimed “Oh my god, is that pie?!?” There were many groups of people that had a major rubberneck as they walked by. The mailman looked longingly and then came back later. Really, it was quite comical. Also, people are very likely to chat it up. I think pie has a nostalgic emotional connection. I don’t think I could’ve picked a better item as lure for my social experiments.

As I mentioned, the first game was Rock Paper Scissors. I was amazed to find that not everyone remembers exactly how to play. I picked it because I wanted to do something very light weight that everyone would relate to. I was right that everyone seems to have played it at one point, but I did have to give a little refresher to a handful.

I also learned that I‘m a force to be reckoned with at Rock Paper Scissors. Even though I was actively trying to lose, I won about 70% of the time. (I’ll track such stats more precisely in the future. See note about sticky fingers.)

Conversely, I’m a total softy. If someone had already told me what they wanted, inadvertently or not, I gave them what they wanted even if I won. In cases where there was a group of people in line, I encouraged them to engineer a trade. I’m looking forward to games with the wheel where my agency isn’t required or allowed.

When people won (returning them to the state at which you normally find yourself when ordering at a cart, namely, being able to pick what you get) they were extremely excited. It brought out a childlike happiness for many. Remember that mailman? It was bizarre and wonderful to ask him to Rock Paper Scissors with me.

It was pretty hilarious that just putting something at stake, essentially a wager, meant there was a palpable thrill of the kill. I was reminded of how much more fun blackjack and poker are when you’re betting real money. Without the wager, they’re pretty dull actually. The biggest adrenaline was when there was a line of people who’d been defeated by my skills. If three people in a row went down, the fourth customer to step up felt like they were coming up against a pitcher on a no-hit streak. When they won, it was pure joy.

Can’t wait for next week! The custom crafted wheel of fortune has been attached. Much fun and mischief will ensue.

Follow @pieLabPDX on twitter or facebook for announcements about what games we’re playing plus mmmpie flavors. We’re located at NW 12th and Davis and are open Fridays from noon till the pies sell out. Hopefully, I’ll be hiring some employees to be open more days of the week soon.

Sorry for the absence of postings lately, but I’ve been busy building things… physical things with molecules and stuff and not just pushing ones and zeroes around. The thing in question: a pie cart. When I tell people I’m building a pie cart I get a blank stare. They blink a few times and then say “You mean, you’re building a pie cart?” I say “Yes! A pie cart! With, you know… pie! Also, ice cream and coffee!” Then I launch into explaining that it’s a laboratory for behavioral experiments. That takes even longer to sink in.

Let me give you an example of one game that we’ll play that actually was the inspiration for it all. It came from a blog post written by Cabel Sasser of Panic about a Mystery Cafe that he stumbled upon in Japan. It works like this. A customer orders as usual but it’s explained that they don’t get what they ordered… they get what the person before them ordered. The person who comes after them will get what they ordered. It’s a big chain. You can elect to set the person after you for a sweet treat.

Back to the pie: the cart will serve beautiful slices of homemade pies. The flavors will be mostly tried and true recipes from my granny but there will be the occasional gourmand flavor like Momofuku’s chocolate pie that has a cult following in NYC. A la mode? Of course, and there will be an ever-ready pot of fresh coffee at hand.

Again, a giant thanks to all of those who made the Kickstarter project a success! We raised $1650 to help cover the costs of the construction, permitting, and insurance. Hugs to all!

I debuted at 30 Hour Day, a livestreaming telathon to benefit the Oregon Food Bank this past Saturday. Have a look at the beautiful pics!

photo by Aaron Hockley : flickr.com/photos/ahockley/

—–UPDATE—–
After a lovely conversation with John of Project M, the founder of PieLab in Greensboro, AL, he generously offered to let me keep using the name. I’m very grateful to have his support.

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Help.

