A Meaningful Life

Simplicity is Sustainables Best Friend is an article I’ve just done for TheCalmSpace.com. Simplicity is a key area of interest for me on many levels, business and personal, so this article was a fun one to write.

Society has somehow decided that simple is bad in many situations. There is a fight to give simplicity back its good name. Simplicity is a very sustainable and freeing existence for people to undertake…

Photo: The Lehmann families home made pasta

I have started writing for The Calm Space online magazine on the topic of sustainability. My first article is The Sus in Sustainable. I get asked to write for tech, saas blogs but time restricts me. The environment however is a topic which can’t wait as it will impact us all much sooner than we think. It can’t wait for ’some day’ in the future when I have more time. Article teaser -

Society holds much suspicion toward sustainability. In the back of many minds out there I’m fairly certain that life may not be quite as balanced with nature as we would all like it to be… goto The Sus in Sustainable article

Leah Maclean one off our Saasu customers also writes for this online magazine. She wrote a great article about how it’s not easy being green in technology.

1. Pool filters - cut the hours by half in winter. Keep it clean, filter less.
2. Second fridges -keep the grill dust free and don’t cool to much beer and soft drink.
3. Oil column heaters - these devices are glacier melters. If you have a couple of these think about an alternative.
4. Leaving your computer on 24×7 - this takes down a lot more electricity over a year than I realised. In reflection, a computer should only take a minute to boot and the fresh boot feeling should pick you up those lost seconds.
5. Electric hot water - this is one of the biggest and most ignored. Lower your hot water temperature setting. If you always need to add a lot of cold to your hot bath then it’s too hot. Change to off-peak if you haven’t already. Better still, supplement/convert to solar.

On the weekend I was cleaning old clay wasp nests of the eaves of our house when I accidentally scraped one off that hadn’t hatched it’s youngsters yet. Inside it where 37 spiders in total, all alive (twitching) but paralyzed by a parent wasp who had collected them to lay baby’s in. These wasps make little clay homes and stuff them full of spiders. Charming

However I realise these wasps keep all the spiders away and as we live in a very typical Australian bushland valley I leave them until they have hatched. Otherwise we would be inundated with spiders. Hat tip to our little spider hunting wasps.

Cool Hunting points out Japans forever-ahead-of-the-curve answer to the reusable shopping bag. Far less likely to lead to social death when you use them to take stuff to BBQ’s. Who will print the first version with Elvis on the side? Even a Sudoku puzzle? Hit Ponoko , spec it and it could be you!

Are we being too quick to ‘damn’ the ‘dams’? Is it better for the environment if we humans produce 1,000,000 water tanks and the required pipes, pumps, controls and labour or alternately build a 1,000,000 person supplying dam using the utility approach?

I got to thinking about this today whilst looking into water tanks. My collegue Peter Cooper at Saasu.com suggested maybe we should look at more localized dams. I think this is actually quite sensible if sites are available. Don’t think for a second that I don’t like water tanks. My gut feeling is telling me I should have one. I’d just like to be certain (thinking more like an engineer) that the distributed environmental impact of producing water tanks is actually less than the centralised environmental impact of the utility approach of dam building. Any ideas so I can make a decision?

There is an amazing Lyre Bird BBC YouTube clip that is a must see! It’s mimicking sirens and chainsaws. Emma, the kids and I went for bushwalk and we weren’t sure but we thought we heard a Lyre Bird mimicking a siren. We couldn’t see the bird though so no confirmed sighting. It reminded me that Nat of Simple and Loveable posted this video a while ago so I tracked it down on YouTube.

I was contemplating why we as humans design things in order to create the new and the better versions of what we have. It doesn’t seem to fit very well relative to nature which will tend to use chance and filter the good results. Evolution doesn’t do design.

So an inquiry into what this means for SaaS (Software as a Service) application design is interesting to me. You could argue designing improvement is a less effective mechanism than filtering a pile of chance results. This is a little scary for someone like me who really appreciates design. After all it is only a single or limited input mechanism. The realm of knowledge an individual has in their specific context is very limited. Even a group has limits. Relatively it is very small when you compare to the enormous test and release environment that the natural world has for it’s many species mutations.

You could say that every creature inputs their genetics into the natural process of evolution to be tested. A candidate for better or worse genetics. Accordingly there is has been spectacular results like the evolution of the nervous system, interdependence of creatures and my favourite the symbiotic relationship.

Evolution puts species through continual survival testing. Successfully featured creatures survive and the poorly featured creatures are killed off, never to be cloned again. The reward is simple and pure. The right to pass down your design and increase it’s spread. Mutations allow change, often radical. They are a very low cost chance of improvement. Near free options on evolutionary upside. Physical and behavioural mutations that are beneficial lead to higher probabilities of survival and a new creature is born.

If SaaS evolved and wasn’t designed what would happen?

So I’ll bring this back to the area I understand, SaaS (Software as a Service). If Mother Nature were a SaaS developer she would probably just add features like mutations over and over and keep killing them off if they didn’t work as improvements and leave them when they did.

If customers used a new feature mutation then mother nature would be rewarded with dollars. So does this imply customers could be left to control the development by their evolutionary wallet. Well the answer is yes if you are happy with a slow kind of evolution.

So why is this less than perfect when it seems so so right? The answer is in luck. Genetic mutations for the sake of this argument could be considered natural luck. Some mutations are very lucky advantages while others are a fatal blow.

Accordingly a SaaS developer can choose to enhance development with customer feedback and also with mutations. Those things the customer never dreamt of. Things that need survival testing. Injecting new ideas or concept into the SaaS application gets accepted or rejected by the customers wallet. The ultimate survivability test.

An amazing market advantage is only ever one left field mutation away. One feature that so alters the customer experience that it might never have been perceived through customer voting systems or looking at competitors.

Evolution has leaps like this. Mutations that lead to one species dramatically outcompeting another. Many individuals in the species will evolve from the single creature feature that was so advantageous. Quite efficiently the cost to get this big upside is only ever single individuals whose mutations didn’t work in their favour.

So it might take several mutations to find a very successful change but when it hits it takes off in a large way. It even leads to the extinction of related species. When you repeat this process with velocity you can quickly see why natures model for improvement should not be overlooked and that maybe designing a little too much might miss the evolutionary leaps.

I posted about our plans for Saasu.com’s sustainable business on the Saasu.com blog. So I won’t comment in length here. It’s many hours of Saasu.com research that might be helpful in your own business.

They were burning the bush in our valley yesterday to reduce the debris load. I’ve seen the results of this at other locations and it’s amazing how all the feral species of plants get knocked and and the natives all seed and grow. It’s a great way of de-weeding the bush and reducing the fire hazard at the same time. The only bit that doesn’t work is the gas and smoke generated. I’d love to know if anyone has seen a study on this topic?