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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. I used to wear a small stud glued onto my nose, to look like a nose piercing, and still some days wish I’d been brave enough to actually get the real thing, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode I’m going to discuss how not to lose scope by focusing on minutia. Details are important, but sometime it is possible to get so bogged down in details that we actually miss the bigger picture, or as the saying goes, “Miss the forest for the trees.”
Today’s Fun Fact following the same theme: Did you know that the Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
Here’s some exciting news for you! Starting today, nominations are open for the 2015 Podcast Awards. Golden Spiral Media is asking for your help to nominate our podcasts in 4 different categories. You can find all the details at www.goldenspiralmedia.com/podcastawards, but we’re asking you to nominate Stuff I Learned Yesterday in the People’s Choice and General categories, Arrow Squad in the Best Produced Category, and The Blacklist Exposed in the Entertainment category. Thank you in advance for your support.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Clint and I enjoy drinking coffee, and have even spent a lot of time researching how to reduce acidity, get a quality grind, the best brewing methods, and proper brewing temperatures, and we both definitely have our favorites. We purchased a pour-over method coffee machine a couple of years ago, and have been really pleased with how the coffee it makes. Sometimes you don’t need a huge pot of coffee though, so we also have an individual pour-over glass carafe, and aeropress but these methods can be a little messy and labor-intensive, and sometimes convenience is king.
This year, we were both surprised and excited when my aunt and uncle generously gave us a Keurig 2.0. We had both used Keurigs from time to time at our respective workplaces, and enjoyed the ease and variety, but had never really entertained the idea of buying one for our home, because the cost of the individual coffee pods was so high and our other methods were meeting our needs well enough. It did not take long for us to anxiously set it up and enjoy our single cups of brewed coffee the day after we received it though.
Once we opened the box we were impressed by it’s sleek, albeit plastic, design. We used the sample K-cups provided in the box with the machine and were pretty pleased with our quick single-serve cups of coffee. Then we attempted to use a brand of single serve coffee pod other than the K-cup and were sorely disappointed to discover an error message pop up on our screen, “Oops!” It informed us, our machine was only designed to work with Keurig brand K-cups and we were further directed to purchase some of those or contact Keurig’s help line. This was frustrating, but we knew there must be a simple solution.
After researching further, we discovered that after Keurig Green Mountain’s K-cup patent had run out, the Keurig machine makers had painstakingly researched ways to protect their K-cups, and enforce their use in their newest model, the Keurig 2.0. Apparently, Keurig, inspired by the counterfeiting technology of the US Mint developed proprietary ink for their new K-cups for the Keurig 2.0. They also incorporated a sensor that bounces the light off of the ink marking in a specific way, and registers the wavelength of light reflected back, rendering other off-brand pods useless. Of course, we did what any other consumers in the digital age would do, we “Googled” a solution to the problem and were immediately flooded with Keurig hacks for any occasion; from dismantling your machine and re-engineering part of it to cutting and taping lids on cups.
Clint came home the next day to find me sawing my way through the top of a little K-cup with a knife, attempting to remove the top of an approved cup to tape to the top of another unapproved cup, in order to get a fresh latte. He assured me he knew a better way to solve our problem, semi-permanently. Then, he leaned over and carefully grabbed the knife and K-cup from me, cut just below the top of the lid, then easily slid the top of the K-cup in the top of the machine propped just below the infrared sensor. Now, every time we go to make a new cup or pot of coffee, the error message is nowhere in site. It was almost too easy.
This got us to thinking How much money had Keurig invested in their proprietary ink, that they touted as the new “DRM or digital rights management” of the coffee world. DRMs usually refer to computer software, encrypting or watermarking data so that it cannot be accessed by unauthorized users, and Keurig had waited to launch their new machine, relying heavily on this new technology to protect their share of the single serve coffee pod industry, which they basically created. Unfortunately, many Keurig enthusiasts took the difficult task of cracking the code as a challenge and just after their release date, business competitors and home brewers alike were anxiously attempting to bypass this expensive roadblock to use their unauthorized coffee pods. How disappointing that must have been for the engineers and product development experts responsible for creating a counterproof way of enjoying Keurig, only to find that their prized paint was easily bypassed with a simple hack, and careful placement of an approved lid.
This also reminded me of the famous Urban Legend where a similar outcome was found. According to the story, NASA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop an anti-gravity ballpoint pen to withstand the harsh heat, cold and weightlessness of space travel. They successfully developed such a pen; meanwhile, the Soviet cosmonauts saved themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars by instead utilizing the humble pencil. I’ll include a link to the snopes article in my notes.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp#7AsrHQrb05Kv2ZP2.99
Here’s what I learned.
Fortunately, the article about the space pen is reportedly False, but the point remains. We mustn’t spend too much money, time or effort developing a high-tech, fancy or complicated solution to a problem when the simplest, cheapest, most eloquent solution is right in front of our noses.
There are issues of scope from small picture to big picture in our everyday lives, too. In thinking about your job or where you’ll vacation, you might take into consideration what you want, what you and your spouse want, what your family wants, and possibly even the geographical and monetary constraints a new position might cause you.
So, like the examples above we see that there aren’t really just two levels—trees and forests, everything is much more complex, and convoluded, a little like the children’s song, “ There’s a speck on the flea on the tail on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea”, when the entire time, the point is, that “there is a hole”.
I do feel a little bad for Keurig, that they invested so much time money and ingenuity into a solution that was so easily outdone. I also appreciate the new perspective that I will take with me when working on projects similar in scope. I will remember to not get so bogged down in details that I miss the big picture. I will also do my best to give each detail just the amount of attention it deserves so as not to sabotage my end goal. In the meantime though, I’ll enjoy my fancy machine with less expensive generic coffee pods, and appreciate that someone was clever enough to hack Keurig.
I’m Mandy Wichert, and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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