I have received a couple of angry messages since starting my Kickstarter Project about my name being the same as a very successful PieLab in Greensboro, AL. I have to tell you, it makes me sick in my heart. When I was going through the process of brainstorming names, I kept coming back to pieLab because is was simple, short, and hinted at the game strategy aspect of the cart. I had several names such as Wonder Pie Spot, Pookie Pie, and Grumble Bunny, but none of them communicated that this wasn’t just a cart where you went up and ordered and everything was as usual. My biggest fear was that there was a well-known co-working space in town called PIE (Portland Incubator Experiment). Well, what can I do about that? They decided to name their tech space after my delicious treat. Nothing to be done. My name will have “pie” in it somewhere.

When I decided to go with the name pieLab, I went to register the name and discovered that it was already taken. I had never heard of the PieLab from 3000 miles away. I went and had a look at the pielab.org site. I saw their essence as being a collaborative of graphic designers where to community is invited in to share ideas. I watched their video where they cut up a pie and pour some coffee. I decided we were not similar enough to be a problem and registered @pieLabPDX.

With the negative comments, I’ve gone back through the site to discover whether we really are TOO similar. I downloaded the press release. I read the press coverage. There was a lot I didn’t learn about the project in my initial run through. It’s grown into training people to be chefs and work in retail. They have outreach to youth. It’s an amazing program. I didn’t realize how thoroughly it had been covered by GOOD, ID Magazine, Fast Company, etc. People in their community have obviously been touched by their efforts.

A lot of people love their PieLab in Greensboro, AL. I can see how they would be upset for anyone to threaten the organization that’s done so much good.

If I had to distill them down into three words they would be community development, graphic design, and pie.

We have that last characteristic in common, it is true. But I’m not inviting collaborators and it’s not a community space. I’m not training others or doing youth development. And yes, I do graphic design occasionally as that is my background, but this cart is not about visual design.

My entire reason for building this is that I’m fascinated by game strategy and behavioral economics and want a way to tweak every possible subtlety of the process of selecting and paying for a humble piece of pie. The pie is the bait for my human subject rat maze experiment. I don’t see any hint of this in their project.

I am unabashedly copying an idea, without a doubt. This is a recreation of a mystery cafe as told by Cabel Sasser as I have made clear from the very beginning.

For goodness sakes, if I was going to straight copy them, at least I’d have the good sense to change the name if I was trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

I feel like pieLab is a rather obvious name. I doubt Barista coffee would be surprised to find that there is another clever coffee house out there sharing their name. I could see that it would be a big problem if another one opened up around here. States protect names within each state for good reason. PieLab is not trademarked as far as I my research shows.

So what to do now? The name was sincerely a coincidence. I certainly did not anticipate this blow back and don’t wish to cause undue harm to their brand. It’s not like I’m so far into the project that I can’t redirect. I am loathe to do anything until the Kickstarter project is finished if only because I just cannot face reworking the stop motion video, and I don’t want to risk losing momentum. Thoughts?

————-
UPDATE
————-

To John (leader of Project M PieLab in Greensboro, AL,

I can see that there are good folks on your side who love you and have come out swinging to defend your work.

I offer my sincerest apologies. I had not heard of your work before I conceived the name. I knew you existed when I registered the twitter account, yes.

I didn’t realize how much recognition you’d received. If I had, I wouldn’t have gone forward with the name.

This food cart is a small, quick project for me in my spare time. I have full time job plus a handful of other side projects. I just wanted to make a decision and move the project forward. I didn’t give it the full due diligence.

Sometimes you make a quick decision and it’s wrong.

I will change the name. Please grant me a little time to recollect myself, find and properly research a new name.

Not to get all meta and write about how writing is hard, but it is. I have been eased into writing blog posts by the daily exercise of writing tweets. 140 characters was bite-sized enough for me to jump in without hesitation. It got me in the habit of publishing content and thinking about the best way to phrase things. And for people like me who aren’t good wordsmiths, it was an excellent lesson in brevity. God knows I have nothing to say. At least on twitter it’ll only hurt for a second.

Blogging, on the other hand, has been a struggle for me. Although I’ve had this blog up for over a year, it languished with one post until about a week ago. In a fit of frustration, I tweeted that “every day I wish I was a better writer.” It’s true. I think more about being a better writer than I do about being a better designer. Strange. Folks like Stefan Sagmeister and Jonathan Ive are great designers partly because they’re great designers and partly because they can speak and write passionately to win over non-design folk who need words to tell them what their eyes cannot.

Writing was the subject this morning on OPB. Think Out Loud was interviewing Oregon’s Poet Laureate. It got me thinking about my own experience with learning to write as a child. I must’ve been in about second grade when a poetry teaching workshop came to my classroom. They introduced us to the existence of poetry by reading some nice poems. I can clearly remember listening to them and thinking “Oh, I get it. A poem is just some silly words mashed together.” At the end of the workshop they had us wee ones write our own poems. I took to this with purpose and thought up the most ridiculous, non-sequitur jumble of words I could manage. I believe it was a “poem” about a flying purple cat. A few months went by and I had forgotten the hippies and their silly workshop when a letter came in the mail that my story had been selected for publication. The little overachiever in me was thrilled to tack up yet another award.

The years have elapsed and the book has long been lost. I wish I could read that poem. I suspect that my attempt at absurdity still had a child’s strict need for a linear story.

I’m not sure if I’ve progressed much since then. I still find it hard to follow Charlie’s advice. He said I never assume I have anything to say or than anyone will read it, I just write.

So I’m giving it another try. Please bear with me.

Now that I’m working remotely at my fake job at Cheezburger Network, I’ve been thinking a lot about tools for collaboration. What works? The tools so radically shape the interaction that I’m taking a studied approach to who/when/why to use each. Here’s a little graph of some common tools. It’s no surprise, the lower the effort, the lower the reward. The cost of contacting has to be factored into the decision of which tool to use to contact someone.

Why aren’t sites like BaseCamp, PivotalTracker or Google Buzz (just kidding) on this grid? Honestly, because I don’t know quite where they fall on the grid. They usually rely on hooks into email to notify of change. Also, because I’ve yet to work at a place that uses it and is completely happy with their system.

Here are some thoughts collected from twitter on what are the best tools and techniques for collaboration:

@rgleeson: “Honestly? 1. Skype video (with shared screen), 2. Mobile device, and 3. google docs”

@tyeshasnow: “Sometimes old school verbal communication is the best way. Let’s all start picking up the phone more often 5 mins = 10 email exchanges.” I would argue a five minute conversation is equivalent to 100 email exchanges. No one is going to have that many. The two are almost not even comparable.

@al3x: “A few days ago, @danbenjamin and I had a conversation. Less tech, more process. You can listen to it at http://bit.ly/bsKoGI”
If you listen in, at about 11:00 he talks about the collaboration when he was employed at Twitter. The gist of it is some of the best employees are remote. The collaboration that happens when you’re remote is higher value because you’re forced to put it into a place that’s visible to everyone. He continues on about other projects… only tangentially related to collaboration, but interesting nonetheless.

For me, the golden chalice of collaboration would be to recreate the serendipity created by working in the same physical space in a remote setup. I think the advantages of working remotely are well established: ability to work with the best people despite geography, tailoring your schedule and workspace to suit, etc. However, you loose the serendipity of casual chatter - the ability to spin your chair around and have a five minute consult with your coworker.

My next experiment to capture that is to hijack twitter for this purpose. Using a tool that can monitor multiple accounts such as CoTweet or HootSuite makes it possible to do this without going crazy. Create a private twitter account. Follow your virtual coworkers’ private accounts. Chatter away! My hope is that by tapping into one of the screens that I’m already paying attention to during the day that I’ll minimize the effort involved. Why private? To allow more unfiltered and/or top-secret conversations. Also, to function as a filter so that you can switch into that conversation among a small number of folks.

As always, I’m writing about this not because I consider myself to be any authority but to draw out critiques and ideas from you guys. Comments are most welcome.

If I haven’t already gone swoony-eyed over the dating site, okcupid.com in front of you, just give me time. I love them not only because I meet my Mr. Smoochy there, but because they do in such a damn geeky smart way. The latest: MyBestFace. It lets you upload several pictures of yourself and be rated on which one makes you the most attractive to the target market. You guessed it, it’s an amazing experience.

Step 1 ) Upload as many pictures of yourself as you care to.

Step 2 ) Check some boxes for which words describe yourself. Choices include Liberal, Conservative, Diva, Overachiever, Extroverted etc.

Step 3 ) Now you must rate 100 users before you get your report. Don’t worry, it’ll only take a second.

Step 4 ) Wait. You’re report will be emailed to you when it’s ready.

This morning, I awoke to find a freshly pressed report waiting on me. The results were very insightful and clear. First, it told exactly which photos did well and who liked them. This was key, because of the two top performing pictures, the age groups of the guys who chose them were exactly opposite. If I wanted to attract guys under 30, the “MySpace shot” was clearly the way to go. It was the top performer overall. Since my goal is guys older than *cough* my 30 years, I should go with the goofy shot of me chowing down on some Mexican corn. (Note: never in a million years would’ve thought that was the best shot of me.)

So why should you care about some dating site?

They’re doing it right. They know who their core audience is and what their concerns are. They’re providing amazingly compelling experiences. I’ve kept my account up just so I can keep playing with their cool tools!

+ Provide a tool that gives your users value that gets to the core of what you’re doing.
+ Pay to play: They require you to rate users to get your report.
+ The tool has just the right amount of information to give value without overwhelming.
+ It’s super fun.

Still curious? Check out my full report. Yes, the pic of me with a black eye did better than the zany smile.

I was kicked out of the nest, like many were last May due to the economy. It’s been a year. What do I have to show for myself? For one, a little site called IconRainbow I made with the patient assistance of Ryan Snyder, aka @ryansnyder. It’s all about the purdy colors, specifically colors of icons pulled from the iPhone app store.

Why color?

If you are a designer, I would tell you that it’s eye candy; a place for designers to come find inspiration.

If you were a dev, I would tell you that it’s a different sort data visualization of the iPhone store; a way to take in several hundred apps at a glance.

If you were an investor, I would tell you that the big picture is to aggregate color information from all over the web and analyze that data to determine trends; that the iPhone store is only our first data set.

Why the iPhone app store?

Well, for several reasons, most importantly because there is a built-in quality filter. There’s a higher bar in terms of complexity and therefore expense to get an app accepted. Also because companies have been given a very well defined task of expressing their brand in that little square of pixels. They’re forced to simplify the essence of their graphic identity down into one thing. Lastly, nice little squares are all the same size which means I can show a whole bunch of them in a neat grid. This makes me happy.

What’s next?

Right now, we only have a subset of about 5,000 icons. That got us up and running, but now it’s time to get all the data. Ryan is writing a scraper to pull down the entire store with more of the meta data (text of the app descriptions, a link to see the app in the official store, etc.) We’ll be adding search so you can narrow down which sort of icons you want to see in a more granular way than just categories.

The big monster is the trend data. That’s what it’s all about. We’ll need to collect data on the whole store for three months and then we’ll be rolling out an entirely new home page focused on those trends.

That’s it! I’m doing user interviews to help shape what the new features, especially the home page, will be. Give me a shout on twitter if you’d like to be a part.

IconRainbow Elsewhere
SiliconFlorist: What are the most popular iPhone app icon colors? With Icon Rainbow, now you know
RyanSnyder.me: Hey, ho, it’s the Icon Rainbow!

As a freelancer, I’m running rather lean when it comes to insurance. I barely have health insurance, much less vision insurance. I’m sadly disillusioned when it comes to Yelp’s icky business practices and besides, there are only five optometrists listed in all of Portland. So what’s a girl to do? Consult twitter for recommendations and call them up to do an old fashioned cost comparison. What I found was a big variation in the way doctors package up and price their services.

Notes:

Lens Crafters: Even though I would never use them, I thought it would be good to include them for comparison purposes.

Golden Optical: First note: They will not sell you only a contact fitting. They only offer a six-month supply. For my simple single-vision lenses this ran $280. Second note: They were recommended to me by one party, thrashed by another. “I tried Golden Optical. I’ll never go back. Outdated equipment, bad service, high pressure sales. No, no, no. Before you get your exam they make you sign an agreement stating you will buy you frames and accessories from them. That’s crazy. I’d gotten my prescription from them before but when they tried to get me to sign this this form I walked out. When I went to anther optometrist I realized how outdated Golden was. For example, their exam room isn’t long enough to stand the correct distance from the eye chart so they have you look at a mirror with the chart behind you to double the distance.”

America’s Best: So they’ve got this crazy deal. Your exam is $45, but for $69.95 you get an exam AND TWO pairs of glasses. Crazy! You get two pairs of glasses for only $25 more. They’re making their money on contact fittings and glasses upgrades. The scratch coating which costs about $4 at online glasses retailers will run you a whopping $69 here.

So who will I go with? I’m split between Ogle and Blink. They both offer the fancy tenometry test for glaucoma instead of the horrible air-puff machine. I think I’ll go with Blink because they’re close to my house, have convenient hours, and are pretty cheap.

My next adventure will be to buy my prescription glasses online. Optometrists are making huge margins on glasses and I’m not going to help them make their boat payment. I’m thinking these $16.95 tortoiseshell beauties from glassesshop.com will do nicely. I’ll keep you posted.

If you are like me, you’ve been hammered with so many “SomeUser is now following you on Twitter!” emails that you just can’t be bothered to care anymore. At SXSW, I declared new follower bankruptcy and simply deleted all of the emails. It’s a shame, though, because I’m sure I’m missing friends, both new and old.

I don’t want to receive any email at all from users that follow more folks that follow them back. Maybe 1:1 is too harsh, so you could use 1:1.5. Ideally, each user would be able to set their own custom threshold. That’s it. I did a little analysis of my last 100 followers to see what effect this simple filter would have. Right off the top, this would eliminate more than half of my new follower notices, almost entirely commercial interests or outright spammers.

I realize that spammers and marketers would adjust their tactics to dodge this simple filter. They could be more aggressive in following and then unfollowing the folks that don’t follow back to keep their ratios below the range. It seems like this would raise a big red flag for Twitter to be able to block them accordingly.

It would also point out to new (and old) marketing interests that following tons and tons of people isn’t the best way to make friends. This would hopefully encourage better behavior from legitimate businesses.

One objection to this is that it would make it hard for new users to get started. I would argue that they can @reply the people they are interested in. I’ve seen several established members of the community send out a tweet welcoming a new user to the group.

Recognizing that there is a continuum of ways twitter can be used, I broke it down into three broad categories. I defined an individual as someone without an overtly commercial interest. These were people I thought were following me because they genuinely wanted to read my tweets. Marketing included companies and non-profits. There were a couple of folks that represented themselves under their own name, but were clearly there on behalf of a company. I marked an account as spam if they had a fraudulent-looking product or were generally obnoxious.

A couple users defied categorization. Take @threewolfman as an example. I marked him as an individual because he had no obvious profit motive, but he wasn’t there representing himself. @lucky22469 was just gaming the system to get as many followers as possible, only for ego it appears. There weren’t enough fake accounts and miscellaneous following me to warrant their own category.

Interested in my methodology? Check out the spreadsheet where I cranked out the numbers in the shared google doc.